DIMITRIS ANGELIS
It’s always raining on a dog’s head
ed.. Policy, page 48

The cover itself, which, like in the two previous books by the same author (“The Deer Cries on My Bed” and “Almost Biblically”) conveys literally and literally the content of the title, arouses suspicion of simplicity and naivety. . At first glance, some poems move accordingly. The thread that controls them is love, or rather, a certain attitude towards it. Very schematically, it could be described as a dog on whose head it always rains, therefore, it is love with an emphasis on a form of selflessness, wandering and submission. Angelis here continues the trend of his latest collections, who want it to be less philosophical-abstract and more lyric-empirical. The tone is calm, with hyper-realistic touches and doses of familiar Greek melancholy. Almost stereotyped images of the old era dominate, now left behind by new poetry: “death trucks” and “all the mornings in the world that I rise from death”, “noon of this yellow age trying to steal two crystal tears from you”, yellow dreams, yellow dogs, yellow leaves, dead canaries. Readers who are insecure about groundbreaking poetry will feel confident in this medium. They will think they understand, they will definitely be touched. The verses under discussion do not repulse or, as it were, hide elusive traps or destabilizing surprises. They don’t demand too much from readers, they don’t burden them with uncomfortable tasks – what a relief! But is it? What would happen, based on the above, the banality is creatively broken by the poet – elusive, it’s true, so only those who want to perceive it (but ambitious poetry in our country knows these strategies well). Therefore, where the reader goes to calm down into a familiar emotion, he encounters such poems as “Antibukovskiy” and “Antipalam”. With this, he opens and closes the second part of the book under discussion (“Daily Sorrows”), which also includes two of the most interesting poems in the collection: “Adam and Eve”, dedicated to a topic close to the artist. and the sculptor Botero and “Karyotakis in Kiurka”, which comments on “a bucolic photograph with a poet among / good villagers”. We have already moved away from what at first glance seemed familiar and easily digestible. Of course, this section also includes poems such as “Where do we hide things” or “I again speak calmly”, offering everyone who wants the necessary self-complacency. But the attentive reader will surely catch the point: the poet pretends to be gentle but with chivalrous courage, restrained tone but with force, exposes himself as a (stray) dog in the rain, but is aware of the farce. The poet-in-role-poet and not just in love and wet dog, but in fact in the role of a modern, globalized, one might say fearless, poet – a star from the first to the last page. He spreads his melancholy around the world, exposes it in landscapes and interactions all over the planet, names a bunch of opponents, mirrors, interlocutors (Bukowski and Palama and Kariotakis and Botero and Tarkovsky and many others). He makes great claims to his legend. He wants to be – always! – those who are a little sad and a little ironic. The difference that Aggelis makes is perhaps asking for a throne, or even a pew, that exactly matches those requirements. Is there such a situation in our community?