Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos Poems

Dimitris Lyacos Biography

Dimitris Lyacos ( born October 19, 1966) is a contemporary Greek poet and playwright. He is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy. Renowned for its genre-defying form and the avant-garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology, Lyacos’s work reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon. Despite its size - the overall trilogy counts no more than two hundred pages - Poena Damni took over a period of thirty years to complete, with the individual books revised and republished in different editions during this period and arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, mental illness. Lyacos’s characters are always at a distance from society as such, fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the People from the Bridge, or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desert-like island. Poena Damni has been construed as an "allegory of unhappiness" together with works of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon.)

The Best Poem Of Dimitris Lyacos

Z213: Exit

Page 5

A few hours more, station, deserted, a dirt road for inside the town, mud, mud, blankets outside, mouldering houses of tin, the shattered pylon further behind, not even a car, rubbish, two children setting fire to a heap, two or three other fires on the horizon, houses, the acid smell stronger, pieces and pieces of asphalt, houses of cement blocks, few people, half-open doors, half-light, the mattress as if it were soaked, that milk, the cramp in the stomach and dizziness, when I awoke, I hurried to make it before it got dark, a bit by chance and from what I remembered, asked questions, the other side back to the bridge, the murmur of water, the trees blackening but I could still see, it was in front of me almost as soon as I entered. What are you doing here, sit for a while beside you, if you could also back then, if someone bent down, heard you while still you could be heard, your eyes that were gleaming the eyes growing dim, the pain growing dim, with how many more did they bring you, the bell, silence as they lowered you down, stifled song and a pause, the murmur of water. I am cold, I leave among other names, photos that look at you yet do not see, the sun now again at its end. On the road back, on the plain, a breath, tepid, as a last breath, and a gleam, the river falling behind, the town mute as before, with some wine on the end of a table, the Bible being erased, between its pages the words of a stranger, between him I write wherever I find a no-man's land.

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