Aligizakis’s English translation makes the book available as an extensive, chronological encounter, and many images retain memorable force: the ant’s winter seeds, the black words suspended from a ceiling, the gear glimpsed at the edge of vision. The translation also preserves the poems’ shifts between colloquial speech, philosophical reflection, biblical language, and abrupt surrealism. At points, however, English syntax feels stiff or opaque, and some collocations sound unusual enough to distract from the image. That texture can make the reader pause productively, but it can also blur whether a phrase’s strangeness is deliberate or translational. Without comparing the Greek originals, one cannot confidently assign those effects to either poet or translator. The introduction’s account of Fostieris’s rhythmic and linguistic range is useful, though its sweeping critical language is less persuasive than the poems themselves. The interview is more illuminating: Fostieris describes translation and tradition as part of poetry’s shared language, and prefers chronological presentation because it shows motifs in their “metamorphoses.” The book’s sequence bears out that claim. For English-language readers, this volume offers more than an introduction to a contemporary Greek poet; it offers a sustained encounter with a poetic intelligence that distrusts easy oppositions. Fostieris’s poems are not transparent meditations: they invite rereading, and their occasional obscurity belongs partly to a project that questions how words and concepts mediate experience. Yet their questions travel. What does memory preserve? Can thought touch the world without remaking it? What does poetry do with the knowledge that bodies and words decay? Across five decades, Fostieris answers not with doctrine but with images that keep changing their terms. This selection’s strongest achievement is to make that change visible. Its long voyage moves toward no final shore, but teaches the reader to notice the seconds, bodies, voices, and vanishing meanings encountered along the way.
Holiday Enclosed days naturally finished. Many lights, colourful dresses and sometimes without dresses, words remembered off by heart and true words, thoughtful or not and silence that was sometimes spoken; there weren’t only the lighted performances; the sun and the trees and the naked body took part too yet the end, even a temporary one, wasn’t unrealized. The theatre was closed. Shadows walked slowly in front of the big mirrors in the hallway, hanging masks, lustful ghosts; there wasn’t any person behind them, and those masks vanished like the smoke of the last cigarette soon as the voice of the milkman was heard in the street next morning and the steps of the cleaning lady on the marble stairs.
“A good friend at Yorkshire would like some of the primary shares. What should I tell him?” Eteo smiled and pulled her close. “This is a hot issue, Frances. I can’t send any shares to Yorkshire, but tell your buddy that anything he might be able to buy in the first two weeks he better go in the market and buy. Even better, tell him that I’m willing to cross a good size of stock to him on the first day, so he’ll be positioned before the stock moves higher.” “What do you expect after two weeks?” “A higher price” he said laconically. Frances gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “Hot man, my hot guy, we’ll see, yes, we’ll see,” she said as she turned to leave, moving her beautiful behind lasciviously as she walked out of the office. Robert O’Leary called Eteo a few minutes later to ask what had happened with the Golden Veins drilling. Eteo told him they had lost the well, which did not surprise Robert. The poor market had already announced as much. “You allocated some shares of Mario’s Nostra to my accounts?” “Of course. Ten thousand for each of your two accounts.” “I’d like some more, Are you tight with this one?” “Big demand for the shares, Rob. I didn’t expect this, honestly. Mario just sent twenty-five new accounts for the shareholder list, a thousand shares each.” “Okay … so cross me another twenty thousand out of your warrants. You’ll cross them out as soon as it lists?” “Yes, Mario wants them on the first trading session. I’ll give you twenty out of those, okay? “Good.” By now Eteo’s day was almost over. He called Ariana and caught her getting ready to visit her mother. “I’m just on my way out,” she explained. “Are you done for today?” “Soon,” he replied. “Want to go for our walk when you’re done? Call me, okay?” “Yes, my love, later on.” “Okay, love you.”
The English translation carries that same balance of intensity and difficulty. Aligizakis gives the poems a clear, open page: the short lines and ample white space encourage the reader to pause, and the recurrent images remain easy to follow. Some formulations, however, sound awkward or opaque in English. At times the syntax and word choice make it difficult to know whether a phrase’s strangeness is intentional or a result of translation. The book does not print the Greek originals alongside the English, so readers cannot compare the two versions. This matters in poetry, where sound, rhythm and shades of meaning are part of the work, not incidental features. Still, the translation’s occasional friction can also suit a poet concerned with language that fails, changes or cannot fully carry an experience.
The substantial introduction traces Faitas’s career and interprets each collection, providing helpful context for readers unfamiliar with the poet. It also quotes many poems and explains their philosophical implications in advance. Some readers will appreciate this guide; others may find that it narrows the space for discovery. The poems often work best when encountered directly, before their imagery is translated into a single explanatory argument. The praise section and biographical notes add further context, though the book’s strongest case for Faitas remains the poems themselves.
Entropy will appeal most to readers drawn to philosophical lyric poetry, Greek myth, and sustained reflection on mortality and the cosmos. It is not a collection built around narrative momentum or sharply individualized dramatic voices. Its movement is cyclical: an image or question returns altered, as if the book’s own form were mimicking the rhythms it describes. That repetition can be immersive, sometimes excessive, but it also gives the collection its identity. Faitas writes from the conviction that a person is brief, knowledge incomplete and the universe beyond comprehension. Yet the poems continue to ask, to remember, to love and to make images out of what cannot be mastered. Their deepest subject may be not entropy as dissolution, but the human urge to find connection within it.
“Twentieth Canto” develops this qualification through the reciprocal action of hands and clay: the hands work the material, while the material works upon the hands. Creation here involves being changed by what one touches. The image quietly opposes the juvenile God’s unilateral impositions. It also offers a persuasive account of poetic responsibility. The artist should discover something through the encounter, rather than merely force the world to illustrate a conviction. This modest image of making carries as much ethical weight as the sequence’s more thunderous denunciations.
The language largely proceeds through accumulation. Short lines, limited punctuation, and rapid shifts between bodily, botanical, theological, and political vocabularies create a restless current. A metaphor rarely remains isolated; it attracts another before its implications have settled. The result can be exhilarating, particularly when an unexpected verb animates a familiar object or when a delicate creature abruptly interrupts an abstract claim. The page gives this crowded movement room through generous spacing, while the Cantos’ italic setting visually distinguishes their answering voices from the Hours.
The same abundance occasionally strains clarity. Successive abstractions and densely modified images can compete for attention, leaving the emotional direction clearer than the relationship between phrases. Similarly, the repeated denunciation of clerics and fanatics sometimes offers less dramatic discovery than the ambivalent treatment of Death. These limitations arise from the work’s chosen pressure: it wants to be chorus, accusation, love song, and cosmic argument at once. Its finest passages allow a concrete action to organize that energy, giving the reader somewhere to stand amid the verbal tempest.
The concluding movements deepen the book by bringing loss closer to the speaking voice. In “Twenty-Third Canto,” a photograph taken from a wallet releases tears, and the speaker loses his desire for a favourite wine. The shift matters because grief is registered as an alteration of appetite and habit. The public vocabulary of outrage yields to the difficulty of continuing a private life. A model train then delivers the familiar promise of doing better, placing the refrain in an object whose smallness contrasts sharply with the cosmic machinery surrounding it.
The final Canto makes the personal cost unmistakable. While the speaker persists in household chores, news arrives of his son’s death in a zealot’s war. This is a revelation within the poem, not a warrant for assuming autobiography. Its force comes from the collision between ordinary maintenance and irreversible loss. Watering flowers becomes almost unbearably inadequate, yet it remains an act addressed to living things. The surrounding animals continue to know their paths and habits until bullets and nets interrupt them. Human bereavement and ecological destruction become neighbouring instances of life needlessly cut short.
At this point the refrain changes. The question becomes whether He could have done better, and the sea answers that He could. The shift moves from an undertaking to a judgment. It withdraws the excuse that the existing order must be accepted as the best or only possible one. The concluding passage attributed to Elytis leaves ethical existence poised upon a precarious point, preserving the difficulty of choice after the accusation has been delivered. There is no easy reconciliation between the poem’s anger and its love of the world.
Opera Bufa succeeds most fully as a work of impassioned refusal, sustained by the pleasures that make refusal necessary. Its theatrical God, philosophical Death, wounded creatures, lovers, and grieving speaker occupy a stage where authority is continually tested against vulnerable life. Although its rhetorical abundance sometimes obscures distinctions, the sequence’s formal persistence gives its indignation cumulative force. The final grief also changes the resonance of everything preceding it. What initially sounds like defiant confidence becomes a more demanding promise: to do better means continuing to care when neither cosmic justice nor personal consolation can be guaranteed.
Herod of Attica Ah, this glory of Herod of Attica, what a glory it is. Alexander of Seleucia, one of our good sophists, arriving in Athens to speak, finds the city deserted, because Herod is in the countryside. And all the young people followed him there to hear him. So, Alexander the Sophist writes Herod a letter, and begs him to send the Greeks back. However, the witty Herod answers at once, “I am also coming along with the Greeks.” How many boys are now in Alexandria in Antioch, or in Beirut (tomorrow’s orators that Hellenism has trained), when they gather at the best tables where sometimes the talk is of refined sophistry, and sometimes of their splendid love lives, turn suddenly absent-mindedly silent. They leave their glasses untouched in front of them, and contemplate Herod’s good fortune. Has another sophist achieved so much? Whatever he wishes, whatever he does, the Greeks (the Greeks!) follow him, without judgment or debate. They don’t even choose anymore; they follow.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the archive reads like a library that survived something — poetry, prose, myth, and survival narratives stacked shelf by shelf.
Mara: vequinox has been posting across a wide stretch of territory this week — modern Greek poetry in translation, mythic and symbolic verse, and prose fiction rooted in exile and displacement.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Voices from the Greek Tradition
Mara: The posts gathered here share a preoccupation with what endures when attention fails — statues, mirrors, people, memory — and what happens when the witness disappears.
Pip: The Yannis Ritsos volume sets the frame precisely. The poem "At Least" opens with a claim that stops you cold: "The statues, he said, die if you don't look at them."
Mara: And the poem follows that logic all the way through the city. Mirrors fill every shop window — bakery chimneys, loquat trees, women, flower carts — all held in glass. Then the stores close, each person takes a mirror home, and the streets go empty and watchful.
Pip: So the mirror isn't vanity — it's a life-support system for things that need to be seen.
Mara: The Tasos Livaditis selection pushes that further into grief. "Return" brings back a childhood friend who died young and comes back, the poem says, to sob through the night because "he had died very young and he had returned to cry so his purpose on earth could be fulfilled."
Pip: Ritsos gives us statues waiting to be witnessed. Livaditis gives us the dead waiting to finish what they started. That's a consistent obsession across this tradition.
Mara: It runs through the Yannis Ritsos Volume IV post as well — "Double Condemnation" ends on those cardboard shoes, "red and imperial, with small mirrors all around." The mirror image returns, this time attached to failed authority.
Pip: Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's "Writing" in her Selected Poems takes the act of creation itself as the erotic and physical center — the poem ends with "Creation is in full blast," which is either transcendence or the best deadline energy I've ever read.
Mara: Titos Patrikios in his Selected Poems asks a quieter question: "Do we become smaller in our daily life or do we assume our natural dimensions?" The poem is about the brotherhood that can't survive ordinary hours.
Pip: Milos Sachtouris, Nikos Engonopoulos, the Neo-Hellene anthology, Hours of the Stars, Nuances, Second Advent of Zeus, Ugga, and the Yannis Ritsos Volume III posts all circle similar ground — identity dissolving into crowd, myth pressing up through lyric, the body as landscape.
Mara: Nuances puts it most brutally: the individual in the agora becomes "salami at the master's lunch," the goal of creating a new world reduced to "his burp at the end of it all intensifying the fragrance of lilac blooms."
Pip: From statues dying unseen to the self digested by the crowd — the tradition holds that witness is not optional.
Mara: Which makes the mythic and symbolic registers these poets reach for feel less decorative and more structural. That's the next layer worth looking at.
Myth, Symbol, and the Threshold
Mara: The posts here work with myth not as backdrop but as the actual grammar of meaning — the way a poem reaches for something larger than its occasion.
Pip: Triptych opens that space quietly: "I pass my finger over your tear wiping sorrow from your sigh, hold on to me and care for buttercups wild crocuses and mustard yellows." Tenderness as its own cosmology.
Mara: Mythography goes darker and stiller — a thicket that declares "Thick shade I shall become," offering cover to a toad, a bass, every creature retreating into evening. The benediction of darkness rather than its threat.
Pip: Wheat Ears lands the loneliness of that threshold: autumn arrives, the vacant chair smiles, and you stand "alone by your shadow, a hint of hope lingering in your mind yet not a single person to share this heaven with." Myth without a congregation.
Mara: That isolation — beautiful landscape, no one to witness it with — connects directly to the survival narratives in the prose fiction.
Surviving the Unquiet Road
Pip: The prose fiction here puts bodies in motion through hostile territory — political, physical, moral — and asks what it costs to keep moving.
Mara: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment in Irish sectarian tension. Jim Patterson's internal monologue lays it out plainly: "We Protestants are not going to live in an Ireland ruled by the Roman Catholic Church. Never." The novel maps how that certainty calcifies into something dangerous.
Pip: Fear of the other's governance — that's the engine of displacement in a lot of these narratives, and it runs across centuries and continents.
Mara: The Gospel of Silence moves that into a military conscript's interior life under surveillance. The narrator describes nodding to survive: "Not because I understood, but because in those days every nod was a form of survival." Silence becomes, as the excerpt puts it, "the permanent environment in which I could exist."
Pip: That's the most precise description of institutional endurance I've encountered in a while — performing normalcy so thoroughly that the performance becomes the self.
Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a traveling group under different pressure — a wilderness route, a missing member, Fire Maker's rule that the group cannot wait for stragglers. The survival logic is immediate and physical rather than political.
Pip: And Redemption and The Long Road round out the theme — one following a character named Hermes through a moment of crisis and ordinary intimacy, the other mapping the erotic and the cosmic onto the same body: "a snowdrift, a galaxy and a nipple, harmony in the arms of life."
Mara: Across all of it, displacement is never just geographic. It's the gap between what a person knows and what they're permitted to say.
Pip: Statues dying unseen, the self digested by the crowd, silence as survival — this is a site that takes witness seriously as a moral act.
Mara: The poetry and the prose keep asking the same question from different angles: what remains when no one is looking, and what does it cost to look?
And I nodded. Not because I understood, but because in those days every nod was a form of survival. I did not mean to express agreement; I only wished to avoid worse consequences. And back in the barracks, nobody asked me anything. Silence became the permanent environment in which I could exist, had to exist. My days passed alike: morning drills, roll call, marches, lunch in the popota, pebbles in the bean stew, half-washed aluminum plates and spoons, lights out, officers shouting, the exhausted gazes of the others, the musty air of the cazarmă. Military life became one endlessly repeating monotony. Yet inside that monotony something almost imperceptible but unstoppable kept growing: expectation. Because I knew — or believed I knew — that it was only a matter of time before they came for me. That one night, in the middle of darkness, the order would arrive, and they would take me to prison, to some cold, windowless place I no longer even dared to imagine, for I feared that if I imagined it, it would become real. Thus my days passed. In waiting. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, whole weeks slid soundlessly into one another, yet the hours did not pass; they only receded farther away. Walking among the soldiers, it sometimes seemed as though no one had noticed anything, as though I had truly succeeded in obeying the order: pretending everything was normal. As though the words nothing, no trouble, all is well truly meant exactly that. I lived through — and within — a poem I had not even yet read. And yet anxiety inhabited every movement I made. When the captain crossed the courtyard and let his eyes drift across the assembled ranks, it felt as though he were searching for me specifically, or watching to see how long I could endure this existence built upon silence. Time passed in a crushing uncertainty. In a vulnerability that seemed endless. And there was the thought which no longer existed as an abstract possibility but spread through my chest like physical pain: Life imprisonment. I went on performing the role of my own…
…Yamka arrived, out of breath, Fire Maker told them, “When there is no place safe to stop, it is always best to keep moving. Were I travelling alone, I would be much closer to home by now. You may stop and rest a bit.” “We’re fine. We only stopped for Finten and Ailan. They’re coming.” Ula didn’t like anyone thinking she couldn’t keep up. Neither did she want Fire Maker to think the chatter of the three friends slowed them down. Father Finten and Brother Ailan were always last to arrive. This time Finten thrashed his way out of the bush. Ailan was not with him. Fire Maker and Keallach looked at Finten but said nothing. Finten shrugged his shoulders. “He had to stop for a moment.” When everyone was finally well rested, Ailan had still not arrived. Fire Maker, ready to carry on, was annoyed. “One of the most important rules I gave you was always to stay together, three to a group, especially when we are following a trade route.” Then he spoke directly to Ari and Rordan, “One of you should have been with Finten and Ailan.” Rordan and Ari remembered Fire Maker’s rule that the group could not wait for stragglers. They knew they were both responsible for Ailan, as neither had wanted to be stuck with the slow walkers and both wanted to be with the two girls. They both decided to turn back for Ailan. Ula volunteered to go back with them. When they found Ailan, they would follow Fire Maker’s trail to where he intended to stop for the night. Fire Maker gave one final direction, “Do not call out. This is not a friendly place. Be careful.” There wasn’t much time so the three set off quickly. This time Yamka walked with Finten and Keallach, and Fire Maker and Bjorn led the way. Rordan, Ari and Ula hurried back down the trail in silence. As they followed at a short distance behind Fire Maker, Father Finten and Brother Keallach welcomed the opportunity to talk to Yamka without her father or Rordan or Ula to answer for her. “What do you three chatter and laugh so loudly about while you’re walking?” Keallach said, grinning. Yamka shrugged but walked quickly on in silence. Finten hurried his step to keep up to her. “Since we are supposed to walk in threes, I would like you to walk with Brother Ailan and me from now on and Ari should walk with Brother Rordan and Ula.” Still Yamka said nothing but walked on quickly ahead to catch up to her father. The three searchers walked fast, retracing their steps through thickening brush. Despite Fire Maker’s order not to do so, Rordan called out softly, “Ailan. Ailan, where are you?” He stopped and whispered to Ari, “He must have stopped to squat away from the trail, then lost his way.” Ula hurried past the other two. “That stupid Finten could have waited for him.” “Why the hell could they not both have kept up with the rest of us?” Ari was suffering his own pangs of guilt for not having remained with Finten and Ailan. “Rordan, you should have walked with them sometimes. Why should I have to listen to his preaching day after day? Ailan didn’t seem to mind, why should you?”
Fragrance Fragrance of cedar on fire abundance unlimited flap of oars slicing the surface with tenderness blackberry’s purple laughter hawks meditating on branches aha, autumn the thief comes to finish hot pillow yearnings of an exuberant call from the opposite shore, smile of the vacant chair looking for a body and you stand alone by your shadow, a hint of hope lingering in your mind yet not a single person to share this heaven with
