Alexandros Milias
Clap hands
published by Pataki
page 64

I got elegant “Scream of Weapons”a cry that seems to be heard in a dream by the sleeping muse of Constantin Brancusi, depicted on the cover.

The collection comes nine years after the equally excellent In the Arc of the Dead Triumphs, which I think is a positive sign, and yet shows poetic essence conscious and constant, not random that he will publish books all the time to satisfy an inflated ego.

The thread of thought that runs through the book is constantly transforming and jumping from one element to another: now ethereal, now watery, now fiery, now earthly.

poetry The Cry of Arms serves and expresses the poetry of a great breath, a modern collective rather than a diary entry that interests no one, an expanded coalition of contemplative horizons in relation to the previous collection, an updated use and interpretation of poetic language material. I also get a general impression, which may be erroneous: it seems to me that under the verses, an underground voice constantly asks: “Why write verses?”, “Why does a person read verses?”, “What does poetic mean the very phenomenon placed in the universe? » Thus, Alexandros Milias expands this human activity, i.e. writing poetry, to the double otherness of the near and the world. He even, as it were, creates conscious cracks in the walls of metaphysical categories so that they can perceive Poetic speech.

Several times the gaze of the poetic subject moves opposite to reality, as the camera of director Andrei Tarkovsky moves, blurring the line between historicity and myth. The thread of thought that runs through the book is constantly transforming and jumping from one element to another: now ethereal, now watery, now fiery, now earthly. In some poems, there is a polyphonic emergence and immersion of forms, a multifaceted flow – or even gushing – of meanings, as, for example, in the poem “The Nymph of Misera”, one of the most beautiful, in my opinion, in the collection. I also found in the opening few stanzas the opening rhythm of Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony, a musicality that persists throughout the poems.

The return to memory achieved in the poem “On the scales that will measure …” succeeds, I think, in making the reader appropriate these memories as his own. I believe that one of the main functions of poetry is the transmission and exchange of experience, as in the case of this poem.

I have also noticed that in various poems there is a staging of figures of dialogue, symbolic scenography, so that poetic ideas can find their way and be interpreted by other actors in the poem itself. I think Alexandros Milias succeeds and forces the reader to step into photo-shaded text spaces with revolving mirrors multiplying and deepening signifier and signified.

When I finished reading the collection, I was left with the feeling that the phrase “… who hopes” could be added to the title “Hands are crying”. What is this weapon? For me, these are his poems. And not, of course, with salty hope, but with the one that comes out of the oven of despair.

* Mr. Kostas Linnos is a poet.