Cicada
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
The celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi explores connections between language, life, and the natural world
By one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets, Cicada is Phoebe Giannisi’s second collection in English. The cicada signifies metamorphosis in this breathtaking, lyrical book, which evokes the spirits of Archilochus, Plato, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. As the translator Brian Sneeden remarks: “The ‘I’ in Giannisi’s poetry is never static, never a fixed point, but part of a process of rebodying the ambient.” Yet, despite the fluid, mythic nature of Giannisi’s poems, they are also exquisitely rooted in the everyday: the sea heard through a window, the murmur of a distant mechanical crane, a damp wind, a photo of John and Yoko. Giannisi is a poet internationally known for her idiosyncratic eco-poetics, as well as her poetic multimedia works and performances, and most of all for her brilliant vision glowing at the borders of language, voice, place, and memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The luminous seventh collection (and second to appear in English) by the Greek poet and architect Giannisi (Homerica) explores the rites and the passage of time "severing before from after." The collection began as a multimedia installation called Tettix, the ancient Greek word for cicada. In its poetic iteration, Giannisi draws inspiration from the cicada's role in ancient Greek mythology and literature: "as Socrates says/ cicadas/ attendants to the muses/ did nothing but sing/ ceaselessly." She alternates between poems that are dense blocks of text without punctuation and airy, free verse that moves like a web down the page. The effect is arresting and often chant-like. In one poem, Giannisi dissects a line of ancient text, exploding all the possible permutations of meaning: "the fragment's diverging interpretations/ arise for the rich tone and tinge." These poems are dynamic in their visual and linguistic movement, "the agitation the ecstasy in life the ego that ricochets within the body the body within the world naked filled with emotions." Giannisi turns the quotidian into the magical in poems that push against the shifting present moment.
