The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating forty years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
BOOKS IN PRINT
The Fragments by Stavros Tsimicalis
‘There is a gentleness about Stavros Tsimicalis’s work, a persistent yet hushed search for identity, for answers. The answers, Tsimicalis hopes, will be found where there is light, and he focuses his search there.... This is the poet at his best. He knows what he wants to say. The message is clear and crisp.’
Review quote
‘Against such a predominantly autumnal or vernal background, Tsimicalis projects his recollections, dreams and religious beliefs, thereby achieving a moving vision of human frailty and of spiritual regeneration. By combining scenes of decomposition, of burning or reducing living entities to smoke and the ‘‘cinders of stasis’’ with scenes that suggest the luminosity of the afterlife, Liturgy of Light communicates a strong sense of life as a constant struggle between light and darkness, on a realistic as well as on a spiritual plane.’
—Poetry Canada Review
Excerpt from book
Fishing for Moon Pieces
Exiled in your solitude, you
Hear the wind, sneaking through the courtyard
Swirling and skirting around the wooden legs
Of the few scattered chairs, sweeping
Pale fallen vine leaves. The surfaces of the white tabletops
Still hold intact the fingerprints
Of the lost customers. Alone
You see the void left by their images,
Filling with dust.
Before you,
Triumphantly, the sea goes forward
With its adulations and eruptions. Your body is warmed
By the twilight. A few yards away in the quay, anchored boats
Bucked by the waves perform a lyrical dance.
Above you, seagulls hover, squeaking along with flapping bats
And already the visitation of shadows begins. Slowly, from behind
Round hills, a crimson moon emerges,
Shy as a young girl when she lifts
Her stooped head from her reading
To glimpse a bearded stranger,
Or as fish that quickly raise their heads
Out of the water to breathe
The light, and the real world glows in their eyes.
Slivers of the slaughtered moon swim, masquerading
As beauty at the bottom of the sea.
And children on the docks
Fish for moon pieces
To put it together again.
Stavros Tsimicalis is a poet, restaurateur and chef. He was born in Skoura, a small village by the Eurotas River in Laconia, and emigrated to Canada in 1963. He is the author of two books of poetry: Exiled the Myth Needles Deeper (1982) and Liturgy of Light (Aya/Mercury Press, 1986). Stavros trained at the Windsor Arms Hotel in the late 1970s. He was, for many years, maître-d at the Millcroft Inn north of Toronto. He lives, with his wife Mary and their three daughters, in Richmond Hill. He currently owns and operates Café Pleiade on Mount Pleasant in Toronto.
The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.
