Excerpt

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.