Where the Light Waits

Chris Knight is managing editor of the Canadian HR Reporter.

These wide-ranging poems, which take for inspiration storms and gardens
as well as pulsars and galaxies, mostly begin or end with people growing
older or observing youth, blending the rhythms of nature’s cycles with
those of the human body and of human life. In “Life Cycle,” for
example, Ioannou blends nature, emotion, and objects into images that
tell of time passing, of knowledge and wisdom gained: “As a child, I
saw my elders as trees: / an elm to climb, straight as my father; / a
flowering plum, / wide as my bunned grandmother.”

At times, however, Ioannou provides the reader with too little
information. Some of her poems ask question upon question, without
hazarding an opinion from the poet that might give these works a
stronger voice. They are thought-provoking to be sure, but in the end,
the reader is often left looking for more meaning.