It's hard to write poetry of affirmation in a post-modernist culture where irony is a compulsive tic. But this new collection by Manolis, a series of meditations on the life and work of the great Cretan artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos – El Greco – triumphs in its lyric intensity and open-hearted transcendentalism. This is a celebration of Hellenic culture and an affirmation of human aspiration amid the chaos of history and the muddle of consensus reality. The poet discovers epiphanies of a heightened vision in the iconography of the paintings. The offset four-line stanza form gives space for reflection and shape to his unfolding narrative. As the poet enters the space where El Greco worked and sits before the canvasses he's overcome by what the philosopher Colin Wilson calls "Faculty X" – an existential grasp of the actuality of the past as a living present, an intuitive gnosis. "The movement of the brush / waves through the air of / sulphur and darkness..." Vivid images from nature are linked with the exalted vision of the painter, creating a Blakean sense of the world as suffused with a divine energy. As we contemplate the paintings, reproduced in the book, our own vision is re-energized and refreshed.

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences at the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years. He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels and a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works. Various articles, poems and short stories in Greek as well as in English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Australia and Greece. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening and traveling. In 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC with the goal of publishing literary books.

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I believe that people like Conrad, Nabokov, Jonas, Manolis, and Bronowski have an advantage in crossing over from another language; they do things with English words which native speakers would never think of. El Greco illustrates my point superbly.

John Skapski