AustLit

'The death of Dimitris Tsaloumas (1921-2016) invites us to revisit and re-evaluate his poetry without the critical anxiety to place him within the historical taxonomies of Australian literature or the hermeneutical suspicion about its belonging. The task of situating his poetry will take time as the canon of Australian literature is still fluid and its main parameters are not yet finalised. After his death however his work becomes a space in which we can detect both patterns and particularities; it is transformed simultaneously into a social text and to an individual testimony. Furthermore, beyond the politics of cultural memory or the ideologies of literary traditions, now there is a unique opportunity to study the compositional qualities of his work and explore its constitutive poetics, without reducing it to its social circumstances or attributing it to the emotional upheavals of his biography. The death of the poet liberates his work from the particulars of his life: with time, biographical information becomes significant only if and when ambiguities eventuate while the interpretation of his work is not exhausted by simplistically corresponding his verses to events in the life of the individual.' (Introduction)