Manolis’ vibrant and radiant poems are infused by a powerful yet subtle music that resonates with the reader who revels for the vitality of the sensuous motion of the language he uses to present images structured in a mixture of Mediterranean and Canadian formats. Poems that make the reader discover the poet’s cosmos as it expands from the microcosm to the universal. Images which declare that everything vanishes as it flows through people’s fingers, yet from all these some become eternal in their wholeness, like the child’s smile which cannot be stained by life’s conditioning, the child’s smile that cannot be blemished by the adulthood’s guilt and banal everyday littleness. Manolis’ poetry stands out among his contemporaries as this poet descends from the ancient modes and exemplary structures from which he draws and which he transposes to us in his personal poetic way.

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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