THE IANA BOUKOVA

Boukova manages to transfuse Balkan tradition to contemporary expressive means, to transform inner experience to extroversive manifestation, comfortably balancing at the border between modern and postmodern. Original in their conception and execution images and a poetic force which subdues sentimentalism, these are poems that any contemporary poet would aspire to write. Stavros Zafeiriou (poet), Entefktirio journal

POETRY

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S [excerpts]

String, a straight line straining to prove itself useful.
Soup, a way of loving things.
Sentiment, an ointment for beginners.
Savannah, what I see on my body lying down.
Slogan, a thought's wooden leg.
Soap, guarantees you will at least be clean when you slip.
Set of plates, parade of militant porcelain.
Spinach, Santa's younger cousin.
Slave, every unbroken mirror.
Sex, a neon sign.
Shit, above all not a childhood illness.
Sponsor, someone who never remembers his name.
Salami, section of symbiosis.
Stage, the usefulness of every smooth surface.
Sandwich, a tango with mustard.
Scuba suit, a joke among crabs.
Symmetry, a highly contagious disease.
Sack, a landed balloon.
Seismograph, someone busy describing solely big events.
Skeleton, a trapped percussion orchestra.
Stool, an oppressed coffee-table.
Sickle-and-hammer, history's knife-and-fork.
Sardine, a fish displaying human-like behaviour in contained spaces.
Striptease, an act that bores the X-ray specialist.
Schizophrenia, mind's wide open embrace.
Stalactite, child of water-drop torture.
Spur, Morse code of divine love.
September, a middle-aged April.
Sternum, something like Pandora's box in pink (and purple).
System, a sieve that also has large holes.
Snail, time's steed.
Sowing, burial in the manic phase.
Station, gradation of the end.
Sophist, a wise man who's insured.
Scrabble, an English gentleman lacking a few vowels.
Shock, good to carry on oneself in case of cramps.
Show, when Aristotle cried.
Shaman, impresario of the dead.
Seraphim, the only church banner that isn't a dragon.
Sword, a shining that leaves things half.
Salsa, a hot dance.
Statistics, the philological abuse of mathematics.
Sauce, a suspect hatred against the simplicity of things.

© Iana Boukova, und.athens, 2019.
Translated by Panayotis Ioannidis

S is for September – and “September” is one of the entries in Iana Boukova's “S”. The poet herself notes about this long poem that is still a work in progress: “'S' is a literary endeavour whose aim and wager consist in the fresh lexical definition of each noun beginning with an “s” in Greek. It tests and tries the possibilities of poetic thought under conditions of 'constraint', and tends towards an idiosyncratic declaration of faith in metaphorical speech.”
see more at und. Athens

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The Bulgarian poet Iana Boukova with her book “The minimal garden”, in a very good translation into greek by Dimitris Allos, has easily gained herself a place in contemporary greek poetry, transplanting memory in all things, honoring with affection what is hurt or hunted, being able to look beyond the future into man’s adventure………..Dino Siotis, (poet), (de)kata journal