Excerpt
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.
