Chimera

by Phoebe Giannisi, Φοίβη Γιαννίση, Brian Sneeden (Translator)

Exploring motherhood, myth, and “transhumance,” Chimera is a stunningly ambitious poetry volume by the award-winning Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song―locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls “a bold achievement….a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2019

Reviews

[Dawn]

An unadulterated delight. The voices of shepherds, folklorists, goat breeders and more join in this chorus for the goat herd, the shepherd, the herding dogs, the shorn, the kids, the sacrificial, the butcher. I can only loudly exclaim the sheer delight I took in the collage of sensations evoked by these poems.

[Diana]

An interesting collection of interview excerpts and poetry inspired by the Vlachs goat herders of Greece. I was left examining what it is to be a human, an animal, a mother, a child, a woman, a man. The poems are striking, but somehow the format of the book - the mix of poetry and quotes - didn't always work for me.

[Sarkis Antonyan]

a cacophony yet i struggled to find any openings into this

[Alison Lorenz]

Weird and fascinating. Wanted it to lean more into the literal chimera-ness the beginning seemed to hint at, but I was locked in all the same.