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Portrait Before Dark
Paperback
Publisher Price: $18.00
ISBN13: 9781955194037
Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Published: Apr 15 2022
Pages: 114
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Portrait Before Dark is a poem cycle that constitutes an imaginary dialogue between the poet and patron of the arts, Edward James, and the eccentric Viennese ballerina and star of the 1920's, Tilly Losch.
Liana Sakelliou began writing these poems in August 2009, when she was serving as writer-in-residence at West Dean College in West Sussex, England. Three days before she was to leave for the U.K., a wildfire surrounded her home and neighborhood. In minutes the pine forest and hillside olive groves were lost. For days, the suitcase and the clothes she'd packed smelled of smoke.
The setting of West Dean seemed made for children-with topiary birds and spirals, lush flowers, conservatories, and sheep one could pet. Sakelliou saw portraits of the James family, as well as Man Ray and Pavel Tschelitchew photos of Edward and Tilly walking through the palace corridors. She liked their faces, their poses. She wanted to write quiet, allusive poems that speak through their voices. The English woodlands serve as a flexible space for Sakelliou's concerns about the Greece's beautiful and fragile environment and the wildfires that continue to ravage the country every summer combined with her imagining the spaciousness of Edwards's and Losch's love as conflicting emotions burn down their marriage.
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