Collected Complete Poems

Author: Iliassa Sequin

Publisher: Grey Suit Editions (2021)

Iliassa Sequin was born in 1940 on a small island in the Cyclades. She was constantly altering and developing her poems, and as if she were a musician, she worked with the notion of quintets and quartets. With musicality in language uppermost in her concerns she developed an original poetic style and this led to her being befriended by Odysseas Elytis (later a Nobel Prize winner). Family opposition to her career as a writer and an actress prompted her to move to Germany. From then on she moved between Germany, Italy, France, and Sweden, becoming a friend of Peter Weiss and Susan Sontag, Giuseppe Ungaretti, André du Bouchet, and Paul Celan. For the majority of her career, she worked meticulously and in obscurity, but she did gain a following: John Ashbery published her work in the Partisan Review, a sequence of her quintets was published by Peter Gizzi in O-blek Editions, and she was also published by Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions. Later she moved to Britain, and married the artist Ken Sequin. Her work is notable for its musical beauty, its distinct structure, and particular typographical decisions. She died in the winter of 2019.