Poetry
2001 • 7” x 10” • 176 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-114-1
Coffee House Press
PURCHASE:
Coffee House Press
Bookshop.org
THE VELOCITY OF LANGUAGE, THE FEROCITY OF POETRY UNEARTH OUR MOST THINKING, FEELING, EROTIC SELVES IN THIS POWERFUL DEBUT.
This impressive debut of a major new voice in poetry begins with Blue Guide, a poem cycle of meditations on light and dark, probing the opposing/complementary nature of these universal principles and their manifestation through words. In Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing, the oracular power of language fuels the journey between constellations shimmering above and the mind shimmering in response below, between phenomenology and phenomena. Sikelianos says, “I am interested in the absolute ferocity of poetry, in our wild, eccentric human selves and animal and mineral planet, untainted by but interacting with socializing forces.”
Earliest Worlds
REVIEWS
“Sikelianos directs us, surprise in each line, to return to the unconscious, to the fierce, absolute sign, out of whose nourishing hand her poetry advances.” —Barbara Guest
“The real and the imagined, waking life and dream, the simple and the complex . . . work together and play together in Eleni Sikelianos’s poetry with a wonderful elasticity and verve.” —Lydia Davis
“An original and beautiful poetry, always discovering its own grammar and name, its own secrets. The poetry comes from her and not others: it is incomparable.” —Alice Notley
“Consistently wedding innovative technique with time-honored poetic tropes of light and dark, individual and cosmos, and self and other, this ambitious debut takes in a lot of influences but emerges singularly and beautifully.” —Publishers Weekly