She kicked the crotch of the guy who always calls me Fuckbeard when Jago’s back is turned, but they managed to hustle her out,along with tearful Cedric who’d turned his back on the whole scenario. Now that all is quiet in the dorm, with Wolfbane locked away in solitary and his supporting cast tranked down safely in their pits, I can safely itemise matters relating to the Order of the Brazen Head. I’ve gobbed out today’s input of sleepy-time, thanks to Simba throwing a shrill tantrum that distracted Jago at a crucial moment of the dosage ritual. So now, around midnight, in the little cone of bedside light, I am the only sentient being in the Creation, an archivist of the Akashic scrolls. Pol Pot’s revolution may have destroyed my artifacts but not the cellular structure of my memory. Of course she ransacked our home, looting, pillaging, laying waste . . . But I have the Lore by heart. I’ve copied it out laboriously over the years, filling a whole series of these black books. Jago pretends to humour me in this, but I still won’t reveal my stash as his own humours are far from consistent. For example, only last month he had a sudden pre-breakfast purge of our “traumatic memorabilia”, our “hoard of faecal souvenirs” as he called the contents of our bedside lockers. “This is the dark body of the Madonna you must destroy!” he shouted at Eamonn and Cedric, sweeping away their framed photos with his fat hand, grinding the pics underfoot, those saintly mothers and martyred wives, whoever, it’s all the same to Jago whenever the neo-Freudian fit hits him. Yet he was only inches away from a lost knowledge more subversive than any of his primal infantile soap-operas. I declare this is the Gnosis of the Brazen head and these are the lost letters of its Lore: 73 Harsnett Road, London SE 27 March 8, 1943 Dear Firestone, What a pleasure to receive your letter! It displays a grasp of occult scholarship which is impressive for someone still in their first year of undergraduate studies, albeit in the shadow of the Bodleian Library, near the banks of Isis. I myself took my first degree at Cambridge before my brief scholastic period at the seminary in Rome and my later researches in Vienna. But the cloisters of Oxford must still be charged with ancient potency, even in these dismal times.
The houses I had they took from me. It happened that the times were unpropitious: war, destruction, exile sometimes the hunter meets the migratory birds sometimes he doesn’t. Hunting was good in my time, lots of people felt the shot the others roam around or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale, nor the skylark nor about the little wagtail inscribing numbers with its tail in the light; I don’t know many things about houses I know they have their own race, nothing more. New at first, like babies playing in the orchards with the tassels of the sun, they embroider the colored window shutters and the shining doors over the day; when the architect finishes they change, they shrink or smile or even become resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who would return if they could or those who vanished now that the world has turned into an immense hotel. I don’t know many things about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop even when sometimes, near the sea, in empty rooms with an iron bed with nothing of my own looking at the evening spider, I contemplate that someone is getting ready to come that they dress him up in white and black cloths with plenty of colorful jewels and around him venerable ladies with gray hair and dark lace shawls talk softly that he gets ready to come and say goodbye to me; or a woman with quivering eyelashes and slim waist returning from southern ports, Smyrna, Rhodes, Syracuse, Alexandria, from cities closed like warm window shutters with perfume made of gold fruits and herbs that she climbs the stairs without seeing those who slept under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them.
Calm Down He took his walking stick. He stopped ambivalently. He looked at the road. Should he strike the rock? Should he ask the neighbour? In any case, he surely feels the stick in his hand. A tree is opposite him, and the cloud at the turn of the road; he may choose, he has time to spare. The dead moisten their fingers in the underground springs. If one delays in the above stoa, the others don’t worry. No one worries. They have already lit the lamp. The place fell on the floor. The napkin is in the wooden ring since the dead aren’t afraid of time. In their shoes, sleep the blind and the made of clay dolls, and their sticks are scarecrows of bad theatre actors.
…at their destination, and they should fasten their seat belts. Hermes looked down from the window. It was a cloudless night. He had a superb panoramic view of the city, full of lights flickering in the dark. He could distinguish the streets and the tall buildings as the aircraft slowly descended. They landed, and Hermes got up to take his carry-on bag from the overhead compartment, stepped off the plane, and said goodbye to Tom. An airline official led Hermes down the long hallways to the baggage area. He found his suitcase from the appropriate carousel and made his way to the arrivals area, where people waited for their friends and family members. Happy voices were everywhere; people embraced one another, kissing, laughing, and crying. He turned around as if to see someone he knew. There was no one there, he knew no one, and this was his first bitter moment of realization that he was so far away from people he loved. He wished Magda were here. He then sat on a bench and wondered aloud, “And now, where are you going, Hermes?” A question justified under the circumstances, a question he had no answer to, only the sense of loss, of abandonment, of forlornness, and fear crept into his heart. Then, as if from the great source, he felt he heard a voice that whispered to his heart, not to his ears. And it was the voice of his new motherland that said, “Welcome, Hermes, you are here in Vancouver now, go out there, find your way to do your studies and get your diploma. Your folks are waiting for you, back in Greece. They look forward to seeing you back. Your diploma is your goal and nothing less…” were the words he felt he heard, and the voice wasn’t any other but the voice of Canada, his temporary motherland, which, like a mother, took another orphan off the streets and gave him a chance. Suddenly, the fear he had just felt vanished, and a jolt of enthusiasm took over his senses. Hermes stood up. His eyes ran around the space of the large airport hall when his glance met the old woman whom he had helped in Montreal; she saw him too. At the same time, a very tall man with a good-looking woman approached…
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has apparently decided that one literary universe is not enough — so here we are, somewhere between ancient myth, Canadian snowstorms, and a ceilidh in rural Ireland.
Mara: vequinox has been busy. The posts this week span translated Greek poetry, prose fiction across several continents, and lyric meditations on exile, memory, and the natural world.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry — specifically, what it means to gather voices from across a century of modern Greek literature into one place.
Modern Greek Poetry — Voices Across a Century
Mara: The Neo-Hellene anthology brings together poets whose work ranges from sensory abundance to stark political grief, and the question the collection keeps pressing is what holds a tradition together across such different registers.
Pip: The harvest poem that opens the anthology sets the tone — here is the line: "great swarms of bees rouse from their hives to drink the vine's ethereal smells and forage on its pistils full of nectar and spread the news in buzzing eulogies."
Mara: What that gets the reader is an almost ceremonial fullness — the countryside isn't backdrop, it's participant. The bees are eulogists. The girls are part of the same procession.
Pip: And then the anthology turns, hard. A second excerpt from the same collection gives us a garden where every rose is dead in a flowerpot-coffin and the cypress is described as endless martyrdom. Spring and elegy occupying the same volume.
Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in his selected poems, works in a completely different key — spare, almost parable-like. An old man sits in the rain covering an imaginary violin with his coat, and the speaker simply says he has always heard the music.
Pip: Nikos Engonopoulos takes a more ironic angle. His Sideris, the Croatian guard who considers himself a true Hellene and brings stacks of newspapers to a house where no one can read them to him, is both comic and quietly devastating.
Mara: Titos Patrikios and Yannis Ritsos pull toward the political. Patrikios warns against glorifying voices that hide something rotten, while still insisting that showing one's wounds requires real strength. Ritsos, across both volume three and volume six, moves between diary fragments of exile and a single grain of rice incised with war banners and deserters.
Pip: Constantine Cavafy's "Finalities" lands the coldest line in the batch — the danger was never where anyone was looking.
Mara: Hours of the Stars and Antony Fostieris round out the range — one spare and devotional, the other a long, careening walk down a dark avenue where God might be cycling past on an evening stroll.
Pip: That image of the margin — the figure walking alone, slightly afraid to look back — connects directly to what the prose poetry is doing with exile and identity.
Exile, Memory, and the Marginal Voice
Mara: The central question here is what poetry can do for people who never made it into the official story — the forgotten workers, the unnamed soldiers, the immigrants who stayed at the edge.
Pip: The AI review of Marginal puts it plainly: "Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied."
Mara: What that means in practice is that marginality gets reframed — not as deprivation but, as the review argues, as a privileged vantage point. From the edge, the structures at the centre become visible.
Pip: The review also describes the book's movement as circular rather than progressive — the older consciousness revisits, asks again, remembers differently. That's a structural claim about how the poems are built, not just what they're about.
Mara: Introspection pushes this further into the psychological. Its speaker fights not just loneliness but his own identity — a vision described as multifaceted and plethoric, unable to settle against what the poem calls metallic and unbendable silence.
Pip: Entropy, Orange, and Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy each approach the same territory from a different angle — the newborn who doesn't know its origin, the speaker told to find a path in an ancestor's footsteps, the figure who existed on a feather's lightness somewhere between the exceptional and the ordinary.
Mara: Together they map a recurring concern: the self as something formed in transit, between languages, between homelands, between the living and the dead.
Pip: From lyric exile to something more novelistic — the fiction excerpts are doing their own version of this geography.
Narrative Excerpts — Lives in Motion
Mara: The fiction this week covers a wide arc — childhood in a mixed-language Romanian town, a failing engineer in maritime postings, a jazz-era romp through the Moscow Kremlin, and immigrant life in Vancouver — and the question is what kind of pressure each excerpt places on its characters.
Pip: The Gospel of Silence opens with a memory so specific it becomes universal: "Teachers were still permitted to use corporal punishment. We received hard slaps. Șerban's method was the cruelest: he grabbed the hair beside one's ear and lifted until the tuft remained in his hand."
Mara: The upshot is a childhood rendered without sentimentality — the watermill, the castle, the Romanian-Hungarian schoolyard rivalries all exist in a balance the narrator knows will not hold.
Pip: He Rode Tall takes a different kind of reckoning. Joel, the engineer, has calculated that he is functioning at roughly a quarter of his capacity, and the excerpt's quiet horror is that he knows it precisely and intends to change nothing.
Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the register entirely — light, comic, tourists navigating the Kremlin Armoury, debating whether a jewelled ladle qualifies as a pooper scooper and lining up for Lenin's tomb on its one open day.
Pip: Straits and Turns puts a Greek immigrant in Vancouver, writing his novel by a window overlooking the Lions, waiting for his girlfriend's visa situation to resolve — the geography of longing made very literal.
Mara: Swamped and The Unquiet Land close out the fiction range. One is set in the high-tension world of Vancouver brokerage, the other in an Irish ceilidh where a stiletto-tongued spinster is already certain the bride is pregnant.
Pip: The Unquiet Land's village gossip is sharper than any market analysis in Swamped — which is saying something. From human drama indoors to the weather outside.
Nature, Weather, and Myth
Mara: These poems ask how landscape becomes myth — and how myth survives when the land itself is fenced, frozen, or reduced to a watermelon slice of moon.
Pip: Mythography opens with two madrona trunks intertwined on a rocky promontory: "Two bodies interlocked bright reddish trunks firm in resolution to uphold the tree-pneuma benevolent auspice unison in the hug of the breeze."
Mara: The plain consequence is that the natural world here is never just scenery — the trees have pneuma, the bees have eulogies, the landscape holds a kind of civic or spiritual office.
Pip: Hear Me Out takes that mythic weight and scales it down to a watermelon slice of new moon — barely visible, mostly imagined, and somehow more present for it.
Mara: Rendition moves to the plains, where a rider on a mustang jumps a ravine against a dying sun, and the fences cutting across rolling fields carry the full weight of colonial enclosure. Vespers ends in the Arctic — Inukshuk's fingertips guiding a wolf's howl through a blizzard, with an arctic hare blinking beneath a dwarf willow, holding onto something the poem calls benevolent hope.
Pip: Four very different landscapes, one persistent argument: the world has its own grammar, and the poems are trying to learn it.
Mara: From a Greek harvest to an Arctic blizzard, the through-line is a poetry that refuses to let place be passive.
Pip: And a prose that keeps asking what it costs to be somewhere you weren't born — or to be exactly where you were born and still feel like a stranger.
Mara: Next time, we'll see what else arrives from the margins.
“My God. He’s alive, barely, and he’s cold as ice.” The chief shouted to the patrolman, “Get on the radio to the desk and tell the sergeant to get that ambulance in here. Now.” Piano music filtered from the house. Spanger thought it might be Chopin. He paused and listened for a few seconds before he walked up the front steps onto the porch. Sue-Anne Torgerson gave him her timid little wave through the window and came to the door. “Pete’s not here,” she said. “He went out last night and didn’t come home.” It was a report, not a complaint. “Let’s go inside, Mrs. Torgerson. I have something to tell you. It’s best if we sit down.” She perched at the edge of the sofa with her hands in her lap, her legs angled together and crossed at the ankles. “What’s wrong?” she said. “The mayor’s gone. It looks like it might have been a heart attack.” She closed her eyes. A shudder ran through her shoulders and chest as if she were trying to throw off a sudden chill. After a minute she opened her eyes and sat without expression in silence so deep that Spanger’s breathing and the ticking of a clock upstairs filled the room. Moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes but did not fall. “Oh.” It was not quite a moan. She brought her hands across her chest and clasped her upper arms, rocking. Her gaze went around the room, then back to Spanger. “Oh, it’s been so hard.” MAYOR DEAD IN JEEP INCIDENT Man Badly Hurt By Torgerson Vehicle Beating Connection Disclosed by Edward Pease, Daily Dispatch staff
“Ah, my dear friend. It takes many strong men and much skill to travel up stream, where the waters run faster than a raging buffalo. Our boat would not last on the running waters or over the deep falls. It is impossible to travel this way until the summer has calmed the river spirits to make them safe for men. It would take us many weeks to build a wood boat strong enough to resist the sharp rocks that wait on the river’s belly and hidden turns. We must walk across the land to reach my home. One day, our home river will carry you on his back to visit other peoples. Then you will learn his ways.” That night, Fire Maker spoke about the Great Floods. “In the ancient days, there were two great floods. The first flood was long before men and women came to this land. In that time, the animals spoke to one another as we do today. Bear spoke to fish. Fish spoke to birds. They ate plants and berries and grew fat on the land. They saw themselves reflected in the waters. The animals saw how beautiful they were and became proud and boastful. Each one thought he was more beautiful than the other. So the Creator decided to punish the animals for their conceit and wash the arrogance from their faces.” Ari stirred the embers and watched the end of his branch catch fire. He held it up until the feeble flame died, sending curls of blue smoke toward the stars. Fire Maker knew the young travellers enjoyed his stories as much as anyone, though they grew restless as the evening progressed. He continued with a smile. “The waters came pouring down so hard that some lost all their colour and became very plain. Others, like the blue jay, found shelter in the high trees and kept their colour. Because the animals had been so boastful, the Creator even washed away their speech. Now many animals are unable to understand each other when they speak. Wolf eats deer and bear eats fish. The Creator made us all to be brothers. But some forget or do not know how they should be.” Father Finten wanted to share his own story of the flood from the Book of Genesis. But he knew his stories paled in the telling, compared to the storytelling skill of their host. So the missionary priest continued to lose opportunities to make converts. To him, it seemed as though the chief was already converted. The stories he told made much sense for the people of this land and Finten found the Native creation story very beautiful. Father Finten struggled with what he judged to be a heresy forming in his mind: Perhaps God shines through to all the different people of the world in many different forms. If our Christian God is true, and all other gods are false, must I take their god away to give them mine, when all the gods are one and the same True God? He wished there were some theologian around, with whom he could confide. If he lost the Faith and his missionary purpose, what was left? Finten tried to stop his thoughts as Fire Maker’s words continued hypnotically. “One day, the Creator made man. He gave his newest creature everything to be happy. But man too became proud and wanted to be greater than the gods. So the Creator of all things sent another flood. This time, the waters washed the colour from many men. The most proud became almost white.” At this, the six white men looked at one another and Bjorn burst into a hearty laugh, and his companions joined in. Finten remarked, “Yes, we have indeed been too proud. Much too proud.”
twenty-nine Ugga, ugga, you say something with your first word at the sight of fire and another at the sight of shed blood you birth the first language you declare something you try other sounds too show-ask-answer so, your child can learn; take it to where the water springs two million years ago the first pointing tools the first hurling the first meat you feel your cranium enlarging first thoughts, first powerful thoughts you-can’t-endure-the-thoughts you must share them with the person next to you with the person who births a new crying baby a baby with a head bigger than yours you run and throw yourself over the crevasse the first duly recorded suicide.
Misses Of breaths that are not you miss the forest breeze while rusted nails hold your ravaged window where gap reveals light Of dreams which are not you become a missed song while your subconscious rebels and barnacles camouflage a mound of words imprisoned in salt Of the rhythms that are not you miss one step or two when nebula mocks: Have a nice day – as usual your descent sleeved in pain
When he and Caitlin returned to the sitting room the music was just starting again, and dancers were sorting themselves out on the floor. But a sixteen-hand reel in the sitting room was much too ambitious. The set collapsed amid shouts and laughter, but the music played on. “Fiddlers are tireless,” someone said. “Wouldn’t it be good if they could pull a plough?” “And play the fiddle at the same time.” “That Dan Ryan is always on the fiddle—no matter what he’s doing.” “Hey Molly, what about a song?” “Give us The Sally Gardens, Molly.” “Good girl, Molly.” “Come on now, don’t be shy.” “She’ll start in a minute. Just wait and see.” “Sure she hasn’t the shapin’s o’ beginnin’ on her.” “She has surely. Good girl, Molly.” “The Sally Gardens, Molly.” Molly Noonan began to sing in a clear soprano voice the first of many songs. Almost everyone in the sitting room performed a song, a recitation, a step-dance or a tune on the fiddle or the pennywhistle. There were no more set dances. As the evening wore on, the ceilidh became quieter. In the kitchen a few women sat around the table talking over cups of tea. “I still think she’s pregnant already,” said a thin, bony woman with a face as sharp as the prow of a skiff. “You mark my words, she’ll be a mother well before nine months are out.” “Maire Kelly, you’ve an evil tongue in your head.” Una Slattery was loyal to Caitlin whom she had cared for as a little girl. “No, I haven’t,” said Maire. “But I have a sharp eye. I can tell when a woman’s pregnant. And I’m always right. Wasn’t I right about the Dooley girl? And Lizzie Thompson? And I’m right about Caitlin MacLir.” “Caitlin Carrick,” said Maggie Potter, a woman in her thirties more talked about than talkative. She had been engaged for thirteen years to Willy Dunn, a farmer who refused to leave his mother to marry. “Caitlin Carrick. I’m sorry. I’m not used to that yet.” Maire Kelly was a stiletto-tongued spinster not known to be afraid of speaking her mind. “Barbed wire in a black dress,” was Slattery’s description of her. “Mind you,” Maire went on, “I’m not reproaching her. It’s happened manys a time before and it’ll happen manys a time again. Michael Carrick is a handsome big man, straight and steady as they come. He’ll make a good husband and father.”