“Thank God she didn’t break her back. Or her neck,” said Mother Ross. “Uncle Finnegan is very good with young Dermot apparently and takes him to the strand every day. But it seems the troubles are bothering everybody down there.” Caitlin opened up the letter. “Let me see now. ‘Flynn’s gained three pounds in less than a month,’ Nora writes, ‘ most of it in this past week in Dublin. He has bought a new jumper.’” “That sounds like Nora,” said Mother Ross. “Here we are,” Caitlin said, reading the letter aloud. “‘It would be perfect here, Caitlin, if it wasn’t for all the trouble in the country, and people going about their business as if living in a bad dream and not knowing if it’s going to get worse or better before they wake up. All they seem to be able to talk about is Sinn Fein, Eamon de Valera and the possibility of civil war, together with the latest outrage. Altogether a hundred incidents were reported yesterday from all over the country, mostly the burning of vacated police barracks and income tax offices. There was one murder, three mail-van robberies, a bomb explosion, the burning of a courthouse and I can’t remember what else. During the past couple of days no less than six police officers have been murdered in circumstances of revolting cruelty. I won’t go into details.’” Caitlin turned to another page with a quick glance at the serious face of Mother Ross. “‘Last night we were visiting some friends of Uncle Finnegan’s—Flynn has never called him by his Christian name, which is Aloysius, because he could never say it properly when he was a little boy. Anyway it was a good night in this friend’s house, but a bad night around the city. Five unoccupied police barracks were set on fire. One was Bessborough Barracks near Phoenix Park, close to where the attempt was made to murder Lord French last December. Another was the old RIC barrack at Ballybrack, less than a mile from where we are staying. At the party last night there was a very nice man called O’Rourke, Eugene O’Rourke, I think, a head gardener for a man called Muldoon. Just after he left for home we heard shots. Poor Mr O’Rourke’s body was found lying on the Strathmore road at the foot of Dalkey Hill. I just couldn’t get over it today. No one knows how he came to be killed. The speculation is that he failed to answer the challenge of one of the sentries posted by the Republican terrorists who were lighting the fires and so got shot. Flynn tries to argue that all these things are bound to happen in a war situation but even he, I could see, was upset by Mr O’Rourke’s death.’” Caitlin lowered the letter. “Isn’t it just awful? What’s happening down there.”
Colt – Dolphin Ravouni rode the colt and preached the law of the tree society and the sea, opposite him on the back of a dolphin parades in the field of blue flags with sounds of princes
An arm points to the right under eastern sky-lobe wish murmured by thoughtful silence balancing two stone goddesses who talk of love passion on bear pelts inside the frosty igloo heated by two hearts warmth and lichen spreading tentacles by the Inukshuk’s base, lone iceberg keeping watch over lost seal, puffin, soul
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has built a catalog that stretches from Nobel laureates to Soviet jazz clubs to a monk worrying about a vow of celibacy in the Canadian wilderness — so, a fairly focused literary project.
Mara: vequinox covers all of that here: modern Greek poetry collections, critical reviews of those collections, and a wide range of memoir, fiction, and travel writing. Let's start with the poetry itself.
Modern Greek Poetry Collections
Pip: The collections gathered here share a preoccupation with grief that refuses to stay still — it moves, it waits, it names itself after mythological figures. The question running through all of them is what form feeling takes when language is the only container left.
Mara: The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets opens that question directly. One poem sets the tone: "I shall wait for the star again to tell it, holding back a tear that has appeared in my eyes, that like a joy I held you in my embrace warm and gleaming, my complete grief."
Pip: Complete grief — not partial, not fading. The poem doesn't resolve the loss; it holds it like something precious. That's the emotional logic the whole anthology operates on.
Mara: The Seferis and Ritsos volumes push into stranger territory. The George Seferis Collected Poems moves through ritual and silence — oil on limbs, a crippled man in a courtyard, coins falling. The two Yannis Ritsos volumes, Volume VI and Volume VII, work in long associative sequences: eggshells creaking under a blind man's feet, a statue making peace with rain, a bus nearly empty by the seashore.
Pip: Ritsos in particular seems constitutionally opposed to the tidy image.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Selected Poems names a stone Oedipus — irregular, gouged, tumbling — and licks it "to the end of my story until I understand what choice means." And Marginal closes the group with a more direct lyric longing, asking simply to sit close during cold winter nights and erase tears from eyelids.
Pip: From Nobel Prize territory to that — the range is the point. Which raises the question of how critics are actually reading this work.
Poetry Reviews And Anthologies
Mara: The reviews here do something useful: they slow down and describe what the poems are actually doing. The AI review of Yannis Ritsos Poems Volume VI focuses on how the collection handles moral witness. Here is the passage on one poem: "Whether we read them as payment, recognition, mockery, or some mixture of these, his earlier silence has acquired a social form. Ritsos needs little explanation to show how wrongdoing can make a place for itself within ordinary manners and a person's wish to avoid trouble."
Pip: So the political and the domestic are the same room. A glove on a kitchen table becomes a form of defiance; a neighbor's silence becomes complicity wearing a bouquet.
Mara: The review of Rendition takes a similar approach to Aligizakis's own poetry collection, tracing how war's damage continues long after impact — in the psyche, in intimacy, in the daily labor of staying alive. And the review of Tasos Livaditis Poems Volume II, which was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, emphasizes how Livaditis uses humor and religious imagery to keep sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone.
Pip: Grief seasoned with comedy, transcendence explained by having lost the way. That's a more interesting theology than most.
Mara: All three reviews share a method: they trust the poems to carry political and emotional weight simultaneously, without separating the two. That same refusal to separate things out runs through the fiction and memoir too.
Memoir Fiction And Travel
Pip: The prose writing spans Soviet Leningrad, the Canadian frontier, a Vancouver taxi at ten in the morning, and a Greek immigrant sitting exams — which is either a very broad canvas or proof that displacement is the one subject.
Mara: Jazz with Ella sets the tone early. A character named Volodya understands that his entire strategy for keeping his job is a stopgap: "Truly, he would never be free to play his music until he left the Soviet Union. Forever." Meanwhile, Jennifer arrives in Leningrad and sees sunshine yellow buildings and lacy ironwork on bridges — the city beautiful and crumbling at once.
Pip: The outside dazzles; the inside knows the score. That tension carries through most of these books.
Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men moves it to the North American wilderness — Rordan and Yamka lost in a darkening forest, a priest awake all night praying not for their survival but for the Brother's vow of celibacy. Redemption follows Hermes through Vancouver, studying, dreaming of home, watching a supervisor's faint smile as he hands in his exam paper.
Pip: A faint smile of satisfaction — that's the whole immigrant experience compressed into one supervisor's face.
Mara: Straits and Turns takes a taxi driver's-eye view: customers sleeping off a drunk in the back seat while he calculates the fare and thinks about what his parents might be eating for supper back home. He Rode Tall works in a different register entirely — a Western, Joel grooming a sorrel gelding in a barn, the smell of sweaty horses and leather as a kind of homecoming.
Mara: The lyric writing collected in Vernal Equinox, The Long Road, Hear Me Out, Marginal, and Kariotakis-Polydouri: The Tragic Love Story runs alongside the prose — poems about a new moon at zero percent, a mirror ruminating on two diverging paths, Athens giving itself to April like a lover.
Pip: And then there is Mythography, which steps back entirely — a painter's brush stopping before it completes the body, visitors seeing peels of skin, strips of cinnamon bark. An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative goes further still, tracing how the absence of sacred books and rigid dogma in ancient Greece gave rise to what it calls a distinctive and unique Imaginative — the birthplace, it argues, of the free spirit and critical thought.
Mara: Which is not a side note. It is the philosophical ground under everything else in the catalog — the reason a stone gets named Oedipus, the reason grief can be called complete.
Pip: So the throughline is attention — to a glove, a faint smile, a zero-percent moon, an eggshell underfoot.
Mara: And the argument that paying attention is never neutral. More of that next time.
…The landscape inverted itself, each jutting item turned into an indentation, internal trees, internal houses, faces, statues, all internal like the forms you pour gypsum to create trees, houses, faces, statues from the start, in multiples, exact replications, always made of gypsum, of course, or metal. However, they retained all their colours, perhaps a little more moist, deep, a bit grayish, purple, olive oil green, brown; and the mountains with a minimal green hue of the expected spring. This faceless diaphaneity spread out to the outside levels too. The bus, almost empty, passed by the seashore; only the ticket collector was visible behind the windows like an ark made of glass. He always kept the tickets in his bag, wilted tickets, with a code number at their edges, that 2 and a half. And the display windows of the upper neighbourhoods resembled glass boxes of winter, diaphanous, diaphanous and Santa Claus with his cottony beard stood on the ladder and changed the sign and year.
I Have a Stone I lick a stone. The pores of my tongue match the pores of the stone. my tongue dries up and travels to the other side of the stone that touches the soil and has some mold glued on it like blood. suddenly my tongue becomes moist again; it moistens the stone which slides in my mouth. I call this stone Oedipus, because like Oedipus the stone is irregular with deep gouges in the eyes. It too tumbles with swollen ankles. When it stays still, it hides under it a fate, a serpent, my forgotten self. I call this stone Oedipus because it has no meaning on its own it has the shape and weight of the choice. so I name it, and I lick it to the end of my story until I understand what choice means until I understand what end means
I Come, sit next to me during the cold winter nights let me discover the pain of denial on your whitish fingertips let me meet that calling tender welcomed caress you received and felt before you ever touched me come, let me erase tears and sighs off your eyelids with you and with the stars we shall define the length of evening along with the end of the holy light
Livaditis can carry that wish into much more startling territory. In “Poet,” a man encounters an abandoned baby, hesitates, and then takes the child home. His body develops the means to feed it. The event is impossible, but the emotional logic is exact: another person’s need calls forth a capacity he did not previously possess. Here poetic imagination becomes a form of responsibility. It does more than decorate experience with unusual images. It asks what kind of transformation might be necessary if we fully accepted the demand made upon us by another vulnerable life.
That imaginative generosity should not obscure the book’s humor. Livaditis is often funny, sometimes mischievously so, and his humor prevents the prevailing sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone. “Correspondence” exposes a writer’s vanity through a deliciously uncomfortable reversal involving a roommate and a letter. “Fame” makes recognition arrive under circumstances in which nobody would sensibly desire it. Bureaucratic procedures elsewhere become absurd performances whose logic survives only by humiliating the person subjected to them. We laugh, but the laughter often catches against something painful. The joke reveals how readily institutions, ambitions, and even literary dreams lose contact with human needs.
The religious imagery is equally resistant to solemn predictability. God, Christ, angels, resurrection, and Paradise appear repeatedly, but they do not assemble into a reassuring system. Divine figures may seem uncertain or vulnerable; miracles may answer a small embarrassment rather than a grand theological question. In “Answer,” walking on the waves receives an explanation grounded in having lost the way. The reversal brings transcendence close to ordinary bewilderment. What matters is often less the possession of divine power than the possibility that the divine might understand weakness. Livaditis’s sacred imagination is most persuasive when it bends toward the person who cannot manage.
Nor does political conviction disappear when religion is spoken. “Applied Marxism,” with its comic relationship between hidden money and approaching moonlight, lets material calculation and imaginative freedom disturb one another. The poem is too brief and playful to function as a doctrinal argument. Its interest lies in the friction between ways of valuing the world. Across the volume, economic deprivation remains tangible even when a scene becomes dreamlike. Rent, hunger, wages, worn clothing, and precarious shelter keep returning. Poems may travel beyond ordinary reality, but poverty continues to determine who waits, who serves, who commands, and who is allowed to rest.
“Horse Eyed Women” gives these concerns a larger dramatic setting. Its hotel gathers desire, loneliness, money, recollection, and violence within a temporary place of lodging. People arrive carrying lives that cannot be understood from their public appearance. The hotel clerk’s relationship with a useless key is especially suggestive: an object associated with access becomes an instrument of longing for an inaccessible past. Around the more conspicuous dramas, the maids continue their work. Their conversations and their presence near the dirty sink draw attention toward the labour that supports other people’s stories, then remains to deal with what those stories leave behind.
The memory of the mother singing in another room deepens this idea. Her song belongs to a life that exceeds her children’s needs. The imagination follows her into a youth before they were born, before the losses that define their present. For a moment, motherhood opens into the larger existence of a woman with her own beauty, anticipation, and pleasure. The scene is tender partly because it releases her from being only a figure in someone else’s grief. Ritsos’s attention allows the remembered person to possess a freedom beyond the remembering mind.
Near the end, a sparrow shakes rain from its wings. The poem explicitly resists turning this movement into a symbol. After so much imaginative transformation, that refusal is refreshing: the bird can simply be there, and two people can look at it together. The man becomes able to touch another hand, and the prose ending brings a kiss where a question about lighting the lamp might have been. Connection returns through bodily presence. The poem has not explained away death, but it has made room for an encounter that grief had seemed to prohibit.
Writing of the Blind Man, the largest section, returns us to a world where seeing and understanding cannot be equated. Blind figures sometimes recognise what others miss; apparent witnesses fail to act; people look closely without admitting what they know. The title suggests an art made under conditions of incomplete access, where touch, sound, intuition, and uncertainty matter alongside sight. These poems repeatedly challenge the comfort of being an observer. To have noticed something may create an obligation, and the wish to remain uninvolved can become another form of participation.
“Eyewitness” makes that problem quietly disturbing. A man sees burglars entering a neighbouring house and waits for somebody else to raise the alarm. Nobody does. Later, the burglars arrive at his own door with bouquets. The flowers place him in a situation whose politeness feels more threatening than an accusation. Whether we read them as payment, recognition, mockery, or some mixture of these, his earlier silence has acquired a social form. Ritsos needs little explanation to show how wrongdoing can make a place for itself within ordinary manners and a person’s wish to avoid trouble.
“Real Hands” offers a different response to disappearance. A man has vanished, perhaps been taken away, leaving gloves on the kitchen table. Those who remain place bread, a flower, or a wineglass among the empty fingers. The gloves preserve the shape of contact while making absence painfully visible. The final recognition that gloves cannot be handcuffed gives the poem a restrained defiance. The person may have been removed, but affection continues to address him through what remains. Here an everyday object becomes a means of refusing the complete erasure of a human being.
The poem also shows why the collection’s political and intimate dimensions are inseparable. Fear appears in kitchens and bedrooms as well as public spaces. Violence changes the meaning of a glove, a knock, an empty chair, or a pair of shoes. The foreword and introduction place strong emphasis on Ritsos’s human concern, and the poems demonstrate how demanding such concern can be. Their compassion includes unease, self-questioning, anger, and the recognition that people sometimes cooperate with what harms them or others. Humanism here must contend with the damaged behaviour of actual human beings.
…The final sequence, beginning with “Moonscape” and continuing through “Perforated Dreams,” expands this antiwar vision into a sustained meditation on modern conflict, bodily injury, revenge, and aftermath. Here the book is at its most direct. Bombs, improvised explosive devices, amputations, displaced civilians, medical care, grief, and revenge appear without the protective distance of abstraction. The poems attend both to soldiers and to those whose devastated lives make further violence imaginable. “Ibrahim,” in its briefness, is devastating: a young man’s shoes remain under his bed while he leaves to join the resistance after his sister is killed by a bomb. The poem refuses to simplify him into either hero or villain. It gives us only grief, absence, and the lethal logic of retaliation.
This ethical complexity continues in “Homo Homini Lupus,” where a boy prepares an explosive device while the poem asks whether horrific deaths can restore his sister. The answer, of course, is no, but the question matters because it refuses easy moral distance. Aligizakis sees war as a machinery of reciprocal mutilation. The dying, the bereaved, the wounded, the revenge-seeking, and the innocent inhabit a single ruinous system. The poems do not excuse violence; they insist that violence must be understood as humanly generated and humanly suffered.
The physical consequences of war are rendered with painful clarity in “Psalms,” “Mistral,” “Aura,” “Autumn,” and “Perforated Dreams.” These poems do not turn away from the damaged body. The wounded soldier is half alive, dependent on prosthetics, medication, tubes, and the uncertain loyalty of a lover. Questions of masculinity, desire, shame, and survival are faced directly. In “Mistral,” the repeated question—whether she will stay—becomes a haunting refrain. The poem understands that injury does not end with the blast; it continues in the psyche, in intimacy, in self-perception, and in the long daily labour of remaining alive.
The visual design of Rendition supports the work well. The generous white space, centred or carefully arranged lines, and clear page-by-page presentation give the poems room to enact their pauses and visual shifts. The book’s longer sequences feel purposeful rather than merely expansive, while the epigraphs create meaningful thresholds between its sections. The layout is restrained, allowing the language and imagery to remain central.
Some readers may find Aligizakis’s abundance challenging. The poems often move rapidly from one register to another, and the language can be deliberately heightened, filled with mythic, religious, erotic, and philosophical vocabulary. Occasionally, a poem’s accumulation of images may obscure its strongest emotional line. But this profusion is also an essential part of the book’s character. Aligizakis is a poet of excess in the best sense: he wants the lyric to hold more than one thing at once. He does not wish to choose between the flower and the weapon, the ancient god and the hospital room, the lover’s body and the broken soldier’s body. His work gains its urgency from refusing those separations.
Rendition is ultimately a book about what remains after the moment of impact. It asks how one lives after desire is altered, after the body is injured, after a loved one is lost, after a bullet is fired, after a god has gone silent. Its answer is not consolation in any easy form. Rather, the collection offers attention: to the wounded body, the grieving mother, the city alley, the desert, the gull, the sparrow, the lover, and the small finite world whose mystery is no less profound than the infinite. Aligizakis writes with moral passion and a richly visual imagination. Rendition is an intense, challenging, and compassionate collection, one that turns lyric poetry into an act of witness.
