tin soldier on the smoldering pile spring frost
tin soldier
Tag Archives: War
‘talk of war’ 28/100 #100daysnewthings
apple blossom—
yet in the gym showers
talk of war
28/100 #The100DayProject #100daysnewthings
In VerSuch 1.07.2014
“VerSuch … das projekt gendai haiku“, the German-language journal aiming to showcase the state and development of modern haiku, edited by Dietmar Tauchner and Ralf Broeker, is now online. Pleased to see it includes two of my haiku. Translated by Ralf Broeker, they can be found by scrolling down the July 2014 issue. They can also be read here:
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Nationen im Krieg
die Mathematik des Glaubens
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immer Wildrosen in ihren geheimen Tiefen
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http://gendai-haiku.blogspot.de
1.07.2014 Wartende wir
Feeding the Doves
Feeding the Doves: 31 short and very short stories, and haibun
Available through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Kindle
Patty Apostolides on Amazon.com:
“Lyrical and Concise”: “…well written and full of beautiful, touching, and sometimes haunting, melodic stories.”
Read the review by author of Greek Novels Patty Apostolides here
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Dr. Joseph Berke on Amazon.co.uk:
“Feedings the Doves = feeding the soul”: “This is a wonderful, evocative book, rich in imagery…”
The review by author and psychotherapist Dr. Joseph Berke on Amazon.co.uk
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Katie Low in Sabotage Reviews:
“…characters recall how that sad event shaped their own histories, but the tone is one of hopefulness, of looking to the future and making the best of situations that will always be imperfect.”
“This sparseness extends to the stories individually, which do not waste their limited word-count on scene-setting or extraneous characterisation; each one evokes a mood, makes a point, or charts a phase in an individual’s development without telling us anything more than we need to know.“
Read the whole of what Katie Low has to say here
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Marjory McGinn on Amazon.co.uk:
“Stunning insight into the Greek experience”
“… each story is poet gem, offering … moments of revelation and introspection”
Read the whole of Marjory McGinn’s review here
Marjory McGinn is the author of “Things Can only Get Feta”
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Blogcritics: Daniel Burton:
“Unique and surprising, tight and passionate language”
“Every once in a while, I get a book in the mail that is unique from anything else I’ve ever read. As a collection of short stories, Stella Pieride’s Feeding the Doves has given me a new definition of what short means, not to mention how quickly a story can be told… ”
“…references to Greece and its geography and culture, ancient and modern, pepper Pieride’s stories. It’s a wonderful setting for her flash fiction, and I found her writing a refreshing and unique collection.
“Each feels like an intimate glimpse into someone’s life, a brief moment in time. And given that each is so quick, so fast, and yet so personal, it’s saying something that Pieride is able to levy language to create this impact in such sort space.”
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Neos Kosmos Review (Australia’s leading Greek community news source) by Helen Velissaris:
“These stories manage to show universal themes entwined with the Greek psyche to give a new perspective on the Greece in the media’s headlines.
Above all, these stories show Greece isn’t defined by its current bank account, but rather the people that inhabit it.”
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Mia Avramut‘s review on Amazon.co.uk:
“From a symbol of the divine (“A Life-Changing Story), to an object of meditation and near-worship in Syntagma Square (as in the title story), to their possible end in a soup kitchen destined to feed hungry children (“Pigeons”), doves’ journey functions as a counterpoint to the human sacrifice and quest for nourishing truths. Several glimpses into silent, sometimes tortured lives, end in haiku. It serves to deepen the reader’s understanding, and add new dimensions to the prose. And it’s a treat, as Pierides is both an archeologist of experiences, and a mistress of haibun.
Since Yourcenar and Kazantzakis, nobody has illuminated with such wisdom and compassion the often unseen lives that make the humanity what it is: a traveling, travailing organism with feet of myth.”
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Mia Avramut is a Romanian-born writer, physician, researcher, and poetry editor at Connotation Press.
***
About
Having left Greece in her youth, Stella Pierides, the author of “Feeding the Doves”, returns to the country of her birth through a collection of stories that lie at the heart of Greek identity.
About the Book:
Greece has been in the headlines for a very long time. Recently, the headlines have been gloomy and negative, the country facing some of its most difficult years. Against this background, “Feeding the Doves” explores recurrent elements of the Greek psyche, tracing them back to challenges posed by the country’s history, culture, and environment.
The widow, the old loner, the refugee, the immigrant, the young, the writer, the expatriate, tell us their stories, touching upon themes at the heart of Greek being: Love and loss, civil war, immigration and diaspora, emigration, poverty, religion, history and catastrophe, and above all, the will to survive.
“What I admire here are the shining moments of revelation, of truths large and small bursting through the lives and memories of these characters. So many characters, and so rich!”
—John Wentworth Chapin
Founding Editor, 52|250 and A Baker’s Dozen
“Stories to surprise and entertain, to wake and calm, to wrench and elate, to tell the Greek story, past and present, and everyone’s story.”
-—Michael Dylan Welch, poet, writer,
and editor/publisher of Press Here books
*
Fruit Dove Press
Email: admin@fruitdovepress.com
http://www.fruitdovepress.com
Perfect softbound
87 pages, 90gm cream interior paper
Full-color laminated cover
129 mm x 198 mm trim size
ISBN: 978-3-944155-03-6
Price: £8.00 UK and EUR 9,00
Available through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de
‘Human Rights and Wrongs’ in Amnesty’s Livewire blog
Amnesty International’s Livewire blog features the blog post I wrote for Blog Action Day 2013, “Human Rights and Wrongs”. One of their three favourite blogs, it can be seen by clicking here
“Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights.” Read more about Amnesty’s work here
Feeding the Doves: 31 Short and Very Short Stories, and Haibun
Feeding the Doves Now available to order from amazon.co.uk, amazon.de and Kindle
“Unique and surprising, tight and passionate language”
“Every once in a while, I get a book in the mail that is unique from anything else I’ve ever read. As a collection of short stories, Stella Pieride’s Feeding the Doves has given me a new definition of what short means, not to mention how quickly a story can be told… ”
“… I found her writing a refreshing and unique collection.”
Read Daniel Burton’s review here: Attack of the Books!
The review is also available on Amazon.com
***
Extract from Mia Avramut’s review on Amazon.co.uk:
“From a symbol of the divine (“A Life-Changing Story), to an object of meditation and near-worship in Syntagma Square (as in the title story), to their possible end in a soup kitchen destined to feed hungry children (“Pigeons”), doves’ journey functions as a counterpoint to the human sacrifice and quest for nourishing truths. Several glimpses into silent, sometimes tortured lives, end in haiku. It serves to deepen the reader’s understanding, and add new dimensions to the prose. And it’s a treat, as Pierides is both an archeologist of experiences, and a mistress of haibun.
Since Yourcenar and Kazantzakis, nobody has illuminated with such wisdom and compassion the often unseen lives that make the humanity what it is: a traveling, travailing organism with feet of myth.”Mia Avramut is a Romanian- born writer, physician, researcher, and poetry editor at Connotation Press.
***
Having left Greece in her youth, the author of “Feeding the Doves” returns to the country of her birth through a collection of stories that lie at the heart of Greek identity.
About the Book: Greece has been in the headlines for a very long time. Recently, the headlines have been gloomy and negative, the country facing some of its most difficult years. Against this background, “Feeding the Doves” explores recurrent elements of the Greek psyche, tracing them back to challenges posed by the country’s history, culture, and environment.
The widow, the old loner, the refugee, the immigrant, the young, the writer, the expatriate, tell us their stories, touching upon themes at the heart of Greek being: Love and loss, civil war, immigration and diaspora, emigration, poverty, religion, history and catastrophe, and above all, the will to survive.
“What I admire here are the shining moments of revelation, of truths large and small bursting through the lives and memories of these characters. So many characters, and so rich!”
—John Wentworth Chapin
Founding Editor, 52|250 and A Baker’s Dozen
“Stories to surprise and entertain, to wake and calm, to wrench and elate, to tell the Greek story, past and present, and everyone’s story.”
-—Michael Dylan Welch, poet, writer,
and editor/publisher of Press Here books
Email: admin@fruitdovepress.com
http://www.fruitdovepress.com
Perfect softbound
87 pages, 90gm cream interior paper
Full-color laminated cover
129 mm x 198 mm trim size
ISBN: 978-3-944155-03-6
Price: £8.00 UK
Available from August 2013 through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de.
.
‘spit polishing’ in Haiku News Vol. 2 No 17
spit polishing
her scuffed shoes—
war child
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Haiku News, Vol. 2 No. 17: Karma Tenzing Wangchuck, Stella Pierdes, Michael Henry Lee
May 13th, 2013
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First appeared on NaHaiWriMo
‘spit polishing’ #7 January 2013
spit polishing
her scuffed shoes –
war child
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NaHaiWriMo prompt: shoes
‘whistling’ #11 November 2012
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whistling through deserted streets shrapnel
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NaHaiWriMo prompt: war. A difficult prompt to respond to… so many past wars, so many going on today… I opted for a single moment, the sound of flying shrapnel, the danger of it.
‘tasting metal’ #8 June 2012
Haiku #27 October 2011
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charred blankets –
the doll
still smouldering
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NaHaiWriMo extension 2011; prompt: consequences of war
Where home is
He scours streets, bus and tube stations for newspapers. Two years since he arrived in London and he is still amazed at how many newspapers lie discarded around. Although he cannot decipher the writing, they are ideal for keeping warm.
He stuffs them inside his pullover and feels like a king: he needs for nothing. He is warm and fed: the city overflows with leftovers. He beds down whenever he is tired, wherever he finds a warm doorway from where he can look at the sky.
He loves summer best. At night, sneaking into Finsbury Park, he heads for his favourite bench, near the lake. It is cool and the sky is full of stars. Not as spectacular as the sky in his village, in the floodplains of the Mesopotamian Iraqi marshes, where the stars shine like diamonds on black velvet, but it works.
It illuminates the memories that follow him like his shadow: the rice fields and the boat he made himself from reeds, the water buffalo; his father, punting through narrow channels. The Garden of Eden.
Then he counts the stars, looks for patterns, for directions; for a sign that it is safe to return home. His heart, filled with nostalgia, trembles like a bird. Often though, he counts his blessings: here, among the floods of people filling the channels of this city, he can blend in and feel safer than in the marshes of his homeland – till it is time to return.
The End
Hot from my computer keyboard, this new short story written for the 52/250 A Year of Flash project, was first posted on their website. A story about a war-savaged, homeless man sleeping rough in Finsbury Park, North London, and the cruel strands of present-day displacement and identity.
10 December 2010
Where is your home?
Marshes in Iraq, photo here and here
For photos of Finsbury Park I took myself, see here
http://52250flash.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/where-home-is-by-stella-pierides/
If Trees, Then Olive Trees
This poem was published in the Big Pond Rumours ezine, summer 2006. It won second Prize in the Big Pond Rumours Poetry Competition.
I wrote it for Tania and Jaque’s house-warming party and it is dedicated to them.
If Trees, Then Olive Trees
You ploughed the seas. You crossed the skies. Saw the shipwrecks. Gathered
your wealth in words. Then, like Odysseus seeing the smoke rising, you decided
to become trees. To grow roots, you wrote. To grow. And while the bulldozers
work round you, while the Fates, the Wars, the Envious, the Arrogant,
lay siege to you, as they always do and always will, remember to stand your ground
like thousand year-old olives, twisting golden brown trunks and holding hands. Expand,
burrow deeper and fashion a silky smooth quilt, a glowing oil lamp, a warming hearth,
a spacious kitchen, a deep well and a cool, vine-clad terrace.
Odyssey is a memory. A treasure and a well-kept secret. Your home always yearned
for you. Your olive-tree bed rooted to the ground. Penelope with outstretched
arms will hug you. The lyre and the xylophone. The drum and the flute will lead you.
And you will dance, and dance and sing the life she could only dream of.
And if, like the man of old, you find your journey not yet over,
embark on each new voyage with zest. Plan each trip in language,
build your boats with words. Thread your sails with rays from your joyous souls.
And for fuel, for fuel employ the subtle beating of your hearts.
Stella Pierides 
