Excerpt
At the Margins of Existence: Love, Exile and Mortality in Marginal
“Aloof” provides one of the collection’s most convincing examples. A foreign poet stands before an audience, struggling to pronounce words in a language that is not his own. His accent becomes a barrier between intelligence and reception. Before his audience can hear the poem, they hear the speaker’s foreignness. His difference in pronunciation becomes, absurdly, evidence of supposed intellectual inferiority. The poem is especially significant in the context of the poet’s biography. Born in Crete, later living in Athens and emigrating to Vancouver in 1973, the poet himself crossed geographical and linguistic borders. He worked in a variety of jobs before and alongside his literary career. The foreign accent in “Aloof” can consequently be read not merely as an anecdotal detail but as part of a broader poetics of displacement. Language simultaneously offers entry into another culture and reminds the speaker that complete entry may never be possible. Yet the poet does not sentimentalize the migrant experience. His more radical response arrives in the extraordinary poem “Statelessness.” Here the last rope connecting the individual to the ground is severed. The word “motherland” appears contaminated by tourism, advertising, and commercial mythology, while statelessness—the word conventionally associated with dispossession paradoxically becomes the most beautiful and desirable designation.
The poem contains one of the central gestures of the collection: liberation requires cutting a rope. This image creates a fascinating connection with the poet’s previous collection, The Incidentals, in which human beings repeatedly appeared tied by metaphorical ropes to professions, conventions, traditions and predetermined destinies. Marginal seems to ask the next question: what happens if the rope is finally severed? The answer is not simple freedom. Freedom creates its own solitude. And solitude is perhaps the deepest emotional landscape of this book. The poet repeatedly places an individual in an emptied room, before a mirror, at a window, beside a cold table, on a terrace, under a darkening sky. Objects begin to assume the emotional weight of absent people. In “Impression,” fingers drum upon a table to beat the unbearable ache of loneliness. In “Your Shadow,” the beloved is no longer physically present, and the speaker’s arms embrace only the enlarged mnemonic outline of her body. In “Empty,” plans, words and embraces have lost their substance, while another winter approaches and the speaker confronts the prospect of another night of loneliness.
These poems reveal one of the poet’s recurring poetic strategies: abstraction becomes physical. Absence is not an idea; it occupies a chair. Loneliness touches the surface of a table. Memory becomes a shadow. Time is registered in leaves, frost, wrinkles, curtains, flowers, abandoned rooms and changing light. Consequently, nature is never merely decorative in Marginal. Cyclamens, gardenias, hyacinths, chrysanthemums, spruce trees, moonlight, wind, sea, frost and cicadas repeatedly enter the poems as participants in human consciousness. The natural world observes, mourns, mocks, remembers and occasionally offers wisdom unavailable to human institutions.
Libros Libertad 