Dimitra Xidous slows time down, almost grinding it to a halt, in her quest to handle the materiality of language, its relationships to the body. In evidence is pleasure in turning words over and over again. Circularity and curvature, waves of motion and perpetually adjusted perception, blend with warm audiovisual motifs; hyphenated identities and reciprocal influences across time, cultures and generations are implicated in the permeability of form. A vivid, fluid poetic exploration of language and loss, and a committed rejection of monocultural thinking shown, not told.
— Christodoulos Makris, author of this is no longer entertainment and The Architecture of Chance
Oh, how about you went around a thing and, circling to your starting point, found the circle was the point after all? Dimitra Xidous is an all-rounder in all the rounds our lives make: in erotic and family circles. Nothing is outside her compass, which means it’s at the centre of her work. Oh, what a surprise, a delight, a lovely glorious nothing, an all-round pleasure!
— Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo and Break.up
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Μηδέν | Oὐδέν (Doire Press, 2020) Somewhere, there is always a circle… Μηδέν | Oὐδέν is a collection about nothing; in other words, the poems are not anything; no single thing. Full of turnings and re-turnings, I worked to do what Eavan Boland has described, in the introduction to Object Lessons: “I have put this book together…as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and resonate the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence…”. More than anything, this is a collection of pleasure, joy, and delight; it is the product of the eye, my eye - gazing out, from zero to infinity, and O. All about the cover: Circling Objecthood, reconstituted copper plate etching. I am delighted to have created new work not only for the book's cover but also its interior. The titular 'objecthood', the very book-ness of a book within the readers' hands, causes us to relate to words and images in a unique way, a way that has become increasingly precious in a world of online content. Here is a collection to hold and behold, to turn over and over, time and time again, to dip into or read in sequence. The beginning is the end is the beginning of its circularity. - Ria Czerniak-LeBov. It's such a pleasure to continue the collaboration we started back in 2014 with Keeping Bees. To view more of Ria's work, visit: https://www.instagram.com/riaczerniak/ To order, please visit: https://www.doirepress.com/ |
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Reviews
“In Dimitra Xidous’s engrossing, original, and intellectually robust second collection, the Greek title of which, Μηδέν | Oὐδέν can be translated as Zero | Zero, the voices of many of the poems are defined by intimacy…Xidous is relentlessly inventive in imagining an experiential acquaintance with nothingness;…The collection is strewn with fragments of secular spirituality, which the poems, inhabiting what Wallace Stevens referred to as the ‘place of empty heaven’ seek to maximize. And yet, the something never fully supplants the nothing. Indeed the nothing seems endlessly useful…At her soulful best, Xidous makes the mind and the body appear to be interchangeable things’.
…’in language at once clear, alert, and granular, a modulating mother image switches to a profound consideration of maternity, a reminder of Xidous’s concern for bodily experience in her first book Keeping Bees."
- Martin Dyar, Poetry Ireland Review (134)
"Zero, the not nothing, is the agreed point from which these poems gain leverage, an agreed upon point from which an infinite curve of points curve out in both directions, time and space curving to form the great O or 0...In the best poems here, Xidous’ concerns come to a single focus, as in the poem ‘A Constant’, where, as happens in other poems, the ‘O’ takes on something of the quality of Molly Blooms ‘yes’'..
Here the material nature of language and body overlap, become the same thing, the receding lines of points from the agreed zero curving to close the circle. In a sense what we are witnessing in this book is the emergence of a world view built on the idea of circularity, of the line that bounds nothing, making it something..."
- Billy Mills
…’in language at once clear, alert, and granular, a modulating mother image switches to a profound consideration of maternity, a reminder of Xidous’s concern for bodily experience in her first book Keeping Bees."
- Martin Dyar, Poetry Ireland Review (134)
"Zero, the not nothing, is the agreed point from which these poems gain leverage, an agreed upon point from which an infinite curve of points curve out in both directions, time and space curving to form the great O or 0...In the best poems here, Xidous’ concerns come to a single focus, as in the poem ‘A Constant’, where, as happens in other poems, the ‘O’ takes on something of the quality of Molly Blooms ‘yes’'..
Here the material nature of language and body overlap, become the same thing, the receding lines of points from the agreed zero curving to close the circle. In a sense what we are witnessing in this book is the emergence of a world view built on the idea of circularity, of the line that bounds nothing, making it something..."
- Billy Mills
Festival Readings
West Cork Literary Festival - July 2021
Kildare Readers Festival - State of Flux - November 2021
Drogheda Literary Festival - Unique Voices in Poetry - May 2022
