Dimitris Lyacos' With the People from the Bridge

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Shoestring Press, 2018)

With the People from the Bridge is the second book in Greek poet Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy (translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press). You can read my review of the first book in the trilogy, Z213: Exit, here. With the People from the Bridge is not a sequel in the traditional sense—there is no narrative continuity, no shared characters, no links, no tenuous connections between the events. It is, instead, a restaging/extension of the themes and aesthetic of the first book. Like Z213: Exit, With the People from the Bridge is fragmentary, hallucinatory, at once firmly rooted in a complex webwork of allusions and drifting free of referentiality, evading attempts to pin it down. There is a bridge, a narrator who provides stage directions rather than narrations, and a series of what can best be described as stories, or, perhaps, anecdotes, although their tendency towards gnomic elision makes it difficult to find a comfortable home for them even in these broad categories.
​
The book begins:

Night had already fallen when I crossed to the other side of the station and came out on the road. It was still raining, a little. I would find them in one of the arches under the bridge, as he had told me. I would see light. I arrived outside, I waited. We waited. They opened. We entered. We were given a hand-out. 

​The details of the passage—night, station, rain, bridge, hand-out—recall the encampments of the derelict, of the homeless and of immigrants hoping and waiting to find their homes. It is an impression that poem confirms with a fire in “a cut-down oil drum” and a collection of detritus, some of which has been turned into shelters. And With the People from the Bridge is defined by a profound sense of displacement, of systematic alienation, and the winnowing of identity that inevitably accompanies it. Indeed, Lyacos integrates the erosion of the dispossessed into the lines of the poem, lines that are sharped as much by their omissions, by the excision of what they might have said, than by what they do say. Consider this early passage:

                                           sometimes more so.
                              like voices somehow, more or less.
               It is inside you.
 
               That. Afterwards, though, comes the day
               they come outside
               you wait for them in the house.
               Same day every time.
               Sometimes in the morning when
               you wake up it is as if you are stuck
               and you prise yourself off them.
               You want to stay a little more
               you don’t want to get up. You turn look
               right left in case they came. No.
               They haven’t come. But get up
                                                            it’s today.
               Today. Get up.
               Another year gone by and we will

​The lines move in fits and starts. Incomplete thoughts. Unfinished sentences. Foreclosed sentences. Leaps in time. The utterances of a self decomposed into its disparate and dissolving parts. This is the narration of experience taken to the limit beyond it will no longer be possible to narrate it, of words poised on the brink of becoming unspeakable.
 
I use “unspeakable” here to gesture to how the poem articulates alienation, but, also and more importantly, to suggest the way this alienation is accompanied by a pervasive sense of trauma. One speaker tell us about being tortured:

​               Until now, every time I wake up,
               every time
     
               a towel on my face.
               They were pouring water on top.
               I was drowning. They were taking it off.
               Then I could breathe for a while.
               Then again. Then they would leave,
               the others would come.

​And the poem is salted with lines such as “Hurts. Wait a bit until it’s over.” In other words, the book reflects at once a pervasive alienation and the fragmentation and dissociation of trauma.
 
The result makes for powerful and fascinating reading experience. The narration is rich in detail but detached from specificity to the point where it is less a narrative than a collection of concrete events that occur sequentially but never cohere into the structure of narrative. Things happen instead of develop. They follow one after the other instead of progress. And they never resolve. Take, for example, this passage:

​               We came back.
               They were around me again.
               They spoke all together
               I couldn’t understand
               Then one by one. I still couldn’t understand.
               They once more all together very fast.
               They were stretching out
               their hands and searching for me.
               I didn’t know where you were
               I was going down below
                                                   a corridor downwards
               stairs. I was feeling with my hands
               on the wall
                              like a face. I sat in a spot
               took the blanket, covered myself
               my head too

​Detached from any context, these lines are bare statements. In fact, they are almost reducible to a collection of terse verbs: come, speak, understand, stretch, search and so on...
 
Lyacos’ writing is complemented by the design of the book. As I noted in my review of the first volume of the trilogy, Shoestring Press has done an exceptional job with the box set, and the same is true of the individual books. The poem is printed on the right-hand page. The left-hand page is blank except for the page numbers for the both the right- and left-hand pages stacked on top of each other in the bottom left-hand corner, and the title of the trilogy, Poena Damni, in white in a black vertical tab in the top, left-hand corner. The arrangement contains all of the conventional elements, everything we are familiar with, but displaced from familiarity, so that recognition is preceded by a moment of uncertainty. The reader is held and dislocated within the text. And then there is the blank page itself. It lies alongside the poem, not so much haunting it as opening it up. It is the page as interval. As a gap in language. As a visual emptiness that is at once an absolute voice, a loss that conceals what has been lost and that cannot be repaired, and a font of ominous possibilities. Although terse, With the People of the Bridge is also deeply allusive, drawing on the Bible, and a range of other texts, and making, as with the above description of waterboarding, reference to traumas of the present. Meaning enters the poem through the gaps in the text. Meaning leaks through the rents in its tissue. The left-hand page is a further gap through which more might emerge. And the poem does end with an emergence of a kind.
 
With the People of the Bridge closes with an extended allusion to valley of dry bones in The Book of Ezekiel: 

               And set me down in the midst of the valley
               which was full of bones
               our bones are dried and our hope is lost
               we are cut off; and he said onto me
               son of man, can these bines live
               and I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
               and he said onto me, behold,
               I will open the graves
               and cause you to come up out of your graves
               behold I will cause breath to enter into you
               and I will lay sinews upon you
               and will bring up flesh upon you
               and will cover you with skin
               and put breath in you    
               and ye shall live.

​This may seem like a redemption, a rescue even, but the book is not quite over. The poem ends with a final passage:

The partially decomposed head of a
               woman, stolen from a crypt at
               Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery
               early Sunday, was found in the street
               next up to a man who was subsequently
               arrested, Los Angeles police said.

​There are no gaps or excisions here. The poem ends with the return of the macabre reality that has haunted it all along. The effect is extraordinary, and better experienced than explained. Which is, in short, to say that you should read this book. With the People from the Bridge is, in this moment when the world has been so thoroughly de-familiarized and we have all been dislocated from ourselves, as essential as it is possible for a book to be. 

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Aaron Schneider is a Founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, and The Malahat Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed, was published by Quattro Books in the fall of 2018. He has a collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), and a novel, The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books), forthcoming in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 respectively.