Venice Without Gondolas by Eleni Bastéa

“Eleni Bastéa‘s “Venice Without Gondolas” is a collection rich in sense of place, highly imagistic, and labyrinthian in its explorations of the past. The poems work beautifully as a sequence exploring family, history and mythology, often simultaneously. It begins with Marco Polo’s reflections on Venice and ends with a liturgy at a contemporary kitchen table. This small book travels great distances.”

–Diane Thiel, “Echolocations,” Winner of the 13th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize

“These beautifully spare and evocative poems explore how places inhabit our imaginations as much as we inhabit their forms and the myths of their histories. For historian and poet Eleni Bastéa, Venice is more than the mystery of its allusions, it is an opening into the personal world of memory and association. These are deeply moving and expansive poems made for the warmth of subjective understanding.”

–V.B. Price, “Broken and Reset: Selected Poems, 1966 to 2006”

“In this touristic age, Eleni Bastéa has rescued the wonder of a significant past, as poem after poem catches the living history of Venetian life. Resonating with overtones of deep personal experience, these lyrics translate the fabled city and its waterborne freedom into an occasion of self-examination, every memory a slow heartbeat, leaving only the shimmering reflex of a strange encounter, the marriage of history’s fact and imagination’s vision. These verses sing, and without a single sentimental note, Eleni Bastéa shocks the reader into knowing the pathos of the ‘imaginary city’—La Serenissima, as Venice was once called—and suddenly we experience an uncanny reminder that a lyric poem can be the journal entry of an awakening.”

–Angus Fletcher, “Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode”

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]