Consistently wedding innovative technique with time-honored poetic tropes
of light and dark, individual and cosmos, and self and other, this ambitious
debut takes in a lot of influences but emerges singularly and beautifully.
The first of two full-length projects included here, Blue Guide, presents
heavily enjambed or open-field free-verse poems intercalated with charged
and sometimes surreal prose. Scientific particulars of the physical world
jostle for position among the inner and bodily realities: "They took
ether from us/ because they discovered light// was both particle & wave,
fructi-/ fying itself, traveling/ solo, & today in the metro was the
thumbprint of a shadow just above// or just below the clavicle/ of a woman."
The "essay" poems of the volume's second book, Of Sun, of History,
of Seeing, continue the first book's scientific motifs, but the visionary
grandeur often associated with Robert Duncan, Anne Waldman or Alice Notley
is complicated by the kind of gleeful parataxis found in Ted Berrigan's
or Ron Padgett's work: "I am every effort of the self/ to describe
the self you are falling// deaf on deaf ears, but everyone's watching (TV).
This is no/ attempt to insist that flux/ can know flux but you/ flex your
muscle and mine!" Mutable and deft, Sikelianos's debut yokes an aggressively
modern style to an almost metaphysical sense of wonder in the world, giving
the poems a distinct voice that doesn't forsake art for art's sake. (Apr.)Forecast:
Sikelianos is the great-granddaughter of the revered Greek poet Angelos
Sikelianos (1884-1951) and a well-known contemporary of Lee Ann Brown (who
has a book forthcoming from Wesleyan) and Lisa Jarnot (Forecasts, Jan. 1)
on the New York poetry sceneas an item in Glamour once reported.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
-Publishers Weekly
Sikelianos's mind is so alert, discriminating, and uncompromising that she
restores integrity to the pursuit [of inclusion].
-Boston Review
The breadth of tone, diction and subject matter rivals in diversity that
of Ezra Pound's Cantos.
-The Cimarron Review
This impressive debut of a major new voice in poetry begins with Blue
Guide, a poem cycle of meditations on light and dark, probing the opposing/complementary
nature of these universal principles and their manifestation through
words. In Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing, the oracular power of language
fuels the journey between constellations shimmering above and the mind
shimmering in response below, between phenomenology and phenomena. Sikelianos
says, "I am interested in the absolute ferocity of poetry, in our
wild, eccentric human selves and animal and mineral planet, untainted
by but interacting with socializing forces."
-Coffee House Press
Links to Articles & interviews
http://www.twc.org/forums/fwir_esikelianos.html (a bio and an article on Sappho)
...mental::contagion...
Poems in foreign languages
www.konture.com (poems in Serbo-Croation!)
Links to Reviews:
http://www.metrotimes.com/
Chris Tysh on Earliest Worlds
http://jacketmagazine.com/15/neely-r-sike.html
Mark Neely on Earliest Worlds
http://www.citypages.com/databank/22/1070/article9616.asp
Steve Healey on Earliest Worlds
http://www.litvert.com/elenireview.html
Jono Schneider on Earliest Worlds
http://www.toolamagazine.com/Sikelianos.html
Erik Sweet on Earliest Worlds
http://www.keough.net/category/us/1566891140.html
anonymous mini review
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.5/poetmic.html
Bryn Canner
http://home.jps.net/~nada/sikelianos.htm
Henry Gould on Blue Guide
