Portrait Before Dark is a poem cycle that constitutes an imaginary dialogue between the poet and patron of the arts, Edward James, and the eccentric Viennese ballerina and star of the 1920's, Tilly Losch.
Liana Sakelliou began writing these poems in August 2009, when she was serving as writer-in-residence at West Dean College in West Sussex, England. Three days before she was to leave for the U.K., a wildfire surrounded her home and neighborhood. In minutes the pine forest and hillside olive groves were lost. For days, the suitcase and the clothes she'd packed smelled of smoke.
Edward James, the Anglo-American millionaire, gave his estate to a charitable trust, the Edward James Foundation, which includes the mansion, West Dean House, where the college is located. She sat on the satin Mae West Lips Sofa, one of Salvadore DalÃ's surrealist sculptures and read James's poems. Through the biographical films that were screened at West Dean, she discovered James's friendships with artists such as Leonora Carrington, DalÃ, and René Magritte, and with writers such as Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. He seemed to know everyone from his era. He spoke to Freud, knew members of the Bloomsbury group, and was one of the most generous English patrons of the arts in the early 20th Century. He helped Max Ernst and Dylan Thomas, as well as the aforementioned artists. In 1933, during his marriage to Losch, James funded Balanchine's first ballet company, Les Ballets 1933, which was the foundation for his American Ballet Company. He commissioned The Seven Deadly Sins, a collaboration by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht, featuring Losch as prima ballerina and Lotte Lenya as vocal soloist. Their marriage from 1930 to 1934 was short and disastrous, and their divorce was a scandal in London society. In 1937, Magritte painted two faceless portraits of James: "The Pleasure Principle: Portrait of Edward James" and "Not to be Reproduced," to which Sakelliou refers in her poems.
The setting of West Dean seemed made for children-with topiary birds and spirals, lush flowers, conservatories, and sheep one could pet. Sakelliou saw portraits of the James family, as well as Man Ray and Pavel Tschelitchew photos of Edward and Tilly walking through the palace corridors. She liked their faces, their poses. She wanted to write quiet, allusive poems that speak through their voices. The English woodlands serve as a flexible space for Sakelliou's concerns about the Greece's beautiful and fragile environment and the wildfires that continue to ravage the country every summer combined with her imagining the spaciousness of Edwards's and Losch's love as conflicting emotions burn down their marriage.
Barnstone, Aliki: - Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, memoirist, critic, editor, and visual artist. Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (Crowell-Collier, 1968), was published when she was 12 years old, with a foreword by Anne Sexton. In 2014, Carnegie-Mellon University Press published her book, Madly in Love, in the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries Series, which reissues the early work of America's important poets. Among her other six books of poetry are Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), and Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016). She translated The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy (W.W. Norton, 2006). Her translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly, and elsewhere. The co-founder and former series editor of the Cliff Becker Book Award in Translation, she served twice as a translation judge for the National Endowment for the Arts. Liana Sakelliou's translation of Barnstone's Eva's Voice into Greek is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with Vakhikon Editions in Athens. She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken,1980; 2nd edition, 1992) and the Shambhala Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 2002). Her criticism includes the introduction and readers' notes for H.D.'s Trilogy, co-editing The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, and her study, Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson's Poetry (University Press of New England, 2007). She has been awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and residencies at the Anderson Center at Tower View and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Professor of English at the University of Missouri and served as poet laureate of Missouri from 2016-2019.
Sakelliou, Liana: - Liana Sakelliou is one of Greece's foremost literary figures, a poet, translator, critic, and editor. She is the author of twenty books, most recently: Alchemy of Cells in a Painting Atelier, selected poems in a bilingual edition (Linea, Bucharest, 2021), Sequentiae, a poetry collection (Gutenberg, Athens, 2021), Where the Wind Blows Softly, a poetry collection (Typothito, Athens, 2017), Creative Reading, Writing, and Living: volume 1, The Novel, co-authored with William Schultz (Gutenberg, 2013), Prends-moi comme une photo, a poetry collection (L' Harmattan, Paris, 2012), and the original Modern Greek version of Portrait before Dark (Typothito, 2010). She is the translator into Modern Greek of two of our most important American poets. In Emily Dickinson: Because I could not bear to live aloud (Gutenberg, 2013), she authored the critical introduction, co-translated 60 of Emily Dickinson's poems and edited the Greek translation of 165 letters. She co-translated and wrote the critical introduction to H.D.'s Trilogy (Gutenberg, 1999). She published a monograph on Denise Levertov' s Poetry of Revelation, 1988-1998: The Mosaic of Nature and Spirit (Typothito, 2006) and οn Gary Snyder: The Poetics and Politics of Place (Odysseas, Athens, 1998). Among her awards are two Fulbright Fellowships in the U.S., several fellowships from the British Council, the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University, and residencies at West Dean College-University of Sussex, and at the Casa d' Escrita-Universidade de Coimbra-Portugal. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and teaches International Poetry and Creative Writing at the Takis Sinopoulos Foundation. She served as President for the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) in 2017 and in 2018. Her poems have been widely anthologized and translated into ten languages.
