Drawn from eight published collections of poetry and one collection in the making, the selected poems span a total of 25 years, from 1996 to 2021, proposing a rearrangement of the Cypriot poet’s most vibrant verses into a composite picture of suspended barriers between people, beasts and landscapes. Imbued with a sense of constant becoming, the poems choreograph both life and death as movement beyond fixed meanings and frames in a way that sustains a sharp perspective of what is seen and felt in our world.
— Official book launch during The London Book Fair 2022 —
These poems written over a quarter of a century exemplify the mature Christodoulides style: that distinctive mixture of the whimsical and a Cypriot version of the surreal, where a drawer may hold bones or a lollipop. A poetic dance with loss and death, in lines that can slither inside you. Poems exact as stalactites.
Desmond Egan
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Whenever I read Giórgos Christodoulides’ excellent poetry, I’m amazed how simple words can encompass such difficult themes, such poetry, such intensity!
George Tardios
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Some of our friends have edges, others don’t. As some tribes pay in dollars, others pay in seashells. Only those may understand how an image besides another build up a thought.
Corinne Desarzens
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Words that know what they owe to silence, that do not give up grasping its meaning.
We would hop inside the film, but this is now prohibited. And the dead we meet on the road do not answer us. We will never know if they were happy to see us. We will never know if we are alive or like Lazarus: resurrected people who can’t believe it, who wonder what they are doing here, standing at the bus stop, waiting for an imaginary bus. Would it be death? This is about people hoping for movement, to put an end to the immobility of things.
Giórgos Christodoulides does not have selective memory, he is not obsessed with order. Nothing should prevent the meeting. For the meeting to take place, it is necessary to leave it to chance. Chance will mix poem and shopping list. Chance knows what the magician will take out of his pocket, what mistake he will repeat before us.
Denis Montebello
