The Architecture of Chance
My new book The Architecture of Chance is now out from Wurm Press:
Christodoulos Makris’ second full collection, blends painstaking poetic craft with the accidental hazards of found text and overheard sample. As challenging as it is accessible, these poems comment wittily yet unsparingly on the cultural, economic and political textures of twenty-first century life.
"A forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing."
"We can distinguish two types of cityscape: those which are formed deliberately, and others which develop unintentionally. The former derive from the artistic will that is realised in squares, vistas, arrangements of buildings, and effects of perspective which Baedeker generally illuminates with a star. The latter on the other hand come into being without having been planned in advance. They are not compositions like Pariser Platz or La Concorde which owe their existence to a single architectural conception, rather they are creations of chance, which cannot be accounted for. Wherever a mass of stone and lines of streets, whose components result from completely different interests, come together, there you will find this kind of cityscape, which has never been the focus of any interest as such. It is no more designed than nature itself, and resembles a landscape in that it asserts itself unconsciously. Without a thought for how it appears, it slumbers through time."
Christodoulos Makris’ second full collection, blends painstaking poetic craft with the accidental hazards of found text and overheard sample. As challenging as it is accessible, these poems comment wittily yet unsparingly on the cultural, economic and political textures of twenty-first century life.
"A forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing."
- Harry Clifton, The Irish Times
"We can distinguish two types of cityscape: those which are formed deliberately, and others which develop unintentionally. The former derive from the artistic will that is realised in squares, vistas, arrangements of buildings, and effects of perspective which Baedeker generally illuminates with a star. The latter on the other hand come into being without having been planned in advance. They are not compositions like Pariser Platz or La Concorde which owe their existence to a single architectural conception, rather they are creations of chance, which cannot be accounted for. Wherever a mass of stone and lines of streets, whose components result from completely different interests, come together, there you will find this kind of cityscape, which has never been the focus of any interest as such. It is no more designed than nature itself, and resembles a landscape in that it asserts itself unconsciously. Without a thought for how it appears, it slumbers through time."
- Siegfried Kracauer, Seen from the Window (Aus den Fenster Gesehen), trans. Lyn Marven
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