The Oculus

These artfully crafted poems capture the thrill of sex and love, sorrow and joy, and all the nuances in between. Written by a Greek American gay poet who is at once businessman, athlete, and avid reader and writer, The Oculus is a journey of the eye. It captures the contradictions of memory, constantly evolving and unresolved, seen through the wisdom of the present.

"How necessary it is / to lose yourself in tangles..." This is an allusion to exploring the past in all its contradictions and embracing confusion, almost as an art and a perpetual state of self-discovery.

The vistas in The Oculus are lush and transport the listener from the sensual Aegean Sea to the calm harbors of New England, the childhood home of a fatherless child, and to the sexual landscape of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The language in The Oculus is structured and uses rhyme, half-rhyme, and versions of traditional poetic forms such as sonnets and couplets to capture experience that is verbally sonic. Stelios Mormoris' poems resound with emotion anchored in very imagistic landscapes and graze sentimentality with a cold, perceptive eye.

This is Stelios Mormoris' debut collection after a lifetime of writing poetry in isolation in Paris, where the author lived most of his life, in Greece, where he spent his childhood, and in New England, where he currently lives.