Faces and Trials

Night close to the sky! As if the soul has taken it in, it gazes. Leaf by leaf, obedient It goes, accompanied by the living To the edge of the sword Who is waiting? And on the other side? Who steers the weather And when it still does not want to? Then In the deep olive grove of the breeze Unspoken awe. And a silvery silence that always hides And you never encounter it. CONTENTS: -OLYMPIA -DELPHI -MYSTRAS -DOMENIKOS THEOTOKOPOULOS -TWELVE DAYS -ISLAND OF FATE -AUGUST -NOTES

In this book, Kostas Bournazakis, a scholar of the work of Angelos Sikelianos (and editor of Sikelianos’s correspondence, *Letters 1902–1951*, Ikaros 2000), records for the first time the life and work of the great poet through hundreds of previously unknown details and documents. Sikelianos’s personal photo album is presented: 250 previously unseen photographs illustrating the poet’s entire life. The book documents the circumstances that gave rise to Sikelianos’s works, their publication history and their reception by the critics of the time. The ‘Delphic Endeavour’, his nomination for the Nobel Prize, his travels, his friendships and his turbulent love life reveal the poet’s personality and, with it, the entire era: the historical, political and intellectual events of the first half of the twentieth century.

THE AMULET “Everyone succumbs,” you said suddenly, “to this indefinite age, without baggage, without a destination, almost without sorrow. We are no longer threatened by unfulfilled youth, by its restlessness and its yoke.” You found yourself unprepared on the brightly lit streets; the long-standing loneliness scattered the remnants of a clipped memory whose sole comfort was an ancient whistle of a childhood Christmas night. The world has thinned out; all that remains is a photograph with frayed edges, timid gestures, and a vase with short little hands ending in the most enigmatic rustle. Yet you have no doubt: the inhabitants of wondrous secrets still exist.

Filled to the brim with relentless cicadas and all around, a golden-blue wilderness; mad rock larks reap ceaselessly the carefree voices of the earth; for the barefoot trunks a trembling, deep, withered blaze — I go closer now and stay. Kindled by a word left unsaid — but not reverie, not thirst, a spark, or a fleeting thought; something immeasurable exists eternal, inexhaustible and fearless or even ploughed by the sun of the heart, an unfathomable echo, bestowed upon every cradle, and it brings the wonder within me to light in this sun-drenched pine forest which I know has no end. The poems in Kostas Bournazakis’s collection, Amidst Suns and Moons, created from a functional sensibility and the choice of Beauty as an enduring boundary, form a unique space, between the mystery and the ritual dimensions of life, the transformative forces of nature and the flickering of Mediterranean light, the primal lyricism and the boundless realm of the Greek language. Free creatures, voices of the Greek summer, elements of the eternal cosmic cycle, eroticism, sequences of tenderness and impulses, secrets of matter, revelatory images, wanderings through the enigmas and flashes of time, create in this collection, which has just been published, an enchanting mythology, a realm of radiant sensations, the potent presence of poetry as the core and starting point of a life lived to the full.

In the Images of Kostas Bournazakis, the allure and conquests of the senses, which embody in the poems the indelible radiance of nature, the Greek language, love, art, and vivid imagination, coexist with a new interpretation of the world – an interpretation that transforms the fabric of reality into a life that is ceaselessly vibrant and, for this very reason, endlessly spontaneous and evocatively contemplative. Rooted in ‘places’ where wonder unlocks memories of radiant visions and imperishable voices, and through the supremacy of beauty over the constraints and arrogance of time, the Images offer the mythical realm that familiarises us with a luminous and generous freedom – and the journey continues whilst the poet’s verses colour the horizons of authentic lyrical acts with multiple meanings. IN THE SUN OF MOLAES The torrent gathers the birds — sharp strokes and amidst the rushes that melt the coins of the stream; gypsy butterflies pause they approach the asphodel, pass through the musk, the spells of the cyclamen, gently drink the droplets of the sun that rippled on the golden thorn; sparkling rustles, violet seeds flutter where the waters murmur and restless gladiators flash in the air. You fall silent and listen intently to the colours; gusts of wind with wild grasses rustling, uphill slopes that have cast off their caps, stones with red hair that weave murmuring the scents syllable by syllable, bursts of cicada passion, unbridled warbling, become a body that speaks, an iconostasis of an untouched Greece.