Birds In The Night (Paperback or Softback)

Winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize

I was struck by the power of these poems’ vision, their brooding and sometimes stunning landscapes, and their stark eloquence and depth of language…(by) the wonderful and eloquent quality of the English translation by Richard Pierce…Mystery, striking imagery, and a fearsome atmosphere are recurring motifs in all the poems. Even the briefest glance at the first poem affects the reader forcefully along these lines: “the darkness emerging from behind the hills,” “purple hair streaming” (a recurring image)…”the air raid sirens began to sound again and we crawl like blind animals into the stifling shelters.”
There is no specificity as to time and place, but a sense of menace and inevitable doom permeates the language, unnerving the reader even as she or he is riveted to numerous startling images…Then a great and emphatic line comes, with a sort of modern Shakespearean resonance in its depth: “No one has ever explained the riddle of the world.”
From the preface by Lee Slonimsky,
author of Pythagoras in Love

"Stamatis Polenakis belongs to the tradition of poets whose every poem is a revelation, an apologia of poetry made anew, a fresh acknowledgement of authentic visions and melancholic convergences, instant flashes which last forever."
Dinos Siotis

Stamatis Polenakis was born in Athens, Greece in 1970. He was trained as a cinema director in Athens and also studied Spanish culture and language at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has lived and worked in Spain and Ireland (Dublin). He is the author of seven poetry collections and a novel, and has also written theatrical works, four of which have been staged. In 2017 his collection The Roses of Mercedes was awarded the Greek National Prize for Poetry. Polenakis' poetry has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Slovenian.

Richard Pierce is a translator and sculptor from the San Francisco Bay Area. In his early twenties he lived in Athens for four years, where he was a teacher and journalist. Since then he has lived in Verona, Italy, working initially as an English teacher, then as an editor for Mondadori Publishers, and currently as a freelance translator. In 2005 he began to translate contemporary Greek poetry and since 2010 has been translating the body of work of Stamatis Polenakis. His translations have appeared in Poetry Review, Ars Poetica, Poem, Cross-Section, Austerity Measures, and the online magazine Greek Poetry Now.