Poetry
Κατάθεση
Not translated into English
Pantelis Michanikos · 1975
Synopsis
Twenty-one poems, at least a dozen of them written in an irony and sarcasm that spare nothing, in a realist language: Michanikos's poetry moves there from dream to defeat, from the ideal of union to the Greece that had carried his generation. The title plays on two meanings, the deposit of a treasure at a bank and the deposition of a witness at a trial. One song there celebrates Rimachos, who kisses the ground where his beloved passed and would be killed seven thousand times to defend her.
Context
It is its author's third and last collection, after those of 1957 and 1963; it dates from 1974 (1975 according to the island's school curricula). The character of Rimachos, an anagram of Makarios, had just been created by Kyriakos Charalambidis in 1973; Michanikos took it up, as did other poets after him. Critics see in it the culmination of a poetry formed in contact with Seferis and Eliot, and Cypriot education has adopted it.
Who it is for
Poems in Greek, brief and acerbic, to be read keeping in mind the dream of Enosis and the year 1974.
Prizes and reception
The Cypriot Ministry of Education has one of his poems studied in the third year of gymnasium.