Last night I took a picture of my mother
Standing next to the statue of Grigoris Afxentiou.
‘Stand there so I can take a picture of you, too’, she whispered
I never stand next to statues to be photographed
Yet for some reason, I obeyed without refusing,
Intuitively I leaned my head tenderly on the statue; hugged it.
Yet again you’ve not kept your promise
I waited for you
so we could drink together under the stars
the valley’s secrets, and the never-sleeping aromas of the summer
on the nights, when Ai-Loukas’ few candles
bathed the moon in their light
and when to cinderella-night we wished to sell
still one more tale
lest it be lost in the haystack.
The Medusa Glance is a present-day triptych, a rich and profoundly nuanced contemporary narrative, sensitive to all the immanent and minute shades of reality, aspiring to embrace and incorporate the whole spectrum of lived experience. As a key motive, the author invokes Medusa, the female monster with venomous snakes on hear head. Stricken with fear, we are nonetheless tempted to be immersed in the poetic universe of Manolis. The epigraph characterizes the bold enterprise of the author aimed at the explicitation of the inner architecture and dynamics of experience, at the renewal of narrative practices and at the constant (re)negotiation of identity. The reader is swept away by a polychromatic tempest of verbs and embarks on a journey guiding him to the dimension of the minute and infinitely multifarious undulations of sublunary consciousness.
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
He had no time – how could he listen? Fighting for his bread
he didn’t see that the wheat ear grew tickling the sun’s ear
he didn’t see the blond mustache of summer
he didn’t see that he also grew.
The current bibliography on Greek literature makes little or no reference to identity, with the exception of a few works such as the literary contribution of Professor Kanarakis, titled “Όψεις της Λογοτεχνίας των Ελλήνων της Αυστραλίας και Νέας Ζηλανδίας [Aspects of the Literature of Greeks in Australia and New Zealand]”(Kanarakis 2003). Although the Greek literature in Australia written in the first half of the twentieth century was predominately that of male writers, the female voice emerged dynamically in the second half of the century, making the female voice very distinct (Georgoudakis 2002; Nickas 1992). Thus, the Greek female writers in Australia appeared in the post-war era, during the Greek mass migration, with Vasso Kalamaras being the first, followed by Dina Amanatides and many more.
The Diachronic Contribution of Greek to Other Languages is the new volume compiled and edited by Dr George Kanarakis and published a few months ago in Athens by Papazissis Publications. Dr Kanarakis, Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University, is a well-known linguist and hellenist.
ΤΟ ΠΟΥΛΙ ΜΕ ΤΙΣ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΕΣ Η λήθη σκέπασε το παρελθόν, το άγνωστο πολιορκεί το σπίτι φαντάσματα πραγμάτων που αγαπήσαμε και…
Poetry, EKSTASIS EDITIONS Ubermensch, by Manolis Aligizakis is the most difficult and most philosophical poetry book I have come across.…