Adieu

Parallel Greek and English poems .Haris Vlavianos (born 1957) is one of the finest and most prolific of contemporary Greek poets. In 1983 he published his first collection of poetry and since then has published five more collections, a book of aphorisms on poetry (the form of Wallace Stevens's Adagia which he has translated), and a number of translations of leading poets including: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, William Blake. He also edits the biannual journal Poetry, which publishes Greek poetry, articles reviews and essays on poetry as well as translations of foreign poets. Adieu is his most recent collection, published in 1996. It is a lyric farewell to his family, particularly to his mother, to his student life at Oxford and his past as a whole. By conversing with beloved persons, places and poetic voices of the past, it represents a rethinking and a reassessment of love, of poetry and of the human condition. The four sections of this collection represent the stages of Vlavianos's development from a difficult childhood to poetic maturity. It is as if poetry compensates him for the disintegration of his family and at the same time emerges as the positive outcome of this traumatic alienation.Bi-lingual text. English translation by David Connelly.118p.