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Description
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And then comes the moment when you learn that even emptiness has degrees of comparison. Twenty numbered poems, three unnumbered, one introductory triplet, and a concluding piece of thirteen lines make up "Twenty," the new poetry collection by Pantelis Boukalas. These are the records of a war—one of those wars that truly seem destined never to end: the war with a black hole that is not inside you, but contains you entirely. Each record tries its own version of voice, from the many that Greek poetry has to offer, as weapons of some power to deceive the Unsmiling One and to speak of mourning, the heaviest ever written by man: a parent's mourning for their child. To turn emptiness into words, even though you now feel words are desperately weak, almost unjust in the face of the great event they are called to spell out. To return from the stunned pain, the resigned silence, or from the way of the scream to the ordered world, you will try and be tried in all voices. In the voice of narration, which extends the field of memory by recalling broken sequences of moments and attempting through storytelling to preserve warmth against the glacier of loss. In the voice of condensation, which keeps only a core of bare words. In the metrical voice and the voice of free verse. In the voice of funeral poetry and folk lament, but also in the voice of hope, of not giving up, of not sinking, as summed up in the command of the Pontic song: "Hold on, heart, hold on, whether you want to or not." But as much as you hold on to the little branch offered by the verse of Pontus, the many-headed bitterness inside you cuts you in two, lamenting in the way of the rizitiko song for the young one who "never enjoyed youth," because—at his beautiful twenty—the "hard-hearted one" caught up with him, with the treachery rightly attributed to him by our folk poetry: "Christ, if only he were ahead, if only he were behind." This soul-devouring "if," the futile "if only," addressed to invisible or indifferent deities, breaks even bones that believed for no reason that they were strong. On a single hair the life of mortals balances. On a single hair that violently and abruptly cuts the world and time in two, into the poisoned present and the relentless past, into the here and the there. Yes. Perhaps the wise ancients were not wrong, those who linked one of their mythological tales of lost immortality to a hair on the head of Pterelaos, king of the Taphians; it was easy to cut, always by treachery, easy for man to return to his mortality. His only immortality is memory.
Manufacturer
Specifications
- Author
- Pantelis Mpoukalas
- Publisher
- Agra
- Publishers
- Agra
- Type
- Prose
- Subtitle
- -
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 80
- Release Date
- 01/05/2026
- Publication Date
- 2026
- Dimensions
- -
- ISBN-13
- 9789605057206
Additional Specifications
- Series
- Moments
Important information
Specifications are collected from official manufacturer websites. Please verify the specifications before proceeding with your final purchase. If you notice any problem you can report it here.