AustLit

'Angela Costi’s An Embroidery of Old Maps and New charts a process of mapping human interactions through embroidery. Costi is part of the Cypriot-Greek diaspora, and her grandmother used her embroidery skills to rise above poverty before she moved to Melbourne. There, Costi’s mother and sisters worked the machines at a sewing factory. In 2009, Costi travelled to Japan to work with the Stringraphy Ensemble, so it might not be too great a leap of the imagination to liken the stitches of Costi’s verse to sashiko, Japanese embroidery. Sashiko takes on a form distinct from European embroidery traditions in the movements required to create the stitches. Sashiko literally means “little stabs,” and, indeed, there are little stabs to the heart to be found and felt among the rich poetry in this collection.'  (Introduction)

'In some topoi of poesy lore, it is believed that the first iteration of Homeric oral verse as a material text was woven by women on a loom – deft fingers spinning, immortalising epic tales. In the Odyssey, an abandoned Penelope sits at her loom, creating, then destroying, her tapestries, waiting for her husband Odysseus’ return to Ithaca from his decade-long voyage. Angela Costi reveals a honed, acute awareness of the traditions, epics, journeys, traumas, travails and triumphs that shaped and brought her to write the existential topography that is her latest collection of poetry, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex, 2021). In these pages, the poet is at once Penelope and Odysseus – speaks as weaver and voyager, sufferer and seeker. But here, when the poet takes up the thread, she does not tear; she tenderly and compassionately unwinds and uncovers those stories, people and worlds in which she recognises who, how and why she is, and in so doing, she reconnects, remakes.'  (Introduction)

'There is a majesty about Angela Costi’s new poetry collection, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, in a weave of words that elevates the simple into an artful epic of beauty, dignity and a persistent quest for justice. At the heart of this collection is the question of legacy – a dedication to her mother Eleni and grandmothers who are each background and foreground, as practitioners of the Cypriot lace-making tradition Lefkarathika, to a detailed exploration of the human condition. The collection poses the question of how does a woman poet immersed in two worlds, as the Greek-Cypriot ‘migrant daughter’, divided by hemispheres lay her ideas about the world as witness, inheritor and storyteller?' (Introduction)