Θα αναφερθώ στις ποιητικές συλλογές της Έρμας «La rosa enflorece» και «Pain Perdu, Πεν περντού». Η προσέγγιση που θα χρησιμοποιήσω για τη σημερινή σύντομη παρουσίαση των συλλογών θα είναι απλή και πρακτική καθόσον μια ακαδημαϊκή ανάλυση και βαθυστόχαστη κριτική θα ήταν, ίσως, πέρα από τις προσωπικές μου ικανότητες, και σίγουρα δεν θα εξυπηρετούσε πρακτικούς σκοπούς.
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.