Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
byzantine

byzantine

Christou, Theodore

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1927725283
ISBN13: 9781927725283
Publisher: Hidden Brook Press
Published: Jul 20 2017
Pages: 154
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.36 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

byzantine proceeds through shallow breaths and heavy swells. Individual poems change their tenor, their voice, their perspective, and their concerns even as the collection builds a continuity of experiences and reflections on various contexts, historical and contemporary, and perspectives or voices. The collection oversees at least three generations: poet, father, grandfather. It moves from Canada to Cyprus. It heaves through academic prose and notes and it flits through soft reflections. This book is Greek and English. Historical and modern. Coy, sad, and ideological. The collection merits reading from front to back. It is something like a novel, deconstructed with respect to character, setting, and plot. Yet the title reveals a great deal about its content. Byzantium is an enigma, as characterized popularly, when it is regarded at all. Put simply, it was the continuation of the Roman Empire post its move to Constantinople from Rome and post its Christianization in the fourth century. Intricate court life. Mystical hierarchies and structures. Decline and fall. Byzantium is a space remember largely through negative connotation in the western world and through mythologizing and memory in the eastern world. Byzantium is a space of historical lore, spiritual exercise and patience, and intellectual efflorescence. The poet standing at his window could very well be overlooking the Bosphorus in contemporary Istanbul. He looks at the world around him, the world past, and the world he could only imagine through stories, and weaves his tale accordingly.

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