The "Lyrical" Poetry Gallery, a completed and revised edition of the anthology "Greek Lyre" (Greek poetry anthologized. From Riga to today), 1993, is the result of the personal passion and subjective reading of two writers, and less a strictly philological work. We naturally like all its poems, since we distinguished them through the act of anthologizing. We perceive them as signposts, but also as autonomous landscapes, in their succession and independence, which mark the main road and the side roads followed by our poetry from Riga to the present day. 

But what to choose first from each poet? While one can encounter scattered verses within poems, a pure poem that contains - as in holographs - the whole poet, in their own idiom, is relatively rare and clearly more difficult to find. How many poets, in other words, have given their "Sacred Way" like Sicilian? From the beginning, we also set as a criterion not to succumb to the ease of excerpts. We did not insist on the best, but on the most representative poem, referring also to the title of the anthology: "Lyrical" Poetry Gallery. 

With the "Gallery" referring, as an extension of the "Lyrical" part, not only to personal poetry - as opposed to epic or tragic-dramatic poetry - but also to its relatively extensive measurement? clearly referring to the importance and weight of representativeness through selection, given the limited space. We resorted to excerpts only where it objectively could not be otherwise. 

Our anthology, as usual, was not formed on the basis of a census logic with the ultimate goal of complete, detailed, and exhaustive mapping - an act that would negate the nature of the act of selection itself - of our poetic landscape of the last 225 years, nor was it swayed by evaluative gradations such as those that could be inferred from the overrepresentation of certain poets, but it was structured poem by poem, expressing our preferences as anthologists, aiming, officially, for a form-version of "completeness," as we perceive it. An act that naturally burdens us.