The protagonist could be the medieval Everyman seeking God or salvation, or his modern version, the haunting and hunted, Kafka’s ‘K’.

Would roam alone here and there with no one to Of the freedom which will be a burden to you, you This is language fluid enough to allow the reader to form his own interpretation:

Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary craftily combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader’s subconscious fears can pop in and out. The general feeling is that we are going through an eschatological experience. This is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (we are never told) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. It is not delineated in realistic terms, but expressionistically, creating in the reader’s heart the necessary emotional angst, which permeates the whole trilogy. We never learn the identity of the fugitive or that of his pursuers, nor the reasons why he was incarcerated in the first place, but the environment is reminiscent of a fascist state of both the black and the red variety. Z213: Exit,the first installment and the latest to appear in print, recounts, in what reads like a personal journal in verse form or poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building (prison or concentration camp) in a nightmarish, post-modernist version of a Dali-like landscape. The three books that make up the trilogy, Z213:Exit (2010), Nyctivoe (2001), and The First Death (2000), published by Shoestring Press, were written in reverse order, as the publication dates of the English translations of the original Greek texts indicate. POENA DAMNI (Pain of Loss) is a trilogy which traces, in a series of episodes of various poetic styles, the pain that the damned souls suffer in Hell when experiencing the loss of the vision of God. But the poet is reader-friendly enough to leave precious sign-posts so that we lose neither our way, nor our prerogative to impose a meaning upon the broad vista of this spectacular feat in existential poetry. Through its labyrinthine narratives and elliptical monologues the reader is invited to discover the meaning and the plan behind what, at first sight, may seem a meandering text. This is certainly true about Dimitris Lyacos’s poetry. (Available on Amazon.)Īccording to Raman Selden we can no longer talk about the meaning of a text without considering the reader’s contribution to it. by Shorsha Sullivan), Shoestring Press, (Nottingham, England), 2010.

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni) by Dimitris Lyacos (trans.

The First Death by Dimitris Lyacos