Amorgos Notebook

Forty fragments in four parts, 'Night', 'The Heroic Frenzies', 'The Islands' and 'The Presence', written on Amorgos, the easternmost island of the Cyclades, where the poet has stayed for long periods. They are not travel poems: with almost no story, they set down light, sea, houses and birds in long lines, now and then broken across the page, and let the outer landscape mirror an inner one. Contemplation slips into trance before nearby powers, the loved body is slowly celebrated, and signs that cannot be read, onyx butterflies or a statue among fountains that is either unfinished or worn away, point to a past older than Classical Greece, back to the makers of the Cycladic figures some five thousand years ago.

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About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

61 pages in the original

First published

2007 by Aldus

Author's age

61 when first published

ISBN

9789707141308 (original)

9781848614833 (Shearsman Books, United Kingdom)