Description

Veroniki Dalakoura

Translated by John Taylor

Bird Shadows: Selected Poetry and Poetic Prose 1967-2020

ISBN:978-1-956921-27-4

(pbk., 220 pages)

(June, 2024) 

Bird Shadows: Selected Poetry and Poetic Prose 1967-2020 gathers a generous selection, for the first time in English, of the poetry and prose poetry of the Greek poet Veroniki Dalakoura. Beginning with a selection of her precocious first poems, which she began to write when she was fifteen years old and which immediately brought her originality to the attention of major Greek poets, the book also includes translations of her most significant pieces from her seven subsequent collections. Through resonant and provocative verse poems, prose poems, hybrid forms, and longer narratives, Dalakoura, whose writing is marked by surrealism and informed by her own translations of French poets such as Desnos, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, has continued to explore themes bringing together suffering and release, death and rebirth, eros and spirituality.

Read an interview with Veroniki at Reading Greece

And here is the article at Reading Greece announcing Bird Shadows as Book of the Month

Front Cover Art:  Stamatia Chatziioannou

Takis Sinopoulos (1917-1981), who was the first major Greek poet to discover Veroniki Dalakoura’s poetry, wrote of how she “deliberately and with a very logical determination… abolishes syntactically organized writing, exorcises punctuation, torments spelling, undermines the semantic function of the subject matter, arranges contradictory or irrelevant propositions, tiptoes like a tightrope walker between incoherent images—which creates the very conditions for the birth of surprise and of the unexpected.” (I Synechia, July 1973)

“Reading Dalakoura’s work demands self-abandonment into the bizarre magic of its seemingly unrelated images (where sometimes even imagery by association seems to be abolished). It is a voluntary immersion in the dim light of an individual’s beyond, an exercise in apnea for that sacred moment of great terror when we approach at the end of life, when we step onto the threshold of death.”

—Pieretta Diamantopoulou (Kyriakatiki Avgi, 27 May 2020).

“[Veroniki Dalakoura’s Hypnos is] a surreal prelude to an unwritten dream biography…. It gathers the traces of an interiority that springs to the surface so that its own fears, denials, desolation, and what is unrealizable can be dreamt.”

— Evgenios Aranitzis (Eleftherotypia, 29 March 1995)

Dalakoura’s “images are placed one on top of the other, like a palimpsest. This is how her lines work. The moment one line is completed, she begins to erase it by ‘writing’ another one over it. In front of him, the reader has all the wonderful splendor of life. . .”

—Dimitris Houliarakis (To Vima, 13 June 2004)

“[Veroniki Dalakoura has] an absolutely personal mythology [and] poetic universe, spacious enough to include everything that motivates her in her journey through the heart of time and the chaos of History.”

— Kostas G. Papageorgiou (Kyriakatiki Avgi, 5 February 2012)

“[Dalakoura’s] symbols raise not so much a problem of interpretation for the reader as that of expanding his or her own senses of perception.”

—Maria Laina (Anagnostis, 1991)