The celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi explores connections between language, life, and the natural world 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

Literature & Fiction

Giannisi, Phoebe

History & Criticism

New Directions

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 the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. 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."

Chimera

Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies. Translated from the Greek by Brian Sneeden. For the first time in English—a volume of poems by one of Greece's foremost poetic voices. Phoebe Giannisi's HOMERICA offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, longing, motherhood, and metamorphosis, re- weaving classical mythology with modern experience. Yet the mythic characters and scenes never feel otherworldly—rather, they appear alongside the tugboat, the bicycle, the television, and the helicopter. Brian Sneeden's masterful translation captures the Delphic rhythms of Giannisi's oracular poems, which rarely travel in a straight line but rather glide across multiple threads of time, like a look interweaving strands of the mythological past. "Giannisi's poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained both in architecture and Ancient Greek, her poems tackle the problem of how to inhabit the spaces we live in—from the abandoned lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a pleasure to have the full Homerica series in Brian Sneeden's lyrical translation."—Karen Van Dyck "Sneeden is a meticulous translator and a poet in his own right. He brings Phoebe Giannisi's work to life with immediacy and conviction."—Edmund Keeley

Homerica

Poetry

World Poetry Books

A leading architectural historian examines the roots of modern architecture in the buildings, sites, and architectural details of ancient Greece, providing a close-up look at the technology, rituals, social structures, political conflicts, and myths of antiquity and assessing how they influenced the design of Greek architecture. 25,000 first printing.

Classical Greek Architecture: The Construction of the Modern

Arts & Photography

Tzonis, Alexander

Architecture

Flammarion

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Books by Giannisi, Phoebe