An edition of selected poems by Dimoula was published by Yale University Press, on October 2012, under the title The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected Poems bringing the first full volume of her work into English for the first time in nearly two decades. In the words of Yves Bonnefoy, “these beautiful poems are reflections of a cloudy sky in earthly words. Their rays of light, also, their reasons for hope”.
A full member of the Academy of Athens, Dimoula’s honors include the European Prize for Literature, Greece’s Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, two Greek National Poetry Prizes, and the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize as well as its Aristeion of Letters. In a 2011 speech when she received Greece’s most prestigious literary award, the Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, Dimoula talked about the role of culture during the crisis. “How society perceives matters of art in general depends on how far its soul has accepted the belief that art, poetry in this case, will not impose cutbacks on the escape it provides,” she said then.
Kiki Dimoula’s poetry—the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature—is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, conflating concrete and abstract, literal and metaphorical, physical and metaphysical. Exacting and oracular at once, Dimoula superimposes absurdity on rationality, caustic irony on dark melancholy. Her poetry — spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own — has earned her a near-cult following in Greece. Through her poems, Dimoula explores both syntax and memory, restlessly searching for forms to contain grief, intimacy, and uncertainty.
