By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
In Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death densely layered fragments fluidly reference the Bible and Classical Greek literature. The white space around these passages heighten the stark sense of loneliness present in the book. The desperation in this book explores a thanatic urge through multiple vectors.
The poem’s speaker is abandoned on an island, and we are given a sense of the desperate situation he finds himself in. The body is described as “fruit of the womb wrecked ships.” And the womb/tomb association is thread throughout the work. It is also not solely reserved for the speaker since the reader is later told “all men have drowned within you and just as the umbilical chord stretches – and you feel the heavenly hand which now draws you with all its might – keep wondering without breath when will you reach the end a bereft body”
These wisps of text take the form of macabre passages that waiver between impending death and the sliver of hope for survival. The work creates a messy sense of a desolate world. In this collection, we witness the aftermath of the impending violence of the first volume of the series Z213. Narrative is justifiably secondary to image and tone in this exploration of desperation and survival in which “[r]egiments of the dead whispering unceasingly in a [sic] unending graveyard”
The various fragments have a poetic bent and range from what seems like prose poems to free verse (although this may be related to the translation process.) The writing in this volume is sparser than in Z213. Yet the narrative texture has given way to a smooth meditative tautness available to those who stand in between life and death. This volume represents an attempt “to reach the dregs of scream”
The First Death (Poena Damni)
Dimitris Lyacos
Shoestring Press
ISBN: 978-1910323878
