Like the song, Autumn Leaves is about longing and desire: the passing seasons, as summer turns into winter, permeate these lyrics with a finely tuned eloquence. Vibrant and radiant, the poems are inspired by a powerful and subtle music, becoming deeply embedded beneath the skin. Manolis, a prolific poet, possesses a distinctly Mediterranean flavour, as would a poet schooled on Cavafy or Elytis: aromatic, tangy, like freshness of an olive grove in the morning. The poems revel in the vitality of the sensuous motion of language on a sea of thought. In the fervid expression of Autumn Leaves Manolis forges a cogent alloy of mind and heart, flesh and spirit. Originally written in Greek, Autumn Leaves is presented in an elegant en face edition.

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences at the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years. He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels and a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works. Various articles, poems and short stories in Greek as well as in English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Australia and Greece. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening and traveling. In 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC with the goal of publishing literary books.

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