Cicada

Cicada, Phoebe Giannisi’s second collection to appear in English translation, offers a vibrant lyric consideration of metamorphosis, mortality, and poetry as song, all centered around the figure of the shapeshifting insect. A contemporary Greek writer steeped in Classical Greek culture, Giannisi describes cicadas’ apparition, flight, and sounds, while also drawing on the insect’s appearances in poetry and its archetypal connections to summertime and myth.

A heightened sense of wonder, borne from a recognition of the transitory nature of life itself, pervades this collection. The poem “Paros-Piraeus: Mini-History of the World,” lists things “you can observe in fine detail” on carvings in “large graves,” including, impossibly:

how the cicadas stubbornly kept singing
even after sunset
how the sea was calm at morning and restless by noon

and even how “the crickets reminded us / of this late summer / that soon ends.” 

In the poem “Preparation,” Giannisi takes a different approach to a similar subject when considering the conundrum of human time spent “in the absolute present / while also preparing” for the future. In the poem’s closing lines, a cricket sings from the attic of a schoolhouse:

it’s gone
it’s gone
what you were waiting for passed
without your noticing
it was already raining
raining
raining

The book also includes prose poems spoken in unpunctuated stuttering syntax, which trip forward in Brian Sneeden’s delicate translation, evoking Gertrude Stein. One such poem, “The End,” opens with these searching questions: “I wonder what’ll become of us in the end the end for both of us what we are now what can words say […],” and draws to a close in the same landscape in which the cicada flies and dies: 

[…] under the vastness of the sky one facing the other one’s eyes in the other’s eyes one’s body in the other’s body soul in the body and in the soul though everyone knows how first creations end