Author(s): Vana Manasiadis

Poetry | Aotearoa | Greece | Seraph Press

New poetry from Vana Manasiadis.

Manasiadis was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and she divides her time between Greece and New Zealand. She is co-editor of the Seraph Press Poetry in Translation Series

Helen Rickerby of Seraph Press says: "Vana has invented her own forms and layouts for the poems on the page, which are nothing like anything I've ever seen before. There are several long sequences which have seemingly unrelated threads presented in parallel - sometimes on facing pages, and sometimes in the top and bottom halves of the same page. For example, in one sequence one thread is a narrative of the days after the death of the poet's mother, while the other thread is a series of ekphrastic poems about various artworks and texts. It may be hard at first for some readers to know quite how to read them together, but the effect I have found is that they show how interconnected and paralleled everything is; how we read everything through the lens of our experiences and griefs, and how healing art can be in our lives."

 tell me the truth: the energy goes somewhere This bold hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis shows what alchemy can happen when pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is. Using strikingly unique forms and melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth, The Grief Almanac: A Sequel defies conventions as it steers us over multiple terrains. The grief of the title is the grief of memory, inevitability, and in particular the grief of, and for, a lost mother, but the result goes beyond eulogy. Wry revisions, elegy, and a kind of poetic archiving, point to co-existence and interconnectedness and culminate instead in a guidebook, a legend and expansive lament. Ambitious and mesmerising, The Grief Almanac: A Sequel is a work that aims squarely for both head and heart.

Review: The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is a sustained work of immense, far reaching intellect. With the two languages at her disposal and the full force of a great mind and heart, Manasiadis lifts her mother up into the light. We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of those tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true. - Fiona Farrell

Author Biography: Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet, translator and creative writing teacher who has been moving between Aotearoa and Greece, and is now living in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland. Her first collection, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, was published by Seraph Press in 2009. She is the co-editor of the Seraph Press Translation Series, and was the editor and translator of / : Shipwrecks/Shelters: Six Contemporary Greek Poets (2016) and co-editor, with Maraea Rakuraku of Tatai Whetu: Seven Maori Women Poets in Translation.