Ilya Tourtidis has often thought that as writers we live most passionately in the bright void between our words. It is our in-between state. The place where we create and make visible our many disguises, as well as the agreements and bargains we have negotiated with forces greater than ourselves – the very place into which we carry the marble core of our emotive burdens, and use it like a mirror to reflect our many paradigms and truths. Indeed our re-conquest of the soul, the imperative infused in all of us, is nothing less than a calling to create, and to inhabit the small infinities of our words. Ultimately we will perish in this Bardo, our task never quite complete, but we will do so with the logic of radiance and desire, seeking always to transform nothing into something, potentialities into insights, and the memory of our journey, back into the still point of God.

Ilya Tourtidis was born in Greece in 1949. He moved to Australia when he was four years old and to Canada when he was fifteen. Educated at the University of Victoria, he worked as a teacher and later as a School Counselor in the Comox Valley where he now resides. He was Co-winner of the Gerald Lampert Award in 1994 for his first book of poems, Mad Magellan's Tale. A subsequent collection of his poetry, The Spell of Memory was published in 2004. This was followed by a further collection, Path of Descent and Devotion, published in 2009. In addition to poetry, Ilya Tourtidis also writes screenplays, novels, and children's stories.

Ilya Tourtidis' profile page

The experience of reading Bright Bardo is addictive, much like sailing over water. One is carried by an ebb tide with poetic channel markers that encourage us to continue. Out at sea the voyage is confusing and frightening because there is no chart, no compass, and landfall is just over a horizon, but clearly, never to be reached. It is an enormous, endless nightscape; and the wheel shudders under our hands... Land, sky, water; the he, she and them of the poems; and all the material stuff observed, are flotsam and jetsam interacting in a surprising congruence with the mystery that is our existence.

Jeff Hartbower