Reviews (14)
State Literary Awards Committee
Award rationale · State Prize for Young Writer 2022
«The collection consists of short poems of existential exploration, structured with economy of expression. Andreou's poetry introduces a frame of reference at once novel, original and youthful. His poetic voice impresses with its power, directness and boldness.» - Committee: Pantelis Voutouris (Chair), Alexis Ziras, Mary Koutselini, Aristotelis Sainis, Ilia Chatzipanayioti.
Giorgos Lillis
Poet · Ta Poietika, iss. 48 · Jan-Mar 2023
«I intend to destroy / my current identity / because I never resembled it for a moment.» This is how twenty-two-year-old Pavlos Andreou officially begins his poetic journey. With this first book he laid the foundations of a poetic edifice. I look forward with interest to what comes next.
With this line the poet reveals his intentions without evasion or self-deception. He begins fully aware that if the world today has started to lose its social identity, the cause lies first of all in the maladjusted temperament of each of us. The poet is searching for an open space where everything is possible. Though it is a debut, Andreou's work has the virtues of a mature artist who uses every means available to communicate meaningfully with the other.
Giorgos Christodoulou
Philologist · Thraka Magazine · 26/02/2023
The poetry collection by this young writer, making his debut in modern Greek letters, is a cry in both major and minor tones. It does not follow the well-trodden path of the latest trend in Cypriot poetic production.
Instead, in a fertile and creative way, he absorbs the inherited traumatic circumstances through a clouded mirror. Being an exceptionally restless spirit and a genuine representative of an active youth, he revolts, erupts, protests, cries out. Mr. Andreou's poetry is flooded with imagination, childlike innocence, critical unease and sarcasm. With the weapons offered to him by surrealism, he sometimes obscures and sometimes illuminates his thoughts.
Katerina Tsitsekli
Critic · stigmalogou.gr · 28/03/2023
His first poetry collection is steeped in nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood, for the past and the memories of his particular homeland. The poet records poetically a coming-of-age story through a captivating journey with words.
His compass throughout life is the people he loves and their ideals, the memories of his childhood years. This game of hide-and-seek with words and unspoken feelings runs through the entire collection. The poet becomes the guardian of memory, the defender of a truth that, through his words, he wishes to bring to light. Poetry is the path he chooses to recall the events that some choose to silence.
Stavroula Kougioumtsiadi
Critic · Thraka Magazine · 01/04/2023
«Eyemisting Icecream» is the expression of the young creator's transition from innocence to the realization of a reality that his sense of justice rejects. This work springs from a deep existential «scraping» of memory, thought and inquiry.
The pillars of this young creator's pen are three: deep reflection, excessive lyricism, lofty expression. The inspiration seems guided by an overwhelming experience. The inner rhythm marks his position at the threshold between childlike innocence and the realistic awareness of an absurd world. This is certainly not an easily approachable writing. To decipher it, one must have experienced loss.
Evangelia Charalambous-Pavtinou
Dr of Moral Philosophy · Fractal · 06/06/2023
«I am a wave», I translate this as follows: I carry within me a force, a different energy, I do not stop moving for a second. And indeed his poetry carries something fresh; it has power, austerity, the essential ingredient for it to be poetry.
I will dwell on the title: Eyemisting Icecream, a wonderful counterpoint. It carries an innocence, the promise of the substance that delights our taste buds. It promises pleasure combined with the revolutionary spirit that tear gas carries. Love cannot help but be poetry, and poetry cannot help but be love. In any case, this first collection leaves the best impressions and sets the bar high.
Konstantinos Bouras
Dr of Theatre & Translation Studies · Avgi newspaper · 09/07/2023
From the title itself, the cold-hot contrast betrays an unusual poetic genius. The aversion to the dominant current of established empty talk becomes explosive when accompanied by groundbreaking, ecstatic poeticity.
We must nurture new voices. It is like fanning the fire in the furnace with the bellows. Surrealist narrativity, depiction of associations. Playful irony, aesthetics drawn from comics of past decades. This is an explosive poetic confession. A highly promising voice.
Jenny Foundea-Sklavounou
Appellate Judge, Poetess, Art Critic · To Koskino · 13/07/2023
«A rebel with a cause» - The poetry collection of the publishing debutant Cypriot poet Pavlos Andreou seems from beginning to end to be a cry of multiple shades. A cry of despair, of threat, a cracked cry, a knife-cry, a semitone-cry.
In a few rare moments, when the sounds cease, a unanimous silence prevails. Running through all the stages of a revolutionary sequence, of a tidal wave. P.A., with the surge-rage of his youthful soul, leads a battle on two fronts. On the one hand, against his external enemies, those who plundered and slaughtered the homeland, and on the other against the demons that torment his existence: loss, abandonment, betrayal, uncertainty, unspoken erotic desire.
The poet's struggle is painful. P.A. tramples through wounds: «I prepared the operating room / I sewed them up / Then they stitched / wishes of recovery / with a needle without a tip», travels carrying luggage with «a torn label», dozes in the «children's slaughterhouse» in Famagusta, dreams of love with «a halo without a wreath». Wherever there is a human memory, it follows him.
Eyemisting Icecream, the title of the book. Surreal, it foretells what follows. The icecream in the child's mouth melts, transforms into tear gas, seals the eyes. P.A. dips the pen of his poetry into surrealism, perhaps because the idealism of his youth cannot bear to describe despair through realistic verses.
With overflowing imagination, sarcasm and tenderness, he moves in and out of light and darkness, undermining the reader's small world. Poetry in his hands becomes his weapon and his lover. «Unto us a Poet is born».
Stavroula Biou
Dr of Modern Greek Philology, Poetess · periou.gr · 02/09/2023
Our era, its «illnesses», the «death cords» of another era the poet did not live through, but whose consequences he experiences deeply in his soul, are all transfused into his pen and his words.
His poetic identity has laid solid foundations for what is to come, which promises to be brilliant! And whoever chooses to share in the poetry of the young Pavlos Andreou may discover something new about themselves.
Giorgos Dritsas
Philologist-Critic · literature.gr · 05/12/2023
Amid the countless intellectual ferments taking place on the martyred Great Island, new poetic voices emerge that bring a new synthesis to the already feverish intellectual whirl of Cypriot thought.
One of these new voices is Pavlos Andreou. From Angeliki Apostolopoulou's preface we are prepared for the fact that we are dealing with a poet who «swears by his words». A poetry collection that brings to mind scenes from barricades and the Cypriot guerrilla struggle, transformed into a clever surrealist iconoclasm.
Giorgos Frangos
Journalist-Art Critic
Anything but the work of a beginner: that is how the poems of the young, barely 22-year-old poet Pavlos Andreou appear. These are poems that are settled on every level - in tone, in style, in overall aesthetics. The level of this first quality collection is a pleasant surprise.
The poet treats contemporary Cypriot reality in a contemporary and modernist manner. With modern means of expression, existential experimentation, allegorical aspiration and cinematically textured images. His images are inventive, while most of his wordplay carries an anti-occupation undertone. I want to stress again that P.A. consistently invests in the situation, neither in the idea nor in the emotion. This austerity is the main safeguard for the aesthetic realization of a poem. I express the certainty that there will be a continuation in the poetic journey of P.A. that has just begun. And I predict that this continuation will be even better.
Christos Mavris
Literary Critic
It truly gives me great joy, and I believe it is also a blessing for the literature of Cyprus, when I read poetry books by our young writers that genuinely impress with the maturity of their poetic writing.
In this small book the young poet presents 30 short poems that leave one speechless with the maturity that distinguishes them. They are poems crafted with mastery and Doric sobriety, standing out for the density of their poetic substance and above all the reflections they convey, as well as for the poet's boldness of expression. P. Andreou's poetry is cryptic, enigmatic, polysemic and multithematic but, I would say, deliberately provocative and at moments incomprehensible. Yet it carries within it the magic of poetry, which dissolves any imperfections it may have.
The poet essentially surveys today's social reality and is inspired by themes such as the physical exploitation of people, and especially of women; the degradation of human dignity by serious illnesses; existential fear in general; and also the emptiness and sorrow left by the loss of loved ones. Beneath this poetry runs, like an underground vein, our modern History, centred on the recent Cypriot tragedy and above all the drama of the enclosed city of Famagusta, which must under no circumstances be forgotten.
Panagiotis Nikolaidis
Poet, Philologist, Critic
With his first, handsomely produced poetry collection «Eyemisting Icecream», Pavlos Andreou constructs a poetic - and inner - space which nonetheless does not preclude the vision or indirect commentary on our contemporary socio-political reality.
This is, in my view, a likeable and dignified first collection, stylistically homogeneous, possessing on the one hand an inner experiential substratum and a refined poetic language, and on the other social criticism and originality.
In the thirty short poems of the collection we observe a poetic vision that essentially strips things of their common appearance, putting in their place its own peculiar, oblique gaze. The poet repeatedly exposes liminal situations, speaks of fractures of consciousness, of alienation, of political and social violence, of the absurdity of history and of human existence, but also, at the same time, of the inexhaustible beauty of life.
To sum up, Pavlos Andreou, ironic and tragic, provocative, contradictory and sensitive, has managed with this book to make us wait on the line. And that, I think, is the main aim of a first collection.
Angeliki Apostolopoulou
Lawyer, Literary Analyst · Book Preface
Pavlos Andreou, a new poetic voice carrying a heavy and foggy inheritance on his youthful shoulders - a slaughtered homeland and the bubbling impulse of his age - traces words, spins through dreamlike worlds, suffocates in the injustice of tear gas…
A bittersweet aftertaste and a blurred memory that struggles to draw out intact images through the smoke. Looking, with the tender melancholy of our fading childhood years, at the fallen drop, we touch the scent of strawberry, vanilla - or was it pistachio? - as we spread under our feet colourful residues mixed with the dust of the melted avenue.
«Whatever pains us» we struggle to turn into texts, into words; we push it away by adding and subtracting silence. Art exorcises the mighty demons of unworthy powers, turns away from rigged games, breathes in (word)-play. The barren era demands a head-on rupture, the resurrection of dead visions with genuine intentions, a direct collision of consciences.
And there is that melted ice cream of doubt too… Boldly he knocks at our door… Once, twice, again and again… The road is long and uphill. Before him, imposing white, untrodden steps… He swears by his words. The moment will come when he will understand. He is denied the right to choose. They will meet him at shadowy crossroads… TO BE CONTINUED…
Philenews
Astra 92,8