With Oenopoiesis (2014), Nicolaides breaks new ground. While preserving the structure of the haiku and its sensory focus on small moments, he enriches both format and content by weaving two types of dialogue into the collection.
The first dialogue, titled “Wine and poem both plastered”, develops as stichomythia within each of four haikus. Its content is unsurprisingly euphoric, allowing space for quips and puns exchanged between the wine (Just cork it and drink) and the poem (Do spare me your whine).
In the second dialogue, wine appears under its ancient Greek name, oenos, a masculine noun, addressing poetry, a feminine noun. In this series of eighteen haikus that closes the “Main Wine” section of the collection, each interlocutor takes up the full three lines in turn. The dialect proves an apt vehicle for this endeavor. It intertwines lyrical tropes with an amorous sensibility, while reverberating — especially in its expressions of heartache — the 16th century anonymous Cypriot Canzoniere (commonly known as Rhymes of Love) an anthology of 156 poems in various metrical forms that offer insight into how Greek-speaking poets in Cyprus engaged with the Petrarchan tradition.
If you don’t love me
O precious may you never
relish wine again