Migration and the memories of women's traditions are woven throughout these poems. Angela Costi brings the world of Cyprus to Australia. Her mother encounters animosity on Melbourne's trams as Angela learns to thread words in ways that echo her grandmother's embroidery. Here are poems that sing their way across the seas and map histories.
Angela Costi is known as Aggeliki Kosti among the Cypriot-Greek diaspora. She is a graduate of both Law and Professional Writing and Editing, and works as a lawyer and community artist with a focus on social justice issues. Since 1994, Angelas poetry, stories, plays, essays and reviews, with travel and migration at their heart, have been widely published nationally and internationally. In 1995, she received an award from the Australian National Languages and Literacy Board to study Ancient Drama in Greece. In 2009, she travelled to Japan with support from the Australian Council to work on an international collaboration with the Stringraphy Ensemble. In Cyprus, Angelas maternal grandmother skilfully created the renowned Lefkarathika embroidery. However, both her parents left Cyprus for Australia to escape poverty, civil unrest and imminent war. These experiences have inspired An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, her fifth poetry collection.
These powerful, poignant poems embody the experience of generations of women, the dignity of their labour, their affirmation of life as a journey into uncharted realms, where they must adapt their skills to sustain their children in an unfamiliar culture: a challenge to be embraced wholeheartedly, bodily. The thread of a unique Greek-Cypriot embroidery tradition morphs into the thread of language celebrating the continuity and manifold richness of life in fluid, intricate patterns of ancestry and migration, the eloquence of words, hands, thread. -Jena Woodhouse. News from the Village: Travels in Rural Greece Angela Costi threads the colours and textures of heart and humanity through fabric drawn across geographies. Cut from one cloth, she stitches complexity of journey, place and people. Now and then. Anchored and looping. Her yarn and needle weave a taut finely detailed tapestry. This braid of head, heart and hand is to be treasured, passed on, a witness to events that must not be disappeared. -- berni m. janssen, author between wind and water (in a vulnerable place)
