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​The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is the sustained work of immense, far-reaching intellect…

Manasiadis swoops with dazzling control and at great speed from a New Zealand world of city street or bush to legends which the English speaking world has taken on as theirs but which this work reminds us, are profoundly, essentially Greek, and belong in that landscape with a power they have to lose in translation.

Vana is the elegist, is the woman who has always chanted her grief at the graveside. She is the woman gifted with words in two languages to write about a woman who emigrated from Greece, raised her daughters, one of the unsung. With her words and the full force of her mind and heart she lifts her mother up to the light where we can see her.

​We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of the tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true. We feel the umbilical twist, the blow to the heart, the soaring uplift to the human spirit – that is the impact of great poetry. 

- Fiona Farrell
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The Grief Almanac: A Sequel reminds us what we owe to the dead, how they revivify and inspire us, how they put everything into perspective for us, and help us find a way to speak – we have inherited language from them – and hence to survive, despite our grief, or rather because of the shared humanity of our grief. That is the triumph of this poetic almanac.
- POETRY NEW ZEALAND YEARBOOK 2021

​This book is doing a big job, and doing it quite brilliantly. 
- LANDFALL REVIEW ONLINE

I want heart but I want scope too. Big projects for poetry …Complexity is about endurance, about surviving over time and distance to ask old questions in new places’. That’s Michele Leggott in her ‘note’ to her 1994 volume of poems DIA. But it could be Manasiadis too; indeed, it’s probably the best way of describing her latest volume.
​- NICHOLAS WRIGHT (UC), ENGLISH IN AOTEAROA

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Vana's pen has the precision and penetration of a cobalt drill-bit, it bites.
- DAVID HOWARD, Ulyanovsk UNESCO City of Literature 'Books of 2019'
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On reading it, in one sitting, I felt as though I had plugged myself into something charged and had been shocked onto a different ‘wavelength’. For the duration of the read, I felt my mind to be a more agile encompassing elastic thing than I have felt for some time. I’ve never read anything quite like it. 
- TAKAHĒ MAGAZINE

The Grief Almanac has a white hot core, a fiercely beating heart.
​- PAULA GREEN
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In The Grief Almanac...Grief sharpens the present moment into such a dazzle, such a dazzle of departure.
- ANNA JACKSON
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This collection goes beyond eulogy.
- OTAGO DAILY TIMES
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WEEKEND HERALD

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