The First Death - Dimitris Liakos

REVIEW: Shorsha Sullivan
The Punishment of Loss.

Awareness of irreparable loss is traditionally the nemesis that overtakes that part of human consciousness which continues, we may suppose, after the dissolution of the body. Yet, with respect to that surviving entity, once a person, such an awareness can still be expressed by using, perhaps as a sort of metaphor, the structure and systems of the body now decayed. The idea of placing a being possibly in this state as the protagonist of a literary work, helps of course to solve one of the simple and basic problems of the writer: who or what shall I write about? “I want a hero” are the opening words of Byron's most famous poem, and that preliminary choice goes a long way to determining the scope and shape of the completed work. Here a hero in a limbo between life and extinction can stand in for everyman, suffering and enduring, without the irrelevant distractions of idiosyncrasies of character, or consideration of what he had for breakfast.

The First Death opens with a sea-scape of iron-grey waters broken by a reef of rocks on which a body already partially dismembered is swept to and fro – a real body, or a site of consciousness for a ghost's imaginings? The vagueness of this central entity is increased by the possibility that it may represent a re-appearance of Legion, the male character in the second part of the Poena Damni trilogy, Nyctivoe. The corpse disintegrates and the limbs lose their articulation, even the ability to walk:

"now you can walk no longer –
you crawl, there where the darkness is deeper
more tender, carcass of a disembowelled beast
you embrace a handful of bed-ridden bones
and drift into sleep."

Painfully and with hesitation his memory constructs a temporal web reaching back into the corporeal life of the sea-wracked remains. The "pulley-wheel of memory" creaks and brings up faces of friends, of crew-mates, of "panting as once upon the whores". A normal body suffering such severe trauma would mercifully pass into oblivion, but this body remains capable of feeling every gross insult inflicted on it, and through the agony of nerve systems which continue relaying pain in spite of being severed:

"…surfeited with pain
brings to the light an unearthly scream
of madness."

Eventually even memory fails, and, cut off from this connection with the human world, the body blasts off to – where?