George I. Kalientzidis, Trilogy: At the Corners of Words, Whom Does Poetry Belong To? A Study of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, Contemporary Greek Poetry, cover work: Christos Kalientzidis, ed. Mandragoras, Athens July 2024, edition number 416, pages 64, ISBN 978-960-592-198-9.

The dolls of a broken showcase. Poetry of the limits and the indeterminacy of chaos. In each word, we correspondingly assign a love, an emotion, an image, a smile, a doubt, a disillusionment, a pain, a damn, a sigh.

However, no matter how you arrange the whole set of paired points (word-image, word-emotion, word-dream), a question mark is always formed. In George Kalientzidis' new poetic composition Trilogy, the three sections of the book are incorporated as titles: At the Corners of Words, Whom Does Poetry Belong To? and finally, A Study of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino. Poems, emotions, images, dreams (which compose a poetic form or rules of poetic writing) could characterize the 22 poems and the 9 studies based on Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, as we read in the title of the collection.

Empty spaces in a past time – memory, and in a future time – anticipation, because life, like poetry, continues to draft theorems, questions (“Whom does poetry belong to?”) and uncertainties: All alone, with the gas pedal pressed at one hundred eighty kilometers, leaving behind sweet moments that you know you will not live again. Anticipating others, equally beautiful to fill the empty spaces of your fierce visage. And you harden year by year.

And friends wonder, how come you no longer describe the sunsets of Lake Doirani? How come you haven’t finally talked about all the things you hoped for and those you lost? And the answers, once stable functions, transformed into tides. You linger in the waters of memory, smiling at the dawn that blushes and you shape the last alpha of love with the same uncertainty, just like back in the calligraphy lesson when your mother tightened the pencil in your hand.

Through the lessons-sufferings-poems of George Kalientzidis, one can discern at times fear and loneliness, often anger for what happens in our absence and in the absence of poetry (which nevertheless accompanies us for life), at times an agonizing feedback of what has been, see memory: I place my hopes in the infinite, that which I could never manage to imprint in my memory. They told me memory is weak from the beginning. And so I could imagine more the embrace of the circles of Euler’s theorem. Two lonely circles that will never meet.

Two people walking on either side of a road. The fear of the other, the other self has become a nightmare in their dreams, and they wake up at dawn and take the roads to nowhere, counting the cars on boulevards and in alleys. Each one with their own territory...

Dreams, nightmares, futile hopes, the verbs “I dream” and “I remember”, many names that are emphatically mentioned in the poetic narrative and coexist acting in the study of the Invisible yet existing cities that enclose us, recharge the pages of the Trilogy with the certainty that what we see is the reflection of the invisible.

George Kalientzidis was born in 1960 in the village of Koryfi in Kilkis. He settled in Thessaloniki in 1974, where he graduated from the 8th Lyceum. He holds a degree in mathematics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and attended journalism and media business management courses. He has been working as a journalist at 9.58 fm of ERT3 since 1994. He has collaborated with newspapers and literary magazines. After his suggestion, the Reading Club of ERT3 was created in September 2011, which he coordinates. He is a member of the Hellenic Mathematical Society, the Union of Macedonian-Thracian Editors (ESIEM-TH), and the Society of Writers of Thessaloniki.