With The People From The Bridge Reviews

With the People from the Bridge is the second book in Greek poet Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy (translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press). You can read my review of the first book in the trilogy, Z213: Exit, here. With the People from the Bridge ...

In truth, I suspect it’s almost better not to know too much about this backstory. By withholding information, Lyacos’ and Sullivan’s text, sparse and menacing, challenges the reader to create their own story, and the book is all the better for it.

One of the most original and significant texts to have come out of Europe in the past generation is Dimitris Lyacos’ poetic trilogy, Poena Damni. I call it ‘poetic’ because there is no word that quite describes a work that moves alternately between poetry, prose, and drama, and that ...

Lyacos' text is one that seems written to simultaneously challenge literary critics, be within reach of most readers, and tell a story that comes across as vital to the author personally -- both intellectually and spiritually.(...)To his credit, there is a sense that these motifs are held terrifically ...

It’s a real masterwork in that it accomplishes the avant-garde task of throwing the reader in all directions simultaneously. It’s a hearty meal, a marvelous, lively response to madness, to death and to reality, all of which we contain and run from constantly. In a sense, that would be the trilogy ...

Whether or not it is allegory, With the People from the Bridge embodies Biblical and European stories and myth, harshly bringing them into an apparent present. If the darkness and renewed loneliness and emptiness are part of the ultimate tragedy of separation from God, then in a godless (or god-evacuated) ...

Dimitris Lyacos’s long, tripartite poem, Poena Damni, is one of the most important and challenging literary works to come from Greece in the past generation. (...) “With the People from the Bridge” is not the poem of a Christian apologist, but of an agnostic thoroughly penetrated by Christian ...

Dictionary Entry. Fran Mason, Historical Dictionary of Postmodern Literature and Theater, pp. 276-77. Second Edition, Rowman and Littlefield 2016.

Lyacos writes one of the most memorable traditionally experimental poetry collections I’ve read. It avoids the visual wankery of bill bissett, the gentle chopping of line typical in Jorie Graham, and the terse verse of Rae Armantrout, while retaining the weightiness of surreal abstraction... A ...

There are tons of literary, philosophical, religious, mythological references in Lyacos' With the People from the Bridge. They have all picked up by reviewers, for they are pretty transparent though perfectly assimilated. Besides Dante's Commedia (a tenuous link, in my opinion), the Apocalypse and ...

It is often said that good stories “show instead of tell.” Dimitris Lyacos’s With the People from the Bridge gives such a deeply felt sense of what it must feel like for a vampire to awake from the grave or the morgue that Lyacos never has to tell his readers vampire.

The interesting thing is that, after so long spent in this mad, desperate company the sane boundaries of what we think of as the 'real' world begin to darkle and shift. Perhaps the dead can rise again. Perhaps the world isending only to begin afresh. This is Lyacos' great gift. Shorsha Sullivan's ...

In the end, categorizing With the people from the bridge seems somewhat beside the point. From the poem’s decrepit setting comes a narrative that purposefully resists classification, if only to offer the reader a truth both pragmatic and optimistic. Those willing to grapple with Lyacos’s verse ...

Despite the reluctance to pin Lyacos's work down to any specific site of struggle, the reader comes away also having found in his words one of the most evocative and moving depictions of the sense of terror and hope that so many precarious lives experience today in making their journeys by boat ...

From Beckett, Dali, Dante, Sartre, and Kafka (already mentioned by critics such as Michael O’Sullivan, Allison Elliott, or Manos Georginis) to Edgar Allan Poe, Juan Rulfo, or even Sarah Kane, Lyacos’s writing reveals an unparalleled understanding of the importance of having formidable artistic ...

Lyacos effectively blends such science fiction elements like the above with religious, as in the first poem, where the narrator reads from one of the Gospels, where Jesus expels an unclean spirit named Legion from within a man (Mark 5:9). It is the balance of these two elements that has the reader ...

I recommend With the people from the bridge because Lyacos delivers a story in which we can all relate. We all have or will experience loss. The vehicle in which he takes the reader on this sad journey is unique (and the genre is…heck if I know), which is a good thing. I like works of art that ...

Like any great love story, our protagonist here worries, “eventually they will get/to us/they will separate us”. Unlike most love stories, she is already dead, and it is her corpse he clings to. Overall, the text is ambiguous but startlingly human.

There are other metaphors of course — in fact the entire piece is a Christian metaphor. Deprived of the beatific vision, this is what you get: life on the bridge. Implicit in this equation is a totalitarian mindset little valorized by modern sensibilities. Whereas William Carlos Williams or Walt ...

Most striking, though, is how densely layered the whole thing is. Voices drift in from the distant past and the literal beyond, crackling out of a TV set or issuing from a cassette-player. The piece reads like a cross-section of a microcosm, with the prose inserts making you aware not only of the ...

Lyacos, a prominent writer in the avant-garde movement, creates a somber and bitter tone in this exploration that takes the shape of an allegory for post industrialized society with the oft used metaphorical vampires.

Yes being Greek adds to my gratitude for such a poet who does not come across the ocean that often any more. I exaggerate as i am prone to do, yet, this trilogy is masterful and it comes to us only once in a lifetime.

A Arte de TraduzirPoena DamniUma Nota sobre Traduzir a Trilogia de Dimitris Lyacospor Shorsha Sullivantradução de Eduardo Miranda"Bless thee Bottom, bless thee; thou art translated."(A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act Three, Scene One)

With the People from the Bridge. Review by Tiffany Austin. Valley Voices Review, Issue 16.1 June 2016, Mississippi, USA. We are truly “with the people” as we experience a man attempting to open the coffin,bring to life, and leave with a lover. Lyacos’ work is at once a broad me-andering of ...