Lyacos writes one of the most memorable traditionally experimental poetry collections I've read. It avoids the visual wankery of bill bissett (L33T nephew of e.e. cummings), the gentle chopping of line typical in Jorie Graham, and the terse verse of Rae Armantrout, while retaining the weightiness of surreal abstraction that can be found in Judas-invoking phrases like (and you ascend into the flowers / of the tree where you were hanged) and description of birds as eyes burnt out faceted vision / unscrewed breastbones screaming. A guttural experience which is rarely experienced and which is what Poena Damni wants to be from the beginning.
by Cleaver MagazineThere is a sense of unquenchable vitality in the project, an inexhaustible fecundity of imagery in the midst of denial and despair. Lyacos brings to bear a formidable culture in which fragments of ancient Greek are embedded in a supple modern idiom, and a variety of classical and biblical references are seamlessly integrated into the text.
by Journal of Modern Greek StudiesWhile The First Death is dominated by imagery of the infernal, it is (in its way) as skillfully articulated a vision of its theme as was Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in another time and in different terms. Balancing Lyacos's labyrinth of shocking imagery there is the counterweight of intellectual stringency and spiritual austerity, so that the reader is invited to contemplate what is in effect an abstraction of horror, Lyacos's disturbing feast of all fruits.
by International Herald Tribune/Kathimerini