…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.
Fortunately, the glacially slow bureaucratic process kicked in and before the authorities could find a more appropriate position for him, he decided that he would confess. Apologize. Make friends with Ivana. Demonstrate that he was as pure as the driven Siberian snow. Definitely no threat to anyone’s wife. A genuine good guy. This slow process of ingratiation had taken a lot out of him, and that was why he needed the support of the trusty Gennadi who was always there to keep him honest. But deep down, Volodya realized that the entire farce designed to keep his miserable job was only a stop-gap measure. Truly, he would never be free to play his music until he left the Soviet Union. Forever. ★ Jennifer loved Leningrad from the moment she stepped off the plane. After the drabness of Moscow and the subsequent rocky flight in an antiquated Ilyushin, even the airport terminal felt cheerful and bright as the sunlight filtered through three huge domes and splashed over hanging baskets of greenery. As their bus travelled to the Hotel Astoria, she stared with interest at the elegant buildings, now crumbling, many still painted in sunshine yellow as decreed in a pre-revolutionary time, the lacy ironwork on the bridges that crossed a network of canals, and the tall linden trees that crowded the wide streets. Their tour halted briefly at St. Isaac’s Cathedral situated on the same expansive square as their hotel. Natasha ushered them through the darkness of the foyer to stare at the dimly lit, centuries-old frescoes under the church dome. She pointed. “Seven types of marble were used in the construction of this cathedral—the red and white from Italy and the grey, green and black from the Ural Mountains.” The cathedral’s foundation was thick and solid, its flagstones hollowed by thousands of visitors, its wall paint blackened and peeling. “It’s real dark and creepy, isn’t it?” said Lona from the foyer’s shadows. Her words were caught up in the acoustics and amplified. Natasha turned to glare at her.
Sleep I lie in our hot July bed silent sweat listening to the curtain’s undulating monologue profound communication between animate and inanimate beings who eavesdrop on the talkative the silent taste the nectar of my lips—you said but leave on them no shame albeit my fiery desire
Pride I waited for you, until the stars of dawn appeared in the firmament their fire dried up all my tears and the cold hill of Lycavittos didn’t hear me when silently I cried for the dream that died in my heart. But now that thoughts brought you back to me 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.
Same Route A piece of red sail in the dark blue. Olive trees, posts, plastic bags, kisses of bathers, faces, hands, and bodies decayed in time, bitter, but interesting. Cicadas with voices floating in space, you haven’t paid attention to them, foreign. Whether you pay attention or not, whether you listened to them or not, whether you saw or not, nothing, he said. A bitter aroma, forgotten, made of mowed grass. Sit down, then, here on the warmed-up soil, untie, one by one, the knots of the napkin. Eat your bread, biting deep, beyond death. Then, the eggshells, so white and fragile, as evening comes, creak under the feet of the old blind man who walks serenely, led by a small turtle, toward the temple in Kolonos.
