Reviews

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 ...

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

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 ...

Overall, the collection leaves us with a wonderfully dark yet enticing description of what might be described as a philosophy of exits and entrances. The notion of the threshold is an age-old concern for writers that has assumed epic proportions in such works as Kafka's Before the Law and Beckett's ...

In Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death densely layered fragments fluidly reference the Bible and Classical Greek literature. The white space around these passages heighten the stark sense of loneliness present in the book. The desperation in this book explores a thanatic urge through multiple vectors. ...

How did a book of Greek poetry become one of the most-discussed and most-lauded pieces of contemporary European literature? Garrett Phelps, Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, explains what makes Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy is so unusual—and so difficult to describe.

In conclusion, Poena Damni is a post-tragic work. Certainly, it does not follow from tragedy, if tragedy is intended as an ensemble of formal characteristics, but unequivocally describes the tortured and tragic fall of the (post)modern subject: A person made of one thousand screams whose core of ...

As I read The First Death, I imagine the carpet of corpses lining the Mediterranean. Strata and strata of limbs—now bones—piled up during recent decades, all belonging to shiploads of migrants seeking escape through Europe. I can’t help connecting the poetry under my eyes with this precise ...

However, while Z213: Exit is definitely hard-going, it’s nevertheless absorbing and enjoyable, even if one read is nowhere near enough to unlock its mysteries. The aim of the book, and who and what it’s about, may be unclear, but there’s enough to enjoy in the puzzles and the writing to make ...

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.

This monumental work of experimental poetry comprises three books published in various editions over a period of thirty years and is organized around “a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, [and] mental illness.” In the ...

Z213: Exit—the first installment of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy—eludes a straightforward interpretation and defies easy genre categorization. One of the most striking features of the text, which offers an admixture of poetry, prose, and fractured discourse, is the varied, evanescent ...

Regular readers may remember my posts a while back on the first two parts of Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy, and today’s review sees me finishing off the work with a look at the third section. It’s an intriguing, perplexing cycle of books, with each having it’s own unique ...

[...] a cadence that allows its more macabre undertones to shine through in a way that is at times vaguely unsettling and at others graphic in ways that are horrifying. [...] filled me with a sense of dread every time I turned the page.

The title of this anthology is already mysterious: Poena Damni . I'm not a Latin, but I would roughly translate it as "The revenge or the punishment of loss". After reading the book, I also realize that it means the loss of home, of orientation, of security. Poena Damni consists of three parts. ...

Same article was also published in http://alnoor.se/article.asp?id=369050

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press as part of a beautifully-designed box set, Z213: Exit, the first volume in Dimitris Lyacos’ three-volume long poem Poena Damni, is a vertiginous work that is at once archetypal, transcendent, and uniquely suited to this particular ...

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 ...

Poena Damni di Dimitris Lyacos è un'opera narrativa, composta da tre libri — Z213: Exit, Con la gente dal ponte, Lo prima morte — non facilmente catalogabile. Si esita a definirlo romanzo, seppure le parti in prosa siano maggioranza; non è neppure poesia, anche se l'atto conclusivo della trilogia ...

Si presenta al nostro pubblico con il botto, o meglio col nero cratere che segue a un botto. All'interno del cofanetto tascabile presentato dal Saggiatore si trovano i tre piccoli ma micidiali volumi - Z213: Exit, Con la gente dal ponte, La prima morte - dell'opera a cui Lyacos ha dedicato trent'anni ...

CI SONO vari modi per raffigurare, attraverso la letteratura, il mondo in caduta libera che abitiamo. Ci sono racconti chemuovono dalla contingenza, che necessitano di un appiglio con la realtà seppure poi scelgano di allontanarsene. [...]

La trilogia del poeta ateniese

Di fronte a questo Poena Damni dello scrittore e drammaturgo greco Dimitris Lyacos, trilogia pubblicata in elegante cofanetto da Il Saggiatore, viene voglia di fare il lettore incontentabile 

Cosa sarà mai questo Poena damni del greco Dimitris Lyacos, tradotto in italiano da Viviana Sebastio per le edizioni ilsaggiatore, dopo essere stato tradotto in sette lingue e dopo che Lyacos è diventato uno scrittore per il quale si parla ogni tanto di premio Nobel? Apriamo il ...

Un'opera nuova (qualcuno ha parlato di surfiction), che riscrive le regole della letteratura ibridando i generi e che inizia proiettandoci da subito nelle pagine di un testo che si fatica a decriptare. Una sintassi piegata alle esigenze della scrittura, con l'eliminazione di aggettivi e avverbi ...

Evaso da un carcere, un ospedale o una città distrutta, il protagonista, un Ulisse gettato in un cosmo senza dèi, attraversa le macerie di un mondo violato da una catastrofe bellica. Giunto in una stazione, compra un cappotto logoro, appartenuto a un soldato, nella cui tasca trova una Bibbia tempestata ...

Considerado como um dos mais importantes poetas e dramaturgos gregos contemporâneos, Dimitris Lyacos lança no Brasil o seu “Poena Damni”, obra composta por partes independentes, mas concatenadas por uma profunda e trágica imersão na solidão, na angústia e na tristeza. O livro de poemas ...

Vi è un istante di sospensione in cui tutto è travolto, e vacilla: la realtà solida e profonda che la persona si arroga viene meno, e, in luogo di essa, restano presenze assai più intense, mobilissime, violente, inesorabili. E in questo disorientamento lo spirito distingue male ciò che imperversa ...

É sem dúvida o mais conhecido escritor grego contemporâneo. Nascido em Atenas em 1966, é poeta, dramaturgo, Fellow no International writing program da Universidade do Iowa, e estudioso — entre outras — da História das Religiões e… super cotado para o Nobel de Literatura. ...

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 ...

Ci sono libri che dicono poco e libri che dicono troppo: i primi appartengono al genere balneare, o del dormiveglia e non conta farne menzione; i secondi inquietano lo spirito, sfidano la ragione, sollecitano l’immaginazione a destarsi dall’anestesia di massa.A questa seconda genìa appartiene ...

Il genere letterario attualmente più in salute – già impiegato da autori quali, tra gli altri, Magris, Fo­ster Wallace, Yu Hua, Carrère, Oz, Ernaux, Le Clézio, Handke e Didion – è probabilmente l’ibrido fra narrazione per brevi e agevoli paragrafi, riflessione a tema ...

Poesia? Prosa? Delirio, mito, previsione? Per Dimitris Lyacos i confini non importano. Sono binari da attraversare sperando che non passi nessun treno, sono linee fatte per essere superate, recinti mentali che la penna può attraversare impunemente e modificare con un semplice tratto che s’interrompe, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dimitris Lyacos’ Z213: EXIT is a revelation. A masterpiece. Distinctly postmodern yet entirely unclassifiable, it is everything and nothing all at once. Despite the myriad references to literature, it is entirely new – I have never read anything like it, and this stunning translation is truly ...

A fierce book that is as much puzzle as narrative, Z213: Exit is the first in a trilogy (known as the Poena Damni) that represents more than three decades of work. Dimitris Lyacos uses a fusion of stream-of-consciousness, verse, and prose to construct this fascinating narrative that approximates ...

Excerpts traslated in Chinese by Shao Xueping (forthcoming)

It’s tempting to read the entire ‘Poena Damni’ trilogy as a response to the unremitting horrors of the 20th-century, and it’s hard to avoid associating the camp, the soldiers, and the guard towers with the disturbing Second World War images that should now be part of the collective subconscious. ...

No other writer can evoke the blurry, ambiguous feeling of dreaming quite like Lyacos. His work has been described as ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘eschatological’. ‘Purgatorial’ might be nearer the mark. Where else but in a dream does one grapple, over and over again, with one’s own soul in ...

By pulling at the eternal literary threads from Greek antiquity and beyond, and coupling them with dystopic landscapes, Lyacos has woven a narrative that is relevant and timeless in the way it incorporates myth with modernity.

Greek poet and playwright Dimitris Lyacos is someone you should know. From one poet about another, here’s why. Just in time for National Poetry Month!

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 ...

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)

When not providing the reader with mystifying dreams and poetic diversion, Lyacos offers up a vision of agony more terryfying than any fire and brimstone sermon. Z213 is almost the opposite of a gospel account.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Blanchot’s powerful and fragmentary contemplation Writing of the Disaster leaves me dumb and dumbfounded as I wander in a text of light and shadow, shapes and voids. Dimitris Lyacos makes admirable additions to such fragmentary writing. If an experimental book can be grounded, Z213: Exit is more ...

From the first page to last, Z213: EXIT is one word, unique. It certainly is not a traditional novel or conventional poetry, the words themselves veer from neat, almost atomic precision to scattered unhinged lettering and sporadic lonely spaces. [...]Is this a masterpiece? For many, it will be.

Lyacos shuttles the reader from the large-scale trauma of social collapse to the devastatingly intimate at dizzying speeds.

Dimitris Lyacos may employ all the paraphernalia of post-modernist poetry: elliptical sentences, fragmented texts, imcomplete words and a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but he always works to a plan, and it is up to the reader to discover it and enjoy what is definitely one of the most exciting ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Myth, in Lyacos, does not present itself as an organic whole upon which his writing is articulated: Z213: EXIT is not a new reading of the myth of Odysseus or Moses. Lyacos does not construct a new myth either. What he does is to turn the myth inwards, towards its deep structure, emphasizing its ...

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 ...

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.

A truly unmatched piece of prose in content and style, Poena Damni Z:213 Exit might be short in size, but burgeoning in complexity.

A hellish agony is woven throughout the work and will draw comparisons to Dante but rest assured this is original writing unique to Dimitris Lyacos. Repetitive images and metaphor of stations and trains, of walls, of blood, of caves and pits, of clawing in search of light to the barrenness of plains, ...

Es fehlt nur noch, dass auch der Tod, der qualvolle Sterbeprozess eines Individuums Einzug in unsere Reality-TV-Welt hält, die Horrorfilme Wirklichkeit werden. Dann könnte man Lyacos Band als prophetisch bezeichnen.

Die Hölle bin Ich! schreit der Krüppel. Die Suche nach einem transzendentalen Autismus ist also unsere Arbeit. Dabei geht es nicht um eine Kommunikation im Rahmen der symbolischen Ordnung, sondern um den freiwilligen Übergang in die Welt des Realen. Willkommen zu meiner Hölle! würde der Krüppel ...

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 ...

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.

If the translations of the poems are exact, these poems are light years beyond our contemporary poetics. Lyacos is a master craftsman steering his way through tons of immediate information.

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.

While I have no idea of Sullivan’s accuracy in translating this book, I do know that what I held when I read & read when I held Lyacos’ Z213: EXIT, an astounding river of words poured from an open wound. There is coming & going & loss & redemption. There are sharp & tongue-filled ...

The art of translation is a gift and we, as English speakers and readers, have Shorsha Sullivan to thank for bringing us the work of Greek poet Dimitris Lyacos. In Z213:Exit: Poena Dani, Lyacos’ middle collection in a series of three, we experience the world through the eyes of a prisoner as he ...

By tapping into - and engaging with such visceral detail, as the scraps and scrims of scenes here provide - this issue of how writing works on the most basic, universal level, Lyacos has created a book of real interest and reward.

Z213 is a tricky, rewarding, quintessentially post-modern work. Yes, Z213 brings the twelve, the cross and the lamb to the poetics of the abyss.

Who is this narrator running from? The law? An invading force? A surveillance state? His own death? God? The same could be said of any of us, because all of us make our own mysteries with our guilt.

The Art of Translation. A note on translating Dimitris Lyacos' trilogy by Shorsha Sullivan. The Writing Disorder, Spring 2011, Los Angeles, USA.

Thought by itself tells you. Review on Z213: Exit by Jeffrey S. Callico. Negative Suck Review, November 2010, Georgia USA.

I recommend it because Lyacos is a true talent. You will not find his works easy read but most of the hard things in life provide us the biggest and most valuable rewards.

Εν κατακλείδι το Poena Damni είναι ένα έργο μετα-τραγικό. Σίγουρα δεν ακολουθεί τα ειδολογικά χαρακτηριστικά της τραγωδίας, αλλά περιγράφει τη βασανιστική και τραγική ...

Elemental themes of life and death, loss and the resurrection of the dead along with the figure of the revenant of Greek and Balkan folklore appear, provoking images of vampires within this postmodernist, genre-defying work influenced by ancient and modern religion, the epic poetry of Homer and ...

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) ...

C'est un texte polymorphe, qui met en oeuvre tous les signes de l'ultramodernité, ce que l'on appelait autrefois l'avant-garde, pour renforcer sa densité "transgenre" et l'étrange de son propos.

C'est un texte polymorphe, qui met en oeuvre tous les signes de l'ultramodernité, ce que l'on appelait autrefois l'avant-garde, pour renforcer sa densité transgenre et l'étrange de son propos.

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 ...

Z213: Exit. Review by K.M. Dersley Ragged Edge Review, June 2010, UK.

Z213 Exit. Review by Paul Mc Donald. Envoi Literary Journal, Issue 158 (printed issue), Spring 2011.

Back to the world through a nightmare: Some notes on Dimitris Lyacos' The First Death by Elena KouttisDimitris Lyacos's trilogy Poena Damni ends with The First Death. The book starts in a desert rock where a cripple is slowly moving like "lava from beheaded rivers". His intentions become ...

The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 19, 2001/ John Hopkins University Press.Robert Zaller - Recent Translations from Shoestring Press. Tassos Denegris, Dimitris Lyacos, Dionysios Solomos.[…]Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death is the latest installment of a narrative ...

“……Ma cosa c’ è di più bello di farsi fottere dai sogni e poi urlare al cielo vaffanculo, chi se ne frega. Nessuno può immaginare quanta ricchezza c’ è in certe sconfitte. Conta il coraggio nella partita della vita. E non mi importa se per colpa di altri sono diventato un inferno. ...

Kathimerini English Edition, 4 May 2000Jena Woodhouse Lyacos: A "feast of all fruits"Dimitris Lyacos' 'The First Death' is a meditation on mortality, disintegration and decay.Praised by the Italian critic Bruno Rosada for "the casting of emotion into an analytical structure and ...

Bruno Rosada, University of Venice The First Death Characteristics of Dimitris Lyacos' poetry It is the poet's predilection for concrete nouns, terms referring to reality, that contributes above all to the reader's first impression. ...

R.G. GregoryActivating the First DeathTHE FIRST DEATH by Dimitris Lyacos has been translated from the Greek into English by Shorsha Sullivan.It is the third in an intended trilogy of dramatic poems and seems ready-made for the kind of theatre-presentation I have been ...

Shorsha Sullivan The Punishment of Loss A Note on Dimitris Lyacos\' The First Death Awareness of irreparable loss is traditionally the nemesis that overtakes that part of human consciousness which continues, we may suppose, after the dissolution of the body. Yet, ...

An overview essay on the development of the Poena Damni trilogy by Dimitris Lyacos.

E. Doukas. Odos Panos, September-December 1997, Athens Greece

A cultural guide by John Gill. Page 87. Signal Books Ltd 2011.

A. A. Psilogiannopoulos Odos Panos, Athens 1996