Dimitris Lyacos' ​Z213: Exit (Volume 1 of Poena Damni​)

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Shoestring Press, 2016)

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press as part of a beautifully-designed box set, Z213: Exit, the first volume in Dimitris Lyacos’ three-volume long poem Poena Damni, is a vertiginous work that is at once archetypal, transcendent, and uniquely suited to this particular moment in time. Poised between novella, poem and journal, Z213: Exit tracks a man’s escape from a guarded building and his flight through a nightmarish, seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. The man carries with him a Bible between whose passages he records his journey, and the text of the poem is a palimpsest of fragments, “pieces,” quotations and allusions that are simultaneously precise and overdetermined. The effect is to create a reading experience defined by the repeated interpenetration of familiarity and de-familiarization—the convention is estranged from and then returned to itself with all of its strangeness intact—and it makes for a book that is by turns haunting and exhilarating.
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At the heart of the book is the man’s journey, and Z213: Exit is a peripatetic work organized around episodes, stops on his journey, hiatuses that are perpetually overshadowed by the threat of pursuit and inevitably broken off by departure. The elements of the plot, such as it is, are disjointed by movement, and fragmentation proliferates across the book, operating at all levels of the text.  In an early section of the book, the man reads by the light of a series of matches:

​As long as a match stays alight. As much as you have time to see in the room that flares and fizzles out. The images holding, briefly, then fall. Some lines you manage, they are gone, another match, again. Pieces missing, empty pages, match, again.

The syntax of prose sections like this is truncated. Sentences are stopped short, structured around omissions, absences and aporias. Text is only half-apprehended in the light of one match after another. The “dark changing landscape” is seen in passing, glimpsed from the windows of the train the man rides. One stop after another. One departure after another. Reading becomes continuous with experience. And the fragmentation that defines both is integrated into the text as its central compositional principle. The prose that makes up the majority of book reads like a collage of only partially continuous glimpses, or, to borrow a term from film, jump cuts. Consider this a passage about the people the man encounters in a mine:

               they lean on each other. How early they sleep. Heavy breathing that grows louder in sleep    odies          one after the other before you in rows. Of dreams. Later nobody anywhere, just yellow mud. The cupboard torn shirts dust dust a stool four or five chairs, shelf, and empty flower pot. The light that returns to the walls etched again and again like a poem     n a     blind going deeper every day, until the end.

Notice the omissions, the sudden transitions, but also the coherence of its absences. One of the book’s defining features is Lyacos’ deft proliferation of significance through abridgement. 
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The prose sections are interspersed with lineated poetry that is even more truncated and allusive than the prose. The prose section in which the man reads by the light of matches ends, “No. Match, fear that the object go away again. As when I went away.” It the opens into lines of poetry:

                                                                                                                Paths were all being
guarded so that no one can get through
 
And thrown out now on the roads I have opened myself, I
shall be bound by them.
 
There were more that escaped before dawn.
 
Without bond or limit, witnesses, precious.
 
A special subdivision of the Peregrini is constituted by the stateless.
(Peregrini Dedicitii) 

There is a tendency for an episodic structure, particularly one so thoroughly defined at all levels by fragmentation, to wear, to stumble into the blandness of an iteration in which difference is collapsed by the duplication of difference, and variation succumbs to the repetition of variation, but nothing could be further from the case with Z213: Exit. Far from being stagnant, far from being a spatialized text that is inhabited rather than moved through, Lyacos’ poem is propulsive, never dragging or lagging. This is in part because of the pursuit of the man and the steadily building sense of threat and paranoia that drives both the man and the reader through the book. But it is also and no less because of the persistent resonance of the content. The experience of reading is one of being pulled irresistibly and swiftly forward by the accumulation of significance. In short, for all of its erudition, fragmentation and discontinuity, this is an intensely readable book.

 As I have already suggested, Z213: Exit is densely allusive. It draws on the Bible and a range of ancient Greek texts. The content itself is similarly suggestive, and it is replete with images that recall the long history of the twentieth century: the train itself, the building from which the man escapes with its wards and guards, the people who are taken away from that building to be thrown into pits. The book is at once a palimpsest of texts and histories. It is no less generically complex, situating itself at the intersection of noir, epic, tragedy, quest, pilgrimage, etc., belonging simultaneously to all of them, none of them, and, emphatically, to itself. Even the title is overdetermined: Z213 could refer to the man’s ward, to the time of his departure from the strain station, to biblical verses, years, events, or a substance the produces hallucinations. The text thus invites a proliferation of readings. It would be better to say, it invites above all a fragmentation of readings, beckoning readers to bring its pages into the flickering, always-foreclosed light of our matches.

It would be foolish to offer anything like a conclusive reading of such a rich work, or to tie it too firmly to a particular context, but, at least from one perspective, by the light of one match, it belongs to this moment in history. We live in eschatological times, under the looming consequences of a whole set of pollical, social, economic and environmental decisions made for us in the past and by us in the ongoing present. To exist in this moment is, for many of us, to be subject to a sense of pervasive threat that cannot be separated from our own guilt and complicity. It is a moment in which every quotidian surface is a trapdoor opening into a vertiginous absolute. In this moment, the first volume of Lyacos’ Poena Damni offers no easy comfort, no bland reassurance, providing instead the complex and sometimes troubling sense of recognition that comes from seeing the ligaments of experience laid bare.
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This review is the first of three. I will cover the second and third volumes of the trilogy in our Spring and Summer issues.

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Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Chattahoochee Review.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is available from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.