Chimera
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Exploring motherhood, myth, and “transhumance,” Chimera is a stunningly ambitious poetry volume by the award-winning Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi
FINALIST FOR THE PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION
In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song—locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls “a bold achievement….a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gianissi's ambitious and often vivid collection, her third in English (after Cicada), features genre-bending poems drawing on three years of field research on the goat-herding customs of the Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans. The opening poem sets the stage for her experiments in voice and interest in the relationship between humans and animals: "the narrator says:// goatfold of Yannis Mourtos in Kalamaki Larissa./ 750 stock, 700 females. goats.// two winters I went among the fold with Chara/ I saw the animals scream and fuck/ (when the human let them)/ I saw the animals being born/ (with the help of the human)/ I saw the animals graze/ (led by the human)." Combining field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts, Gianissi's poems feature philosophical and academic reflections that can sometimes drag: "The herd isn't simply a society of animals... domesticated animals, monitored and controlled and intended for consumption. I've just spoken about domestication, about indoctrination, about appropriation... the herd is a group of animals raised with the purpose of being used and consumed by humans." By contrast, "Darkness Again" offers some of the best of her lyric writing: "for years the dead didn't bother us/ we tucked them one by one into the earth." Readers will find this strange and captivating.
