Description
“Stop words are those words which are so common that they are useless to index or use in search engines or other search indexes,” says Wikipedia.
Regardless, the poet deftly uses these useful words to make meaning of our lives. Each poem uses a stop word as a point of poetic departure, around which he sews a context, impressionistically, sketchily, pencilling a mood, a feeling, tension between the sexes. Relationships are at the heart of his poems, love, death, time, the possible, the impossible, the probable, the emotive, in short sensibilities.
Timoshenko Aslanides’ first book of poems, The Greek Connection, won him the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1978 for the best first book of poems in English, published the previous year in the British Commonwealth of Nations.
In his numerous subsequent books of poetry he has sought to describe and affirm what it is to be an Australian and to celebrate the natural and built environment of the country, and the history and imaginative genius of the people.
