It is only when the fire burns to ashes, when the embers are glowing, that cooking, and warmth is possible. Similarly, in George Vassilacopoulos’ latest poetry collection: Ashpoems, we are presented with the smouldering verses of a poetry that having been consigned to the flames of fervour emerges as a philosophical and sensuous meditation on existence, shaped by a Platonist framework that privileges the erotic, not as divine ecstasy nor as political passion, but as an immanent condition of being. His verse, or at least its “ashmemories” contemplates the cosmos not as a transcendent or hierarchical order, but as the felt, relational field of human presence—a shared reality that is loved through the loving of others. As he says: “I gather/ The elsewhere in you/ Around my neck/ Into a charm/ For the Bad Omens/ Of the next poem.”
At the core of Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is a unique articulation of eros—not as sexual desire or celestial yearning, but rather, as a form of ontological attunement. His poems do not speak of eros as aspiration toward a separate realm of perfection, as in some classical readings of Plato’s Symposium, but instead, as a resonant, inner force that draws beings toward one another within the temporal unfolding of existence. This is an eroticism grounded in mutual recognition, in the silent but potent gestures that constitute relational being.
His notion of “erotic minimalism”—a term he has invoked in relation to his poetic practice—evokes a phenomenology of love that recalls Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the face-to-face encounter. For Levinas, the Other’s presence is not reducible to comprehension or assimilation, but calls forth an ethical response prior to cognition. In a similar vein, Vassilacopoulos’s sparse but affectively charged lines gesture toward this immediate openness: the erotic is the presence that disarms, the nearness that transcends domination. As he writes in: I Welcomed You, language is not an assertion of authority but “a whisper to the visitor from the visionary future”—a mode of receptivity, not control. In the Ashpoems, language is that which emerges from the conflagration of words being conscripted to evoke that which defies articulation: “You stutter/ Sighs of broken words/ Out of this world.”
Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos is not the grand rational architecture of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Instead, his poetry returns us to the world—sensuous, fractured, temporal—but imbued with meaning through our loving relation to it. Here, his Platonism deviates from the ladder of the Symposium, where love ascends from bodies to souls to forms to the Good. Consequently, his work resonates more with a Platonic immanence, one echoed in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who reimagine Platonic eros not as a disembodied striving, but as a poiesis of being-in-relation: “You keep coming back to the warmth/ Of my darkness/ To my words of consonants/ They tell the story of the world again.”
Consequently, in the ashpoems where the cosmos appears, it does so not as a background but as a beloved—at times fragmented, melancholic, or in exile: “I sprinkle your abyss/ With poems/ Redeeming us with surprises.” Vassilacopoulos thus breaks from classical metaphysical aspirations to describe a world not perfected, but lived. The stars are not ideal markers of eternal truths, but participants in the dance of longing and recognition. As Irigaray writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, “We are always already in the cosmos, even if we have forgotten it.” Vassilacopoulos’s poetry invites us to remember—not by ascending but by opening ourselves to the presence of others and the “silent messages” they bring: “How can I recite you a poem/ Made from ashes?/,,, I curved my palm to give a place/ To their dark tiny crystals/ Words magically appeared/ Little ashmemories.”
Though steeped in Platonic thought, Vassilacopoulos’s poetic logic often moves dialectically, recalling Hegel’s formulation of love as unity in difference. For Hegel, love is the synthesis of individual selves into a shared spirit—not through erasure, but through mutual recognition. In this way, love becomes a dialectical process, a movement that preserves contradiction as it unfolds into reconciliation.
Vassilacopoulos’s poems mirror this dialectical rhythm: they often begin in the solitude of exile or the sorrow of absence, but gesture toward the promise of relation. The lover in these poems does not master the world; instead, they attend to its openings. As the poet writes in The Pleasure of Exile, “there is no home but the arrival of the guest.” The very condition of exile becomes a poetic ontological stance—one of receptivity, vulnerability, and openness to the unexpected presence of the Other: “My words roll/ …You wait for them/ Open mouth in the void/ As they land/ They recite us/ Into stalactites.”
Such ideas resonate with Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where spirit comes to know itself not in self-possession, but through the struggle and reconciliation with the Other. Vassilacopoulos poeticises this in existential rather than political terms: the cosmos becomes intelligible not through mastery, but through a tender dwelling-with, in which the erotic is the site of recognition, the unfolding of “you” in the space of “we:” “We float/ In the vertigo/ Hollowed by the poets.”
A hallmark of Vassilacopoulos’s poetics is his attention to silence—not as absence, but as the space where meaning gathers. In many of his poems, it is the unsaid, the pause, the breath between words that carries the deepest charge. This practice echoes Heidegger’s belief in the “saying of the unsaid” (das Sagen des Ungesagten)—that poetry opens the clearing in which Being can show itself. Yet unlike Heidegger, whose concern remains with Being in the abstract, Vassilacopoulos roots this opening in the erotic relation, in the space between persons: “Baptised/ In the mist/ Of your silence/ I am ready to be named by you.”
In the Ashpoems, silence becomes a kind of ontological gesture, a touch that does not grasp. The erotic here is not the frantic desire to possess, but the capacity to be-with, to bear witness, to offer one’s presence without domination. This echoes Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of love in The Inoperative Community: “It is not a fusion of souls but a spacing, a sharing, a withdrawal that allows for being-together.” In Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos, love is the distance that binds, the silence that listens, the χώρα in which everything indwells, whether this is where: “With the ancient silence of my hands/ I wash your face,” or in the process in which: “We sway/ In each other’s breathing/ Fathoming their silence.”
Rather than being linear, Time in Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is recursive, melancholic, and oozing with memory. The presence of the past is never far: loss, exile, and return haunt his verses: “Carrying/ he dead of the tribe/ Into aethereal heights.” Nonetheless he refrains from romanticising nostalgia. Instead, he reclaims the erotic force of the now, the “minimal” moment in which love discloses itself not as totality, but as trace, gesture, echo: “Recite me/ And listen to the ancient echo/ Of your breathing.”
This temporality finds kinship in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, particularly his notion of kairos—the “opportune moment,” where potential becomes presence. Vassilacopoulos’ poetics in the Ashpoems embraces such temporal ruptures, where ordinary time is suspended and a new intimacy with existence is made possible, “carrying the heaviness of worlds/ From one to the other.” The cosmos is not behind us or above us, but here, in the hush before the word, in the gaze that holds, in the quiet arrival of the other, “In the mornings of sorrows/ Over a cup of coffee.”
George Vassilacopoulos’ Ashpoems constitutes a philosophical inquiry through verse: a poetics that situates eros at the heart of existence, not as escape from the world but as devotion to its fragile beauty. In dialogue with Plato and those who have transformed his legacy, from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas, Irigaray, and Nancy, his work insists that the cosmos is something we love into being through the simple, radical act of welcoming another: “I breath you in/ I breath me out.”
In place of divine ascent or political mastery, Vassilacopoulos offers a human cosmos—erotic, relational, temporal—where the soul does not seek to transcend the world, but to belong in it. And in the whisper of his lines, in their minimalism, we find an invitation: not to conquer truth, but to accompany it, as one accompanies a beloved across the trembling silence of a shared world, “as drops of the world/ Sweating.” It is for us then to decipher these ashes, written by “the bell/ Of all sounds,” in order, in silence, to “Return our Tribe/ To the beginning.”
