Beautifully translated…The book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages…, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones."
Phoebe Giannisi was born in Athens in 1964 and is the author of seven books of poetry, including Homerica (chosen by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 in the Paris Review). She is professor of architecture and cultural studies at the University of Thessaly.
Translated by Brian Sneeden
In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of a community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own language and practice transhumance. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song—locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls “a bold achievement: a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited.
Translated by Brian Sneeden
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.
“Cicada” originated from “Tettix” (the ancient Greek word for this insect), a commissioned exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens in 2012, curated by Stamatis Schizakis. Tettix is a project presented through various media such as performances, video and sound works, as well as poetic manuscripts that now belong to the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens.
Beautifully translated…The book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages…, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones."
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.
