|
|
|
CRITICISM FOR THE POETRY OF EFI ATHANASSIOU
Des poemes, simples en apparence, mais gonfles de pensees profondes et de sentiments genereux. Des poemes qui creusent le destin humain pour retrouver une image premiere de ce que nous fumes alors que nous n'etions pas encore moules par la vie, que la joie n'etait pas encore douleur et que l'espoir s'appelait vraiment l'espoir et non pas resignation.
Il y a dans la poesie d'Efi Athanassiou un melange de gravite et de legerete qui peut faire croire a un jeu de la part de l'auteur, mais qu' on ne s'y trompe pas : n'est ce point la meme le visage de l'existence ?
GASTON-HENRY AUFRERE
Litterary Critic
There is genuine poetry in the "March First" of Efi Athanassiou and the possibility, moreover, of formation of a personal style is evident.
I.M. PANAYIOTOPOULOS
Litterateur
However, in the “March First” we have something to notice: the tendency of Athanasssiou towards the divesting of things and her ability to catch subjects hard, subjects that present to us life disunited or covered with repulsive lies. Her experiences are realistic and her disposition sarcastic, but it is exactly this which leads her not towards the laughter or the satire, but towards the pain and agony.
She shows the ugliness, the inhuman, the hard with a trembling of the fingers, as if she aims to its effacement, as if she is telling us with pain “look who we are…” This opposing to the social conformism shows an independence of soul. And this soul is continuously shocked, because it suffers for the truth, because she always tries to put in order, inside her, the feelings and memories, which torment her. All these show a boiling of soul that does not quieten and tries to be relieved in poetry.
ANDREW KARANTONIS
Literary critic
Efi Athanassiou is not, perhaps, as much as it should be, known to the selective public, which follows the new poetry in our country. However, she is a real poetess. In the book she has sent us is revealed a right depicting of real life and a deep humanism. The subjective element, with the sensitivity and the gentle passion, creates and expresses images and sentimental situations of the objective world. These are the main characteristic features of her talent.
Many of her poems spout a dramatic emotion of individual and social truth. Her images various, clear, many sparkle, as if they want to create a new world, ideal and charming, and others evoke somehow a tragic exposition of human pain… She wrestles with the image and with the feelings. She explains an anguish psychology and problems of the man of today with his wounds and his sorrows.
She has a powerful sensibility.
LAMBROS MALAMAS
Litterateur
"Elefthero Pneuma Periodical”
I read carefully your two books “T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets” and “Exodos pros ti Nea Epochi”. The first book is rare for the Greek letters. It is of a level of detailed doctoral thesis. You have done much work and it is evident that the quantity is accompanied by depth.
I am obliged to congratulate you for a unique book in the Greek Letters of rare profundity and close detailed analysis.
The collection “Exodos” is often a reflection of what you write in the analysis of the Quartets. One finds in them diffused the pursuit of Knowledge and of the most permanent which is our salvation. I don’t know if this Knowledge exists in the long run and for the wider population, nor which its value is.
However, I will confess that I prefer your less intellectual poems, which touch strings of simple men like me. The poem “My mother” was, from this aspect, stirring while I very much like “ Theophano”.
You have versatility and wide learning that is transparent in both these books. I believe that you contribute, with splendour to the literary present of Greece which often appears poor.
JOHN FILIS
Litterateur
Professor
Rector of the University of Crete
Your sensibility and culture have the quality that makes our most authentic virtues to belong to others. Psychograms like “the children” of page 19 in the collection “System of Fissures” fulfil crucially the scope of literature, to present some specific man in his marginal conditions. I am extremely glad that you have escaped from the plexus of the “poetical form” which troubles almost two centuries Europe. Just today becomes obvious that the Western World was going to embellish the disturbance that was taking place in the rooting of humanity, as if it did not want to see neither the destruction of the old nor the invasion of the new values in history.
You, however, continue the great tradition which knows that the essence when it bids fare-well and when for the first time sees the world, does not need neither shroud nor swaddlings.
I wish you to find the strength to give men what you have representively lived, on behalf of them.
With comradely greetings.S.KYRIAZOPOULOS
Litterateur
Professor of the Department of Philosophy and Pedagogics
University of Ioannina
Everyday life, like water that gushes impetusly from the rock, with small phrases, half words, that come out in a rhythm like gasping. These direct images of life, succeed one an other, like an excitement, an agony, in front of this everyday and unexpectedly warm event, that makes the nothing a significant and important action.
Original expression, singular, a poetry of the small common things, which take sudden dimensions. Parentheses many times incoherent, phrases fragmented take value, associative jumps valorise the poem.
In any case she does not depart from her own peculiar expressive method, which renders a liveliness to the whole of her style and poetry to this realism without affectation, that has as its target the simple communication and it does not yearn for poetry and has, as a written address, so much cheerfulness and joy of life.
MARCOS AVGERIS
Litterateur
Literary Critic
I was preparing to write you in praise of your fine and genuine poetry I found to touch me in the verses of “Transitions”. Afterwards, however, I read the “System of Fissures” and then, from certain poems, sprang up and pierced me like a sword a genuine human pain ( “ Birthday”, “Car”, “Walk” and others). And so the one impression completes the other.
I congratulate you and thank you. I wish you more fine creation.
With much estimation.MICHAEL D. STASSINOPOULOS
Litterateur
University Professor
Academician
President of Democracy
Though I knew what was in progress, your double present was a beautiful surprise. And only the irreproachable editorial appearance prepossesses pleasantly for the contents.
Melancholy, enough depression but also trembling sensitivity springs up (Transitions) with the beautiful and so true conclusion of the Epitaph. As far as the Fissures are concerned, even here the depression is not missing, however it is of another form, of a spasmodic regard in the world of vanities.
If you think this, that only you and I, perhaps, have remained to fathom introspections, within a world that wants to be ignored. When what is only seen is the object – do not be frightened. Not even renounce this voice of the bottom. What ever they say, whatever happens, the only extant is this permanent depth, this we examine and belongs to us. As long as the life remains to us, let the study of it remain and according to our strength, the expression of it. God be with you.
T. PAPATSONIS
Litterateur
Academician
The asthmatic character of the form in your poems, within the essence of the existential poetry, has coincided with the bitterness and disappointment almost nightmarish (when some resignation is not betrayed) of the essence (Best sample the 4.30 Flight 603).
This coincidence of form and essence – that is the finding of the proper aesthetic expressive tone – is a success – and the most truthful sample of pure lyric creation. Especially interesting for the student the two writings which I suppose have as their subject Yannena. Their conception different, the one (At Yannena in Eripus) clear descriptive, the other (So much have I stared) more inward and heart rending.
Both these writings, imprints of love, contribute to the more complete appreciation of your work and your emotions. This is assisted by the Kavafic influence which is found in both.
Another token of purity in your poetry, is how much you surpass your subjective impulses and attain, by far broader messages, interpretative of the human fate and of the pain that has as its dregs, which somehow calm it like beautiful pyrotechnics, brilliant visions (Child that you play the broken wheel), (Yesterday).
Every one of the whole series of brief and epigrammatic poems teaches something, apparently for a life failed, essentially for the vanity of life in general. However, excessive bitterness everywhere, to such an extent that life seems to be hanging from nostalgias even for illusions (23) and contradictions (22).
No doubt very evocative the “Remember”, the “From time to time”, the “Done”, the “Window to the storm”, “Practically impossible”, but I cannot enumerate all, because all impact to me emotion. And even more evocative is, for one, to see in some poems, down at the date the handwritten note (the so much meaning) “Night”. Especially apocalyptic is the “ Inferno” or the “Book”, or “Deprivation”.
If you want me, however, to confess what is absolutely identified with my personal, the mystique theognosy (Knowledge of God) and also aesthetic, I will confine myself to the three little verses of your Epitaph, which in the most absolute way I adopt, because it includes the amalgam, constituent of the transient life, which is composed by Pain and Beauty.
And I complete this somehow incoherent heaping up of impressions, the without any claim of criticism, but only of an “Act of Communication” I add an entirely superficial observation that passed from my mind:
Associating “pro acto de cerebration inconsiente” as a great Southamerican poet, Ruben Dario says, what was written on the card which accompanied your poems, that is “Institute of Geology and Subsurface Research”, with your poem that has the title “ Open view’, I wanted, with insistence, to find a correlation like a distant influence. And expanding afterwards, as we have the tendency to take recourse to symbols, I reflect, that it might be possible that all our inward life is a continuous “subsurface research”, unexplored finally unfortunately, with only outlet the mystical and irrational forces, which only have the power to disrupt our darkness ( that you somehow hint in “In the Inferno”). Thank you that you gave me the chance to explore all these poetic labyrinths.
First of May 1969
T. PAPATSONIS
Litterateur
Academician
The aesthetic character of the form, within the essence of the existential poetry, in the poems of Efi Athanassiou has coincided with the bitterness and the disappointment, the almost nightmarish (when some resignation is not revealed) of the essence. This coincidence of form and essence that is the finding of the suitable expressive tone is a success and the truest sample of pure lyric creation.
T. PAPATSONIS
Litterateur
Academician
In presenting myself I would like to tell you that I feel particularly glad when distinguished women attempt to escape from the standardized literature and conquer new areas, as for instance Natalie Sarraute, in Nouveau Roman, has achieved as no man follower of the oldfashioned literature has, up to now, managed.
Both your texts seem to me very interesting , as they go to the direction of the contemporary poetic prose (siukturellen prosa), as nearly of Ingeborg Bachman’s or of Eisenberge's, but of this last in the direction of the newest poetic prose.
That you are in the right way I believe is definite, because these go to the literature, while the Greek prose, with the expression of its provincialism and pathos, only around it has turned.
I cannot guess your age and if you have many more beautiful written or published, but I wish you courage, good luck and persistence.
Dr ANNA OSANA– PORPHYRIS
(Translation form German)
I read carefully the two books; you were so kind to send me. The Transition has interesting elements. They show a familiarity in the look of things and a humanism inwardly moved. In this collection of yours there are poems which arrest you. I liked the climate and the chromatic disposition in your poems “In the garden” and “ Light of the afternoon”.
TASSOS LIGNADIS
Litterateur
Literary Critic
The so original and interesting “Cyclic Poem”, and your most beautiful poems “Exit to the New Age”. I found impressive the conclusions of your poems. They contain very deep meanings as the “They called her woman /this one only / is enough” or “To remember what you are, what you always have been”
K.LYKIARDOPOULOU
Writer
Dear Efi,
More than two months have passed that I have your books on my table, I have read them many times and however I have not called you, I did not see you. I have been away in Aegina you see.
They have warmth, humanism, all together give forth the thinking man, a thing which for me is very important; it is a rare virtue, rare because it is missing even from those which the philology has classified them in the masterpieces.
The "Transition" has various materials. In the “System of Fissures” certainly something else is attempted. The intrusion in “things” is deeper and more pragmatic I would say.
Very fine observation and bitter without ornaments.
KATERINA AGELAKI ROUK
Litterateur – Poetess
For reasons of my principles I must tell you that this letter of mine I have written to praise earnestly your significant work.
M. MERAKLIS
Literary Critic
University Professor
I liked very much “Transitions” with the metaphysical sense that characterizes them.
I.N.THEODORAKOPOULOS
Professor of the Athens University
Academician
Your Poetry is one of the very few bridges of communication which have remained in men.
Now with great joy I will present you to the Polonic public.
With agony, therefore, I shall expect every new work of yours.
N.CHANTZINICOLAOU
Litterateur
Friend Poetess,
I first read the “System of Fissures”. I give you my hand. I give you my love. This book of yours is a masterpiece
You understand.
With sisterly loveYIOLANDA PEGLI
Litteratrice
Poetess
I have read the “Transitions” and “System of Fissures” and in order to write you today I read them again.
I always loved your poetry, and as much as I become more acquainted with it I ascertain its genuine vein, which in this last offer of you is full of juices and is poured rich, with the same always sensitivity, that becomes more and more personal, with the same always reflection that we now find more penetrating to the problems of life and of our epoch.
However, in spite of all its contemporary dress and its diversified fluctuation, it has a transparency and brilliant clarity and this I think witnesses its pure source.
Especially moved me the songs of mother’s love with their deep devout truth.
All testify an experience won by art . And the mother with the inexhaustible tenderness which it is this later that gives the dimensions to the pain and the devastation, is painted, engraved better, with haematic chisel in refined sublime verses.
With my love and deep estimation
SOFIA MAYROIDI – PAPADAKI
Litterateur
Poetess
E. Athanassiou: System of Fissures-Transitions.
It is not the substantial of the meditation, that gives to the poetry of E. Athanassiou, something special, absolutely personal-it is mainly the Knowledge that she herself has about what constitutes poetry, that for constituting it must penetrate in its space. Because ,we have said it again: all cannot be altered to poetry, because in their deeper being there is the poetic disposition, and here is due the quantitative which distinguishes poetry, that is to have adequate cultivation of its area and not to have the competent result.That is a great quantily and a slight quality. Because the above principle is known to very few.
E. Athanassiou knows it. It is for this reason whatever she includes in her collectionw(IKAROS Publications) halts you tactfully, it obliges you to follow it with ease and ascertain that the poeters lives the problem of the time:man and she is aspiring to give to it a solution her own certainly, but not at all irrelevant to the things.
This explains why any one fissure of life renders her the right to create a kind of transition to the true flow, to that which as much as it changes its appearance it guards in depth, the essence of the being.
A poetry with content, with effort of introspection of man and of that which makes him eternal problem, includes Athanassiou in her two poetic collections, a poetry that we do not encounter often.
ANGELOS FOURIOTIS
Literary Critic
EFIS ATHANASIOU: ‘System of Fissures’. A new kind of speech and writing, which partakes in poetry, theatre and prose and tends to break the traditional catch-phrases of Greek literature the provincialism and the passion. It attempts an anatomy of the social phenomena touching a top ranking subject, again in the literary field-the creation of life by woman and her place within it ,as the greatest ‘racial’ matter of humanity.
Format 8,pages 36,"IKAROS" EDITIONS Athens 1972.
VRADINI, January 3,1972
EFIS ATHANASIOU: ‘Transitions’. A without trace of philology, poetic recording of painful experiences, which grade from the dramatic up to the tragic, with reference to the generally, human as they transit to an allegory of geological phenomena from the suffering to joy, as in Bethoven and the ‘enantiadromia’ of Heraclitus.
Format 8,pages 96, ‘IKAROS’ Editions Athens 1972
VRADINI, January 3,1972
TRANSITIONS,SYSTEM OF FISSURES, of Efi Athanasiou.
‘IKAROS’editions.
The first, poetry collection, recording of painful experiences, which are referred to the generally human, in transition from the sorrow to joy. The second, a synthesis of poetry, prose and theatrical speech. With this synthesis it is attempted an anatomy of the social phenomena, touching the creation of life from the woman and its position in life as the greatest’ racial; question of humanity.
"Athinaiki" Newspaper
With inexpressible joy I received your book and I would like to thank you immensely.
I have read with interest the whole volume of the collection “TRANSITIONS” and of the collection ’SYSTEM OF FISSURES’ and found out here as well, your characteristic nice modesty, which is mentioned in the enclosed note.
Dear friend, it is not a matter of consequence if these work of yours represent you, but the weight, the fact is that they are significant poetic creations. Your books now in my hands, show quite clearly that their creator not only has an indisputable more than important talent, but that also there is in it a sample of powerful poetic form.
Infinite creative elements, compose wonderful poetic images, in respect of the formal architecture. A rich sentiment vividness of thought, lyric disposition and personal style of a great sensibility, for recording experiences.
Above all, however, the exact balanced abstraction - where the remmant shows what is left from a saving operation-place you poetry to an important position according to its evident value.
In reading your books, your countenance was coming to my memory, with the modest appearance, the sensitive facing of certain situations in respect with humanism, the laconic of the saccinct speech and yourself control. So before all the others, I was seeing an harmony of the speech with the personal actions in the whole of life. A symphony to prevail between the human being and the spiritual creator. In the character and the work, and the laws of the existence teach us that the deep works come only from life, from the personal experience and the live example.
It is what Goethe was saying: ‘’the light that burns the soul and the flesh, that becomes a fire in the pure atmosphere of a very conscious, very crystalline spirituality, to become in the end a light meteor.’’
Your poetic ability materialized in your work. I have read and studied is such as to offer many, contributing to the Greek literature.
G. VELISSARIOU
Litterateur
From the ‘IKAROS’ editions has been published the poetic collection of Efi Athanassiou ‘Transitions’: a recording of painful experiences which are escalated from the dramatic to the tragic.
From the “IKAROS” editions has been published the new book of Efi Athanassiou ‘System of Fissures’ that introduces a new kind of writing which partaking to the poetry, theatre and prose, breaks the traditional cliches. With the ‘System of Fissures’ Efi Athanassiou attemps an anatomy of the social phenomena.
NEA NEWSPAPER 17-12-71
TRANSITIONS
The poetry of Efi Athanassiou opens great horizons.
Though she wavers between a static form an impetus that is defined from a more elaborated manifestation of the sentiment and even if she is divided by a glance to the past and an opening to other ways where light is intersected by darkness she retains a weight of consciousness and thought that creates a substantial and existential poetry.
Phenomenally hard, it is like a metal which is transformed when forged. The sentiment is reinforced with the expression of a cry, which sometimes is slightly revealed but it is only ‘as a name’ present, with a pain, that does not want to be recognized as pain.
SYSTEM OF FISSURES
In this collection we are in front of a poetry completely different, entirely synchronized (modernized) one could say.
The poetess is entirely immersed to it and poetry becomes movement, integrated uniform rhythm.
Every word includes a dynamic of movement and at the back of it an integrated world is revealed, which lives, moves, acts and thinks. A detail which can escape to us becomes for her a motive, a cause and a pretence for a poetic construction extraordinarily alive.
This justification, in research, leads us to the choice of the poetic expression. The poetess has well understood it. She knows to subdue the architecture of her verses, with the use of a brief, comprehensive, concise style, where the juxtaposition of elements succeeded different rhythms.
Such a march has Efi Athanassiou attempted.
GASTON-HENRY AUFRERE
Literary Critic
(Translation from the French text)
I have read with interest your poems, because I have ascertained your talent from your previous books.
I enjoyed now your anodic march and I warmly congratulate you. The ‘Transitions’ stopped me and moved me more. Your wonderful poem, that inspired you my country, (of the page 4) At Yiannena-In Epirus’, filled me, most especially, with enthusiasm.
I copied and keep it, to use it, when I proceed to the second edition of my book ‘Pamvotis in Poetry’.
At my first opportunity I will send you this book to see how many and how have sung the legendary lake of Frossini,
CHRISSANTHI ZITSEA
Literatrice
-ATHANASSIOU EFFI-System de fissures
Ikaros, 1971;in –8,36-ATHANASSIOU EFFI- Transitions-Ed.Ikaros,1971;in-8,32 p
Systeme de fissures, discours profus et mobile parlant qui parait n'avoir a dire que par lui-meme et sans cesse, est I'envers de la trame. C 'est le lieu des choses qui dissent ou que l'on a a dire. Registre d'entrees, matieres inscrites en depot ou en consignation, sans souci d'inventaire et encore moins de bilan. Ce monde de la representation est toutefois sillonne de fissures: interrogations, injonctions, voux: c'est a I'avers de la trame que, par transition, le monde de ces choses va server d'arene a la rencontre entre I'^etre et la vie.
Transitions: Une ecriture par signaux (chaque vers ne compte qu'un, deux ou trois mots, termes semaphoriques d'un message suspendu), et une elocution en dents de scie, ou intermittente,ouenumerative: dents de scie, grains de chapelet, nombres successifs qui forment ou enoncent un continu sans rien combler de I'abime qui Ies separe. Ce qui est dit, c'est |'Aetre et la vie, ainsi joints, ainsi disjoints dans Ies stratifications sedimentaires formant la vie inconsciente et que viennent rompre de brusques images, vehementes remontees de laves qui sont moins braise ardente qu'archeologie de belles cendres.
NEOCLIS KOUTOUZIS
Literateur
(From the Analytical Bulletin of the French Institute)
A defused melancholy, something unsatisfied, the sense of alienation of modern man is hinted in the verses of Efi Athanassiou as we find them in her new collection ’March second’ published by ‘IKAROS’ .It alludes also, the poetry of Efi Athanassiou, to a paradise lost and a hope for the future.
Having as a ‘’target’’ the ‘’ephemeral’’ the poetess often achieves, as she draws directly from her personal experience to give a profundity, that touches the permanently human.
And it is ,I think, exactly this, the insistent care to remain faithful to herself, not to touch anything of those that she has not a direct taste of them, has not felt them, or they have not moved her, that takes away any suspicion of ‘philology’ from the poetry of E. Athanassiou and makes it extremely attractive. Today, that the great speech and the vacant word and the standardized (cliche) expression are going to reduce to permanent characteristics of the poetry of many young, the unaffected and sensitive voice of E. Athanassiou it is natural of course that it stops us.
B.VARIKAS
Literary Critic
‘’VIMA’’ Newspaper
Je ne crois pas me tromper en affirmant que la poetesse Efi Athanassiou apparait de plus en plus comme l’une des voix les plus authentiques de la poesie grecque moderne.
Sa poesie est autre chose qu’un divertissement. Elle a du poids et de la forrce; elle ne decoule pas d’une acrobatie spirituelle mais d’une pensee profondement etudiee et pesee qui cherche au travers de la futiliite de l’existence a attendre la stabilite interieure,et dans le cadre du reve a delimiter la continuite de l’experience dans le temps et au- de la du temps.
GASTON-HENRY AUFRERE
Literary Critic
Surprise me pleasantly, the full of vibration and vigor, the sound, comprehensive, philosophized epigrams of Efi Athanassiou. I call them so because, though their content is deep, the expression is always brief, quintessence of meditation and deep pain.
Dream and pain her material and creator the art and the thought.
I think that within the general renovating march of contemporary poetry, E. Athanassiou follows her personal path. With the genuine lyrism, the woman sensitivity and the litotes of form.
SOFIA MAVROIDI-PAPADAKI
Literatrice
Poetess
It has a fiery essence the poetry of E. Athanassiou as we study it in her collection ‘March second’. A substance that burns down the things, presenting in there inward sections. Catalytic we would call it ,in the meaning that it breaks mercilessly-with hardness in the speech –the surface, the form, giving us what is beyond of the visible. Beyond the beauty appearance of things or situations.
There is in all the poems, an existential problematism, sometimes undiagnosed, which creates a stormy overflowing of sentiments.
Sentiments which are expressed by poetic forms which bear in their external structure also the marks of the turbulence. The internal sarcastic attitude against the world, which is analyzed under the pitiless penetration of the poetic lancet.
We have perhaps exceedingly stressed this point in the poetry of Athanassiou, but it is this which excels and gives its particular sense in the structure of the verses.
It should, by any means, be noted that the internal agony is absolutely harmonized with the external expression.
A. LYKAVGIS
‘’Machi’’ Newspaper of Lefkosia.
An harmonic whole of realistic and idealistic (symbolistic) facing and recording of the things in the second poetic collection of Efi Athanassiou. And certainly the personal tone, a new brilliance of words and an effort to deepen the meanings we did not fail to remark
A new poetic voice that comes to relate us her own truth.
"ATHINAIKI" NEWSPAPER
28.9.68
The second poetic collection of E. Athanassiou, from the first month of its circulation has attracted a lot of praising criticism for the personal tone ,the clear cut of the speech ,the profundity of the meanings, the substantial attitude towards all that happen in our time and its deep humanism.
"VRADINI’" NEWSPAPER
14.1.67
Efi Athanassiou, in ‘’March second’’ has a genuine poetic vein.
Her work shows us even a remarkable degree of spirituality, as also the continuous exercise within the poetic area. The communion of art is transmitted selfsame and the procedure, in spite of some hardness veneer, which is slightly betrayed in the form, moves.
‘’NATIONAL HERALD OF PATRAS’’ NEWSPAPER
12.5.67
The poems of E. Athanassiou have a style and a vibration painful. Her poetry is divested of embellishments and needless periwinkles .It is a poetry hard and implacable sarcastic and realistic. The symbols and the tone of her poetry have something from the roughness of our days. Her verse is a tragic exposition of human pain.
‘’ELEFTHEROS’’ NEWSPAPER
29.1.67
Her experiences, from her contact with the art, presents us Efi Athanassiou in her first book. This scope, which is manifested with anxieties and work which sometimes revolves round the life of artists and some other times around the objective description of the types and situations that surround them, constitutes a nice and original subject. A sane concept about life and the aesthetic achievements is in fact offered.
In her second book what we observe is that the verses of Efi Athanassiou have acquired a greater music rhythm, they easily jump on a meter more inward .Happily she does not destroy her spontaneous verses with unnecessary retouches, which often alter a genuine voice to that of a husky phonograph.
The poetess herself, her nature, emerges from the things and their reflections .There is undoubtedly a chromatic concept, since moreover Efi Athanassiou is a painter. She transforms the vibrations of the colour to those of the sound and the sense of speech. It is also given to us this content of the mystic voice which interprets impressions from her surroundings and the incidents that she lives. We follow this pleasant alteration of thoughts and sentiments without stumbling on difficult enigmatic phrases or conventional terminologies.
The poetess believes to the social scope of this elevation of hers over the ugly reality.
We feel her agony for reaching a higher step on the aesthetic and cultural life. Many of her thoughts gaze the future. We always return to a Greek vision to the clear sky of the Greek nature and of the landscape which ceased to be tragic.
We do not encounter-as in other young people collections-the word death.
K.PETRIDES
‘ELEFTHEROS’ NEWSPAPER
19.2.67
Reading poems of Efi Athanassiou you feel under every verse a warm heart throbbing and a sensitive soul full of humanism to be in agony not only for today ,but also for tomorrow and for the distant future. In the march which mark with a luminous line her two poetic collections ‘’March first’ (1965) and ‘’March second’’ one finds out a continuous escalation of her agony ,which is also the agony of the today’s cultured man, escalation in depth of a bloody inward search for finding the truth in that saves.
If you listen carefully the verses of the song ‘’The uncompromised’’ you will listen to a powerful cry that you will not be able to easily decipher what exactly is: A cry of pain that is redeeming ,or a cry of desperation and rending for what snorts in her or happens around her. Agony without a salvation or salvation that comes with a tragic ‘No’ in life-that is like a negation which is stamped with a gunshot on the temple.
However you will understand that at the back of this uncompromised there is the poetess herself. And so you will find the key to open the door of her soul and conceive the central core of her message.
In the ‘’March Second’’ the agony of the poetess, who looks continuously inwardly and searches to find her God is more distinct. Among thorns that bleed her march, between interrogations, of anguish and agitation ,the great cry will be heard:
‘’What to glorify? With what?
Substantially, the march of the poetess is a march towards the real liberty of man –a meaning which she expresses often and with wonderful poetic forms in the few verses of her song ‘’Drunkenness’’. And only with these two collections the poetess is worthy of having a distinguished place in the Neohellenic Parnassus and to be counted among the most lyrical women voices of our contemporary poetry.
‘’SIMEA KALAMON’’ NEWSPAPER
19.3.67
Fighting disposition in low tones. Calm like a whisper the facing of our difficulty epoch ‘’that obstructs the ways to the ideals’’. Much sentiment and humanism. Laconic , epigrammatic and sententious the verse.’’
‘’PHOS’’ NEWSPAPER OF CAIR
Thank you for your true poetry
P.PALEOLOGOS
Warm thanks for your true remarkable poetic collection
M.I. MANOUSAKAS
Professor of the University of Thessaloniki
Efi's Athanasiou: ‘’System of fissures’’
One could suppose or ascertain too, the commendable effort to structure a personal ‘’poetic ‘’ in the collection ‘’System of Fissures’’ of Efi Athanassiou.
We have singled out this collection, from a group of having somehow orientations of the kind, because we can place it in the climate of sentimentalism and the direct emotional lyrism which holds a wide section in our contemporary poetry. It is there that also leads us her previous collection ‘’Transitions’’, (1971).
It is a manifestation of remarkable ‘’poetic directness’’ with a rich underground of lively experiences, but of directness also, looking for a style more personal, with an effort evident to be impressive and original. She has brought us so with the’’ System of Fissures’’ to another poetic possibility of writing.
This title has a direct connection with her pursuits and with as many as she accomplishes. It is not abstract or accidental and this is also something, because so many are our young verse-writers who catch themselves from the hair of luck. In the moment is favorable, they can gain something. But most of the time it isn’t.
Efi Athanassiou has not, at all, been relied on luck, but on the intellectual concept.
There is a poetic reason in her new effort, which constitutes not in describing in parataxis her images or the iconographic harvesting of her imagination, but to pierce them with impetus, vertically as it happens with the drilling machines in the streets or the machinery for finding oil-wells. So, the poem, or the poetic material, gushes from down upwards, spurting, like the water of the jets.
This system of Athanasiou is somehow an external and “mechanistic” because she uses systematically and over abundantly the semicolons and the brief, gasping phrases, which are abrupt lively stopped by full stops, but often is resulting to the vividness of the style and the preserving of the first liveliness which characterizes a poem from zero to the expression.
It is as if Athanassiou is deliberately concentrated to the external characteristics of our life, its acoustic and imagery. Perhaps she regards now vain the “inward expression”, as if it has been abolished by the feverish factionalism of our industrialized life.
Athanassiou writes her poems mixed with the hasty crowd between the yellow and the green light of the passages. This attitude is also a poetic view point that not only justifies it, our epoch, but also it imposes it, when somebody knows to make use of it, as Athanassiou in entirety achieves it, giving us these “instantaneous synchronouses”, which however all together compose a quite phantasmagoric picture which is objective and at the same time poetic.
ANDREAS KARANTONIS
Literary Critic
NEA ESTIA PERIODICAL No 1084 (VOLUME 92nd)
SEPTEMBER 1972
With the collection “System of Fissures” (precious poetic efforts “ March First” 1965 and “ March Second” 1996) Efi Athanassiou aims to photostatically preserve specific daily moments, of private evidently character. The whole psychic climate of the collection is subject to the style of the personal diary and the ethos of a conversationalistic relaxation, accompanied by culture and nobility.
The structure of the speech is psychic and the only effort to point out the specific distinction is exhausted in the small sentences, the unconnected shape, the semi-periods (with overuse of the semicolon),
In hushing up and very often in dialogical expression (theatricality, which aspires to be transformed to an other dimension of the poetic expression.
More happy as for inspiration and recording is the second collection of Efi Athanassiou.
Without escaping from the basic ethos of the diary enumeration, of the composition of the personal impressions and the parataxis description, she appears in the “Transitions” more poetical climate in the lyric form and the image arrangement and her opinion element is disposing a more evocative metaphysical tone. The metaphorical equipment is successful and in certain poems (as for instance “Of the storm”, “Spring Time” and the expressive means become more personal, more familiar and more permanent.
Efi Athanassiou known also as a painter, gives as a genuine poetry which is distinguished for its deep lyrism and her love for whatever is human and creative, her love for the good, the permanent constitutes the dough which forms her verse. She devests the negation and projects the new world with all its virtues, leaving her emotion to appear clearly, in an aesthetic grandeur, from which her gentle sentiments pass.
When she sees the ghosts of the evil to demolish her dreams for the world of love, the virtue that holds the Sumpligades Stones open, she is not disappointed. She grows to gigantic dimensions from the here ruins.
SPYROS MILAS
Litterateur
YOU EXIST
(translation from the Greek)
When I will find again my voice
All the cries
They have been mute within me
In the time of silence
will be crystallized
In one * only word you
EXIST
I recognise you
Everywhere
Your breath
Penetrates the wind
Enlives all sounds
Traverses horizons
Opens new routes
Canals in the universes
Rolls me up
And refreshes me.
You blow me
And become a tree
I reel
Stretch hands
Branches
Open eyes in the light
At your sight
In light I search for you dazzled
And every moment I find you
And I am resurrected
With you united
I expand
Over space and time
This city
Which gave me birth
And no more I have country
I escape from the earth
And I roll with you
In the infinite.
When you touch me
I blossom
Have flowers and fruits
Swing in the wind
I endure showers
Cross centuries
And find you again
Take roots very deep
And you give me water
I become field
Earth
You plough me
I grow grass
Become green
The wind blows me
Caresses me on the ends
Rain that falls
Adorns me
With diamonds
The rising sun
Leaves me its glow
Fiery burns me up
I become dust
I rise high
With is I iridish
I pass in the molecules
Within the light I am darted
I dance in circles
Traverse forms
Find passes
Where you show me
Open the way
To come
And find you
You give me the hand
I take it
I fly with you
I am raised
We pass valleys
Oceans
Mountains
And centuries
What age
Your passing marked
And I recognised you
That you rolled
Deep inside me
With sounds
Children's voices
And songs
Bells of other far away worlds
What age
What space
What route
What path
Brought me near you.
Lonely
In a country
Where you stumble
On columns
And marbles
Alone
In a place
Where I knew no language
I uttered cries
Like a light house
I threw signals
And I was sinking
You came
Threw an island
A compass
Took me on your boat
Got the steering wheel
And lead me
To the other sore.
I had the face
Stuck on the soil
In the warm's route
I only knew.
You came with your magic stick
Threw to me
A fresh mulberry leaf
I take out my silk threads
I knit my cocoon
And there I nestle.
At your silence
I change
In lightning speed
Forms
I pass like a wind
Through me transformations
I become a chrysalis
I jerk my feathers
To another birth
Other perspective of the world
That has not changed.
Open an eyelid to light
And spell
A and Ω**
Words
I know not
Neither do I the wounds of the world
Only the colours
And light
A new creation
Is throw in front
Of my
entirely closed
vision
The cobwebed house.
Now
All open to the lights
I follow you anywhere
I traverse
The orbit of the stars
Through Galaxies
Which burst out
Like storms
With you I travel
I pass mountains
Clouds
Worlds and universes
I see you
I recognise you
I feel you
It is You
That You are found
Everywhere
And you
EXIST.
-------------------------------------------------------
* In Greek there is only one word "ΥΠΑΡΧΕΙΣ"
** The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
