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. It’s a real masterwork in that it accomplishes the avant-garde task of throwing the reader in all directions simultaneously. Soon, instead of knowing until you’re nauseous exactly where you stand (and do not stand) in today’s global economy, for example, you’re good and lost (in the best literary way) on the confusing road to a questionable salvation with each refugee, seeker and lost soul among the torturers, prisoners, survivors, lovers, friends and worshipers who haunt the trains, bridges, villages and churches that inhabit Lyacos’ (and our) world. You’ll get triggered for touchstones and allusions and be on your way to complete presence with the text. Relief is overrated.īegin getting to know Poena Damni as you read by searching references and collective human history and memory. In other words, something you only want to read once, with, at the end, a sense of relief that you are still someone special.

Most attempts at post (and post-post) modernism end up weak, scattered and afraid of scaffolding for fear of ridicule. Lyacos’ Poena Damni is powerful because the work is stitched in all its seams with a very deeply grounded lyrical and inward-looking precision. Ing on top of each other, another page, write, again a That you don’t have time to write, in the dark you can’t Pieces missing, empty pages, match, again. To see in the room that flares and fizzles out. In his trilogy Poena Damni Dimitris Lyacos proves it’s a gift we’re still (for now) willing to accept:Īs long as a match stays alight. This is the gift of high modern and postmodern art. Only a writer who has studied and read the deepest narratives will succeed, reaching for and pulling up out of the muck brief remnants that add much-needed weight to the radical fragmentation that is contemporary life’s relationship to personal and cultural histories, not to mention death and reality. For the real owns rider and horse, and language obscures this fact by its severing nature-and this explains why postmodern literature is such a difficult medium in most hands. In the highest sense, both approaches to writing use language to pull everyone involved up short to a face-to-face blinking contest with reality. Both postmodern and high modernist poetry have a context of traumatized grand narratives, reflections of human consciousness (both writer and reader) damaged by and aware of their own damages, whatever the source.

The First Death by Dimitris Lyacos