Dimitris Chiotopoulos the artist in poetry does not go hunting for his words: they come to him as to a lover. With them he builds his palaces of dreamland which, so far from being fleeting visions, are the tangible structures of poetic discourse, a discourse given vibrancy by the cosmic reality that attends on it.
His lines have an expressive dynamic that does away with all connectives. This indication that there are not to be the expected superfluities makes for the closest possible bond between the signifier and the signified, which establish their presence in a manner simultaneously self-contained and selfsame.
The right true end of the dialectical link between the poet’s individual awareness and the Universe as a whole is to arrive at a definition that shall be comprehensive while remaining deliberately ambiguous, thus translating the autarky of thoughts and emotions. Every one of Chiotopoulos’ poems – songs in the sense that Webern’s Lieder are songs – is permeated by uniform inspiration. They are a landmark in his steady controlled search for existential redemption. With what ease he handles a verse technique favoured ever since the days of Eluard, and what individuality of content he gives it as he sets on it his own personal seal! Here are the time-space continuum, with its kairic interruptions; the vestiges of time past; and above all the anticipatory experience of time to come. All these are but the signature – the liberating signature, if you will – of this artist’s choice of the life that ancient philosophers called ‘cease from grief’; the coming of the longed-for bliss there and to be enjoyed by all who know how to approach it. At a time when poetry is a rainless country, Chiotopoulos’ poetry brings us ‘water, best of things’.

Evagelos Moutsopoulos
Professor of Philosophy, University of Athens
Academician