A poetic dissertation on love, heartbreak, grief, letting go and healing
Five stages, five senses: from the first sight of that person, to the sound of rejection, to the ache of a touch withheld, to the bitter taste of dismay, to the quiet exhale of letting go and healing. Love unreturned is its own kind of loss.
Each stage takes you deeper into the psyche, but also closer to a Mediterranean pine forest, an island alley, a swallow returning to the nest: Love, even unfulfilled, pulls toward both the inner and outer world.
Place more than space
built by Love for someone
where’s the Love now? long gone
yet remains the Place
—from the poem “Place”
About the collection
stages of unrequited Love: poetic dissertation on love, heartbreak, grief, letting go and healing is a collection of 50 poems arranged across five stages of unrequited Love.
Each stage explores a different part of the experience, while the five senses provide a thread running through the collection. The poems move between the intimate and the physical, between inner landscapes and places in the world outside.
The collection began as an original Greek poetry book. This English edition is a substantially revised second edition, bringing the poems into a more mature English version, while preserving the illustrated character of the work.
The paperback edition is fully illustrated with the author’s pen-and-ink drawings. The ebook includes the five sketches opening each stage, together with the two bookend drawings appearing on the contents and closing pages.
You are also warmly invited to set these poems to music.
An audio edition is being explored, particularly with accessibility for readers with visual impairments in mind.
The English rendition
I initially thought of the process simply as a translation. But poetry does not always move neatly from one language to another. We would then consider this English edition as a poetic rendition, rather than a strictly literal translation of the original Greek.
I tried to preserve what each poem says and feels in Greek, while allowing the English version to find its own rhythm, sound, imagery, and voice. Sometimes that means keeping close to the original; sometimes it means departing from its metre or rhythm, even when these naturally take a different form in English.
The illustrations
The drawings are not mere decoration. Many of them depict real places that are important to me, and others carry personal associations with particular experiences.
In that sense, the drawings form part of the Place that appears at the end of the collection: not simply a physical location, but a homeplace, a landscape of memories, experiences, and things that remain after something has been lost.
Some of the drawings have even specific stories behind them. One, for example, depicts the knife that inspired the poem rebetrayed. I was carving a piece of pine bark into a miniature boat when I cut my finger with that same blade because of thinking of Her.
The illustrations were made with a dip pen and deliberately simple strokes. I wanted them to share a consistent visual language throughout the collection. That was initially a challenge, but after the first few drawings the technique began to come naturally.
I love the contrast of ink on paper, and, perhaps inevitably, I see something of the collection’s own subject in that contrast: what exists, and what is absent.
Edition history
1st edition: digital PDF
The first English edition was distributed directly through Homepublished as a PDF, mainly to my few followers, friends and family. It is no longer available.
2nd edition: Kindle and paperback
A substantially revised edition, with changes to several poems and a further refinement of the English renditions, prepared for publication through Amazon KDP.
Publication
Publication date: [COMING SOON…]
Formats: Kindle ebook | Paperback
Publisher: Danis Dedes
Read / buy on Amazon: [COMING SOON…]
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