Übermensch

By Manolis

In his latest book of poems, Manolis celebrates the “imperfect perfection of the imperfect chaos,” energetic and lucid philosophic meditations on the mysteries of being human. Übermensch is derived from one of Nietzsche’s most challenging and frequently misunderstood concepts, the Superman or Overman. Nietzsche believed that we are capable of being better than we are, possessing more understanding, more compassion, greater wisdom and more awareness which allows humanism to fill the void left by the absence of God. As Virgil led Dante on his midlife journey, the Übermensch is our guide through modernity. Manolis has extended his range, celebrating the magnetic possibilities of the self in a narrative that takes us on an intellectual and spiritual journey. The poems possess a vitality of sensuous music in a sea of thought, kinetic and direct, imbued by rational compassion and mystic clarity, in poems that transcend the quotidian to enrapture us by the enigma of an unchained life. The voice in the poems awakens us to the next stage of consciousness and moves through impenetrable breath like a river that flows through the spiritual body, mouth to mouth, reviving language from the still bones of silence. Übermensch is a reverie in the best traditions of poetry, a poetic sacrement from which the taste of language rises like honey oozing in the ear. With Nietzche’s Zarathustra as an inspiration, every word a music more music than music and after the silence breaks, the voice goes on forever. In Übermensch, with the Greek en face, the taste and texture of the language transforms the empyreal whose accents linger long in the vocabulary of the imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Libros Libertad Publishing
• Release date: May 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301133413

Manolis

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) is a Cretan-Canadian poet and author. He’s the most prolific writer-poet of the Greek diaspora. At the age of eleven he transcribed the nearly 500 year old romantic poem Erotokritos, now released in a limited edition of 100 numbered copies and made available for collectors of such rare books at 5,000 dollars Canadian: the most expensive book of its kind to this day. He was recently appointed an honorary instructor and fellow of the International Arts Academy, and awarded a Master’s for the Arts in Literature. He is recognized for his ability to convey images and thoughts in a rich and evocative way that tugs at something deep within the reader. Born in the village of Kolibari on the island of Crete in 1947, he moved with his family at a young age to Thessaloniki and then to Athens, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Sciences from the Panteion University of Athens. After graduation, he served in the armed forces for two years and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver, and stock broker, and studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has written three novels and numerous collections of poetry, which are steadily being released as published works. His articles, poems and short stories in both Greek and English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Sweden, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Australia, Jordan, Serbia and Greece. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Romanian, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, languages and has been published in book form or in magazines in various countries. He now lives in White Rock, where he spends his time writing, gardening, traveling, and heading Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company which he founded in 2006 with the mission of publishing literary books. His translation book “George Seferis-Collected Poems” was shortlisted for the Greek National Literary Awards the highest literary recognition of Greece. In September 2017 he was awarded the First Poetry Prize of the Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival, in Craiova, Romania.

Book preview

Impact

And since the new reality was upon us truly we

accepted it: our God was dead. Buried him yesterday

afternoon with no songs, no paeans, nor lamentations

and we felt a lot lighter. Nothing was as ticklish as

the mood of the sombre day while I would say, fear

was hidden deep in our hearts. Sorrow reigned in the black

funeral home office while just outside beggars stretched

their hands asking for what we couldn’t spare, decency

of the new serpent who appeared but without fangs,

feverish magnolia bloomed its purple flowers over

our nuptial bed and in an eyrie we filled our chalice

with courage and we mailed it to the four corners of

the universe and promised never to be trapped again

in the idiocy of a system.

The Andian condor we declared heir of the flesh.

The wind and the rain we proclaimed our catharsis.

Evoe, oh, free elements, evoe.

‘Multiply and conquer the earth’ someone said. And

it was good.

Futility

We suddenly felt the flesh that carried our pain and

our dreams was foreign to us since He had died: our God:

and inappropriate it was not to take into account

the undertaker’s tears. We had none, God was too old

we thought and finally we understood the angel

who advised us to show compassion, who advocated

morality, had also died and we had to rely on the birds

to recommence our sentimental love and understand

our neighbor who started his day brandishing a pistol

in his hand, his eyes fixated on us as though saying

‘you better not…’ a sentence that contradicted

our Sunday dinner and in vain we insisted to light our

oil lamps.

Expectation

Yes, it was all in vain, we knew it and all the news

we received described in detail the abominable horrors:

deeds of friends, acts of foes, merely insignificant and

we paid attention to the song of the chickadee and

to the meadow’s fecund verdure still able to sing amid

the colorful destruction of our childhood still in our

hearts and we gazed the decapitated houses as if

they were gleaming stars.

Then, we too, threw away our credit cards and free

from unclaimed guilt we walked anew yet as desolate

as the earth we were meant to traverse.

Discovery

Yes, we knew it: the traitor always lurked in

the shadow of the half standing wall with his grip

on the revolver’s trigger ready to spread justice

described in the primeval book, logic illogical doomed

to fail and we lived tightly close to anonymity and

to the ancient oaths, given once, when the visitor called