Full stop

"...The poems, then, are all distillations of experience blended with the knowledge of a rich intertextuality. The poet knows her ancestors well and honours them. She strikes the right chords in others, listens intently to the voices she has internalised, and adds her own voice to the chorus of those who, in turn, have gone through the process. Knowledge of the past enriches every younger generation with what it has learnt along the way..."

"...Kiki Dimoula, with her ‘Semicolon’, brings this poetic year to a close with yet another rich collection. Giving voice and substance to an inner wandering, the great poet, with metaphysical irony, highlights and expands on signpost words such as: ‘I want’, ‘perhaps’, ‘I exist’."

"...This achievement by Kiki Dimoula establishes her as the absolute steward of the soul’s affairs, as a place where truth finally flourishes unhindered."

"...Kiki Dimoula speaks and writes with words, but she knows that their form and sound are always to be transcended, so that the unspeakable may be embraced by the command of silence, so that the words may fall silent within their own sound and emerge into the light of day without the burden of their usage."

"...In her recent poetic ‘offspring’, Kiki Dimoula, ‘Anotelia’—a poet who, alongside other recognisable and entirely personal expressive building blocks, frequently expands her poems with a wise and, as such, traumatic and unhealed proverbial reflection, resorting to ‘axioms’, as the dense, instantaneous philosophical poetic discourse was also known internationally..."

"...The autonomous, dynamic, unruly words capture, in this collection too, both enduring and fleeting psychological moments, giving form to the existential anguish that characterises the subject of her work throughout her poetic output."

"...Almost in a single word, without writing volumes upon volumes, Kiki Dimoula’s poetry combines stories, modes of exposition, pasts, memories, a complete history. She takes on the poetic responsibility of speaking to us. It could not be any clearer, with any greater clarity or precision. It possesses the virtue of narrative development, maintains the sense of the poem’s structure, and, when you read it, you feel that this vessel of poetry which you thought was sailing rudderless has the most suitable helmsman: narrative and structural explanations of life. Always with the tension between temporal and spatial relationships determining the writer’s question."

– Dimitra Pavlakou, Avgi

"...This achievement by Kiki Dimoula establishes her as the absolute steward of the soul’s affairs, as a place where truth finally flourishes unhindered."

– Giorgos Veis, Poetics Magazine

"...Although Dimoula does not write about current affairs, her poetry is nevertheless as relevant as ever. Although she appears to be writing about herself, her poetry concerns us all, transporting us from the personal to the collective: she gathers silences, losses, joys, despair and ambiguities, awakening within us the heavy burden of the human condition. Oblivion and memory do battle. It drains oblivion and brings forth memory. Oblivion abandons memory for the sake of time, which passes relentlessly over it. "

– Dinos Siotis, Kathimerini

"...Dimoula, as wise and lucid as ever, knows that our strength lies in our weakness, that a whisper is our howl, that without a silencer our cry is a hollow melodrama, that by undermining poeticism you serve Poetry, that the spirit dwells in matter, that Nothing contains Everything, that if you do not long to be absent you have no presence..."

"...One need only read the poem ‘Problem’ and many others from her latest collection of poetry, ‘Full Stop’ – which constitutes a birth with all the characteristics of a firstborn child —to realise the extent to which it summarises her previous poetic output, whilst in such an unexpected way leaving open all possibilities for a continuation as revelatory as the sixty-odd years of her past in poetry. To the extent that another punctuation mark—namely the exclamation mark—takes the place of the semicolon for the reader."

– Thanasis Th. Niarchos, Bibliodromio

"...Borrowing one of her earlier verses, I wrote some time ago that ‘the melancholic wind of life’ runs through all of Dimoula’s poetry. This collection confirms her straightforward maturity."

"...In her latest collection of poetry, ‘Anoteleia’, the poet once again brings personal pain to the fore through a poetic mourning. One of the most distinctive features of Dimoula’s poetry is the poet’s focus on ‘insignificant’ objects and events, which she takes as her starting point and transforms into symbols of life and fate."

"...Dimoula’s poetry is now a poetry of words, as they are effortlessly expressed, simple words, that is, those that are actually used. So you often find yourself searching within the poem – not just at the end – for a riveting interlude, which often fails to materialise. Perhaps, however, the poet does indeed wish to direct our attention now simply to the words, since, as we read at the end of the collection, word and existence are equated, and we can pronounce the word ‘existence’ ‘slowly, very slowly / as if its syllables were endless’."

"...For the _Semicolon_ in Dimoula’s poetry is her own Dantean ‘Divine Comedy’, with Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Without grandiloquence and with humble materials, without grandiose gestures but breathing. Is this not how life goes on? An everyday Poetry that breathes amidst the established Chaos."

"...Thank you for choosing, in these strange times we live in, to express with honesty and clarity, in a simple, unadorned and meaningful way, everything that concerns us. You give us strength, as you still manage to string words together to form phrases full of meaning, which highlight the vagueness of the rules we are often called upon to follow."