The car, a 1953 Cadillac convertible, stood in front of the Tournquists’ house. Red and shiny, it had gleaming white wall tires. Tyne had not seen it there on any of her previous visits. As Cam drew his Buick alongside, she said, “Your parents must have visitors.” “I don’t think so, honey. There’s no car here except what belongs to the family.” “Oh, did they get a new ….” She stopped, realization dawning. “Oh no, Cam, it can’t be … not mine.” Stunned, she remained seated until he came around to open her door. “I’ll let them tell you.” Cam helped her out, and led her up the front steps. At the top, she put her hand on the wrought iron rail and turned to look back. “Oh, my goodness,” she murmured. The car was indeed hers, Arthur Tournquist informed her a few minutes later. “But, I can’t let you … really, it’s too much ….” “Tyne, will you please stop mumbling and accept our gift graciously?” Arthur smiled at her, but Tyne sensed his impatience. What did one do in a situation like this? She didn’t want to refuse a gift. On the other hand, this gift was much too extravagant, the most she had hoped for being a second-hand older model something. She had no idea what she had expected, because she knew little about cars. But this … even if she was to be their daughter-in-law, she could not accept a gift like this. And that’s just the point, she thought. If Cam and I were already married, it might be a different matter. They could have waited … they should have waited. She thought about Moe and the humble little television set from her future in-laws. She would give anything to be able to trade places with Moe right now, or at least be able to trade gifts. Since that was impossible, she craved the next best thing – to call Aunt Millie and ask her advice.
In Notes on the Margins of Time, the short poem does not merely reduce the scale of the longer lyric. It changes the reader’s experience of implication. “Doxology” concentrates its action into the relation between a damaged human figure and the sun he praises (93). The man resembles a dusty, leafless tree; the sun that has burned him remains beyond burning. The compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury. The English is strongest in its refusal to explain which response should dominate.
The repeated tree establishes the man’s exposure before the final contrast arrives. The poem’s restraint matters more than any single ornamental effect. Its language lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and the sun’s power remain visible. A more elaborately lyrical translation could easily turn that asymmetry into consolation. Here, the starkness permits a harder reading: praise does not prove that suffering has been reconciled with justice. It shows a human response whose dignity and difficulty cannot be separated.
“Hour of Song,” printed on the same page, similarly finds expression at a moment of deprivation rather than abundance. Wine and fruit are present when singing is forgotten; separation supplies the occasion on which song becomes necessary. The poem reverses the expectation that fullness generates art and loss merely silences it. Its short lines make that reversal almost ceremonially plain. Manolis’s uncluttered diction allows the relation between the two moments to remain the main event. The poem needs no explanation of why people sing; its arrangement of circumstances performs the explanation.
Elsewhere, the domestic image carries a more troubling psychological charge. In “Memory,” a father returns without greeting his family, while the others remain absorbed in their own relations (98). The child’s perception is organized by the father’s silence, the window, the storm, and the cross-shaped mark disclosed by lightning. What might have remained a minor household omission becomes a retrospective scene of separation. The poem is not simply remembering an event. It is showing how an event acquires meaning when remembered, and how the child’s image persists beyond the occasion that produced it.
This is an important test of English syntax. The delayed and repeated references to the father create a hesitation appropriate to recollection, yet some constructions are cumbersome enough to slow comprehension unnecessarily. The reader can distinguish that grammatical friction from the productive uncertainty of the image itself. What the window-cross signifies may remain open; who has failed to notice a greeting should be clear. The distinction matters because the poem’s emotional force depends on ordinary actions being apprehensible before their meanings become strange.
“Winter is Approaching” offers another powerful transformation of the domestic (97). A former hat becomes a place for chickens’ eggs, while a father’s stored collar helps define the coming cold. These objects have survived their original occasions of use, acquiring new functions or retaining an unsettling remnant of an old one. The trees’ association with mothballs brings seasonal change into the atmosphere of storage and inheritance. Such images demonstrate why Ritsos’s objects should not be reduced to emblems with fixed meanings. Their force comes from displaced use, touch, and memory.
The English miniatures are often successful precisely because they preserve this practical identity of things. A hat remains a hat even while it becomes a nest; a collar remains a piece of clothing even while it carries paternal distance. The material object is not discarded once the metaphor has been understood. Manolis’s plain nouns help maintain the double attention that these poems require. The reader must see both what an object is and what a particular history has made it capable of suggesting.
(If you like poetry of this kind, you may find more about this great poet in the following links)
4 Therefore I sit and contemplate: what man has that is truly his since my life assumes its importance when I narrate it to someone like daylight that is important to the blind who, at least, need to be seen thus I sleep in peace knowing that someone else risks on my behalf, the one they know, only that each morning, just not to betray myself, I have to gather the broken pieces of the nightmare and Uncle Elias, very old, powdered with talc, since he lived humbly, returned each Christmas and spent his evenings making birds, not real ones, just to make sure they wouldn’t lift up the house again; in fact, one night I retried, and I swore with such empathy that the few cloths I had placed in the room almost dried up, yet just that, and the bed, Judas the Iscariot, betrays me to them every morning I therefore preferred to walk aimlessly, a true delight to my kind of people, and then I truly found myself close to my life, like the very sick who love the next fellow and who stand absentmindedly under the trees or wear old pyjamas or die fast like honeymoons and Mr. Such and Such was very joyous when he made money though that didn’t stop him from slapping me two or three times a day so that my poor mother’s milk went bad and we had to exhume her so other seasons wouldn’t be in danger; Besides, how can I learn new tricks at my age? In fact I’d like to stop here for a moment as it happens in old transcribed glorious documents or like the drunkard who stands in front of the icons for a while before he goes to spend the funeral money on drinks and then the expulsions from parish to parish, short affairs with the handrails, mysterious way of wearing the same hat all the time and this woman at the end of the road, so forgotten that her steps are heard from inside all the fairy tales; then there is always a sorrow for ourselves in all our illusions like our true residence that lasts as long as a song.
(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this beautiful book of translations in the following links)
…“I’m going out. I’ll be back in two hours. I don’t want to find you here when I get back,” she said in a stern voice and left. He sank into his armchair in a world that had collapsed around him. His wife didn’t want to see him again. Where could he go? His life was a big question mark. His life was so arranged and well set up until this morning. His life of order and security has suddenly become chaos and disarray, a gigantic open mouth ready to swallow him. His orderly life has turned into a disorderly one. How could he live now? How could he face his co-workers on Monday? Could he talk to someone? Did he have anyone to talk to? A quick thought flashed through his mind, and he felt shivers travelling through his whole body. He walked upstairs to their bedroom. Everything seemed to be in place. Then why does his life feel upside down? He stepped into the closet. His clothes hung orderly in it. On the top shelf, he groped for the box. He took it down. Went to the bathroom. He placed the box on the counter. He opened the box: he looked at his service revolver. He hadn’t cleaned it in a while. Like a zombie, he loaded his pistol with ammunition. He stared at himself in the mirror. The code. Yes, he remembered the code they all followed, their protocol. That dark thought ran through his mind again, and this time it didn’t make him shiver at all. He felt peaceful. He felt better. The code was what he had followed all his life. A code, a protocol, the secure way of a CIA agent. It’s the same code he had to follow to the bitter end. When everything goes into disarray, and everything becomes nothing but chaos, the code must come into place. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he stared at his face and then faced the pistol in his hand. Suddenly, a euphoric sense of well-being overtook him as if someone was protecting him. He felt strong, good, and comfortable. Heroic. He smiled at himself. He winked at himself. What would she think when she found him? Would she cry? Would she laugh at him exiting this way? His eyes filled with tears, and somehow, he felt an inexplicable warmth, as if in a different state of mind, in that dimension that various books described. He put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and, following the example of so many others before him, Bradley pulled the trigger.
(If this excerpt spoke to you, you can find more about this book in the following links)
“I bet none of your sons’ll be fishermen,” Sweeney argued. “You can’t make a decent living at it any more. The whole industry’s gone mad.” He reached out and poured the formerly rejected half bottle of porter into a glass. “What did it cost to run a boat before the war? A hundred pounds a week maybe. Now it costs around three, four hundred. Even more for the big boats. You’re paying out more than you’re taking in.” “I’m not.” “Then you’re an exception, Joe; and I wish I knew how you did it.” Sweeney was staring at the pale, frothy head in his glass of porter. Then he looked up at Joe. “It must be galling for you to get tuppence or thruppence a pound for your fish at the quayside and watch the fishmongers in their shops rake in anything from sixpence to half a crown.” “And there’s damned little going for sixpence, I can tell you,” said Slattery. “In fact the housewives in the city are complaining because they can’t get enough fish, and the fishermen are complaining because they can’t get rid of it. I hear that whitings were so plentiful during Lent that fishermen couldn’t give them away. They had to send them to the manure yard. I think Michael was wise to sell out. Not that he’s a fisherman anyway.” “Speak of the Devil and he appears,” said Sweeney. “How are you, Michael? Come and join us.” Michael and Caitlin had just appeared at the dining-room door and looked in. “We’re going pretty soon,” said Joe Carney. “Don’t give us that impatient look.” “They’re not very hospitable, are they, Joe?” Sweeney teased with a leer. “Wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded with good friends, lots of food and plenty to drink on a miserable, wet night like this than stuck in here all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to?” “I would to be sure, Sweeney,” Joe agreed. “Come on, you two, sit down, have another drink, enjoy the craic.” “I think we should take the hint and go,” said Seamus Slattery. “It’s getting to be very late. This isn’t one of Finn’s parties.” “You don’t have to leave on our account,” said Caitlin. “Oh, I think we do,” Slattery declared. “It’s been a long and memorable day for you two lovebirds.” “Well, your wife’s still gossiping in the kitchen,” said Sweeney. “Go and grab hold of her and tell her it’s time to go home. Come on, we’ll all go together.” Twenty minutes later the house was empty, and Michael and Caitlin sat…
The strengths of Nuances lie in its imaginative range, its ethical seriousness, and its refusal to divorce lyric beauty from social reality. Aligizakis writes with a notably visual imagination. His poems are saturated with colour—red, white, azure, pewter, gold, black—and with tactile materials such as stone, flesh, wind, water, cloth, metal, and wood. His diction frequently reaches toward the elevated, incorporating mythological, religious, philosophical, and erotic vocabularies. This can create a heightened, ceremonial tone well suited to the collection’s central concerns.
At times, however, the density of the language can work against precision. Some poems accumulate images so quickly that their syntactic or emotional centre becomes difficult to locate. Certain abstractions—“meaning,” “glory,” “freedom,” “opulence,” “greatness,” “void,” “dream”—recur frequently, and their force is strongest when grounded by the concrete material world that the book handles so well. The collection’s most effective poems are often those that allow a particular object or scene to carry the argument: a doll with a missing arm, a rusted bicycle, a flowerpot, a park bench, a syringe, a tank, a food court, or a coffee cup.
This is not a weakness so much as a productive tension within the poet’s poetics. Nuances want to make large claims, but it is most persuasive when those claims emerge from a small, exact image. Its best work reveals how philosophical inquiry can remain rooted in the body and in ordinary experience. The collection’s frequent shifts between sublime imagery and everyday detail are not accidental. They express a central conviction: human beings do not encounter death, love, violence, religion, or freedom in abstract space. They encounter them in rooms, streets, kitchens, workplaces, hospitals, public squares, and landscapes.
Nuances, therefore, are best understood as a collection of ethical lyricism. It asks readers to attend to the shades of feeling and responsibility that are often lost in public language, ideological certainty, or personal habit. Its poems are willing to be sensuous, rhetorical, mournful, comic, politically alert, and metaphysically restless. At its strongest, the book demonstrates that nuance is not a retreat from moral seriousness. It is a way of seeing more clearly: of recognizing that every claim to beauty contains a history, every gesture of love includes vulnerability, and every act of violence leaves behind a world which language must struggle to describe.
There was one more obstacle to overcome: O’Donnell couldn’t drive. Rule #5 stated membership would not be considered unless the applicant possessed a legal driving certificate. He took advantage of Dodge down time to familiarize himself with the machine. Whenever the car slumbered he sat behind its wheel practising the smooth shifting of gears, learner’s manual resting in his lap, the glossy, air-brushed wantonness of Ed Levine’s calendar girls an encouraging audience to his lofty aspirations. He approached Pete Dombrowski about his chances. The longtime club member had dropped by Ed’s garage to replace a gasket. O’Donnell held a light. – How long before I’m in? – Depends, kid, Dombrowski said. Maybe never. – What’s your guess? Gimmee a ballpark. Dombrowski slammed the hood and wiped his hands. – Members decide by secret ballot. That waiting list? It don’t mean nothin’. – I’m getting my licence soon, O’Donnell reminded him. Dombrowski slid in behind the wheel and fired up the car. The engine roared to life. – Don’t go celebratin’ yet, squirt. Soon O’Donnell had mastered the clutch. At every opportunity he stole runs around the block. After only a few weeks he was driving as far as the municipal line. Mr. Levine was frequently waiting for him when he returned to the garage. The two had an unspoken agreement. The senior Levine wouldn’t inform the membership of my friend’s unauthorized excursions if O’Donnell remained silent about Mr. Levine’s afternoon liaisons with a certain housewife. O’Donnell says that pressure to influence the outcome of the draw was especially vigorous the first Sunday in May, as Car and Driver magazine invited all interested associations to enter a vehicle in the Spring Festival gala. The winner that particular Sunday had the privilege of powering the Dodge along the flower and bunting-bedecked…
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where exile, desire, and the weight of history all show up before breakfast — and somehow that's a normal Tuesday.
Mara: vequinox has been posting across a wide range of work lately — modern Greek poetry translations, fiction excerpts, and a philosophical essay on what imagination actually does. That's the territory we're covering today.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry, which is where most of the weight lives.
Voices Out of Exile and Time
Mara: The thread running through these poetry posts is displacement — from homes, from language, from time itself. The question is what survives when all of that is stripped away.
Pip: George Seferis opens the answer with something almost architectural. The setup is a poem called "A House Near the Sea," and it earns its length.
Mara: The poem earns it. Here is the spine of it: "Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them."
Pip: That line does a lot of quiet work. The house isn't a metaphor for loss — it is the loss, with feelings of its own.
Mara: And the Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume VI — push that further into the political. Volume IV's "Without Counterweight" puts it plainly: "All the flags are torn to the whole length of time and there isn't one on a balcony to lower half mast."
Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in Poems Volume II — longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize — turns inward. The observation that cuts is this: "each person keeps the key to their prison in their pocket and pretends to have forgotten it."
Pip: So the exile isn't always political. Sometimes it's the one you've arranged for yourself.
Mara: Antony Fostieris, in Selected Poems, takes that further into paradox — "In my future time, I'm already dead, fresh and dead in my darkness." Alive and dead simultaneously, in glassy cities that sink into clouds.
Pip: Hours of the Stars and the Neo-Hellene Anthology pull in the other direction — toward light, toward a "solemn and beautiful stranger" welcomed until exhaustion, toward wild lilies and the nectar of April lips.
Mara: Entropy frames the whole range: "between the minimal and infinity." Second Advent of Zeus traces selfhood back to its cellular origin, and Titos Patrikios distills community into six lines — seed, acorn, oak, path, forest.
Pip: From houses that resent you to forests that remember you. That's quite a range for one tradition.
Mara: The fiction posts ask a different version of the same question — what does a self do under pressure? Let's go there.
Fiction at the Edge of Endurance
Pip: The fiction excerpts here aren't comfort reads. They're interested in what people do when the situation is genuinely impossible — and how quietly that can happen.
Mara: Straits and Turns opens with a CIA agent named Bradley arriving home after a long flight, his life running on institutional routine, two years from retirement. Then: "he smelled the strong alcohol odour all over the…" — and the excerpt cuts.
Pip: The ellipsis is doing real work there. Everything before it is procedural calm, and then the floor drops.
Mara: Water in the Wilderness takes a different register entirely — warmer, more fragile. A boy named Bobby with missing fingers, escorting an elderly woman through a hospital door with his shoulders erect and head held high. The damage is visible; the dignity is louder.
Pip: And then Redemption lands its immigrant quietly in a three-by-four-meter room with paint peeling off the walls, trying to order food from a menu he cannot read. The stakes are enormous and nobody is shouting.
Mara: Gospel of Silence is the one that swings hardest. The narrator describes choosing "the rebellious Christ" over "the hermits' Christ who resigned himself to everything" — and then his father beats him with a wooden ruler until it shatters.
Pip: He endures it without a sound. That detail is the whole book in one sentence.
Mara: In Turbulent Times catches a family holiday collapsing in slow motion — a son counting down the minutes before he leaves, his mother's voice going "shrill, like the high-pitched squeal of scraped metal." The Qliphoth goes stranger, into an occult archive kept by a psychiatric patient who has memorized forbidden lore.
Pip: Poodie James brings a dead mayor, a woman who doesn't cry, and piano music that might be Chopin. Nostos and Algos asks the plainest question of all: if love is there and you won't give it, "why are you still breathing?"
Mara: Across all of it, the body under pressure — institutional, familial, historical, self-imposed — is the constant. The desire to escape, and the question of what you carry when you do, runs right into the next theme.
The Body That Desires and the Body That Endures
Pip: Red in Black is reviewed here, and the review makes a distinction that matters: the strongest poems are the ones where the beloved isn't just observed.
Mara: The review puts it directly: "The poem's lyric force comes from mutuality." When touch and transcendence are shared gestures rather than one person's projection, the erotic becomes something more durable.
Pip: What this means in practice is that desire without mutuality is just description — and description alone doesn't hold a poem up.
Mara: Red and black move through the collection as moral categories, not just colors — passion and industrial damage, the body that wants and the body that gets worn down. Wheat Ears lands the same collision differently: a phone call from someone already buried, their laughter roaring through the wire.
Pip: Hear Me Out takes it into the digital — "I started falling in love with you, without even knowing you." Same ache, different medium, same unanswerable questions about what's real.
Mara: Which is also, quietly, a question about imagination — what the mind constructs when the body isn't there. That's exactly where the essay goes next.
What the Imagination Actually Does
Pip: An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative takes on a question that's been wrong since Aristotle — what truth means when you're talking about poetry.
Mara: The essay argues that Europeans have reduced truth to correspondence with empirical fact, and that this is a fundamental error. It goes back to the Greek word Aletheia, drawing on Heidegger: "Aletheia is understood as unconcealment, the state of being disclosed."
Pip: So the upshot is that a poem isn't lying when it doesn't match the facts — it's doing something the facts can't do, which is disclose what's otherwise hidden.
Mara: The essay is careful to say this isn't a call to revive ancient Greek philosophy wholesale. The point is that the dominant model of truth has narrowed what we allow imagination to count as real — and poetry pays the price.
Pip: Every poem in this episode is, in some sense, an argument for that claim.
Mara: Houses that grow resentful, bodies that endure, love that arrives by wire — and underneath all of it, a theory of what imagination is actually for.
Pip: Same questions, next episode. The site keeps publishing.
He walked back to the rented room and settled in his new home. It was a small room with a table, a chair, a closet for his clothes, and a single bed. The size of the room was no more than three by four meters, with paint cracks all over; some paint had peeled right off the walls. He didn’t really care about its condition. It was a very cheap room. A small window with shutters opened to the street, and Hermes saw a small garden. He took out his clothes from the suitcase and hung them with care in the closet. He, then, sat down on the bed and thought it would be a good idea to write home and let them know he had arrived and was okay, three letters to three different addresses. Realizing he had no paper, he walked out to the closest corner store, where he bought some paper, a small jar of coffee and a small rectangular box of sugar cubes, which he encountered for the first time in his life. He went back to his room and sat at the desk to write his first letter to his uncle and untie. He described in detail that his trip was very good, the city was beautiful, and he felt enthusiastic about the university. He wrote with intense feelings, particularly in the second letter, addressed to Magdalene. He signed the letters and sealed the envelopes. He would post them first thing tomorrow morning. Hunger took over him. He got up, knocked at the door of his landlady and asked where he could find a restaurant to eat something. She informed him that “Black Cat” was the closest restaurant to the house and told him how to get there. Hermes got out and walked the few blocks to the restaurant. The server brought his coffee. Hermes understood that coffee was served each time, even before an order was given to the servers. He looked at the menu, but he couldn’t understand the words; therefore, he didn’t know what to order. He had his coffee and a cigarette. The girl refilled his cup and looked at him with questioning eyes. He pointed to the menu and said, “I don’t know what these are…” his finger travelling down the list of food items. The young server asked him, “What language does he speak…” He said, “Greek,” she called him to follow her. He got up and followed the girl through a hallway to an opening that connected the restaurant to the kitchen.
Last year at Brodick was a disaster. It should have literally been the last. But back they came. ‘This year will be even better than last,’ his mother had written. ‘Morag is her old self again after that awful experience in August and Rowena is just such a sweet little doll. We are going to be so happy showing her off to all the other guests and visitors. She will be the Little Belle of Brodick this year. If only your dear father could be there in flesh instead of in spirit. But how proud he must be in any case, as I am. Hamish has continual headaches these days and Alec is pale and liverish from working so hard. They both need the holiday at Brodick, as you must too. Could you not take the earlier week off and be with us the whole time? After all, you are the boss of that firm of yours. And Morag never sees you through the year. She misses you. She says you are becoming more a stranger than a brother.’ This year the changes of last year were twelve months worse. Mrs Anderson’s whole body was turning to steel, like her tiny, ball-bearing eyes. Morag was no longer pregnant. She was anaemic and tired and bitchier than ever. Rowena ran away every time Ian approached and screamed that he was going to beat her. This invariably brought Morag or her mother or both of them running to the child’s side, yelling at Ian to leave the little dote alone, to act his age and stop bullying a mere infant. Hamish and Alec sat all day every day in the stuffy sitting room, playing cribbage almost interminably. There were no walks, no golf, no drinks. Only the boat-trips were continued, apparently for Rowena’s sake, but Ian had missed those during the first week of the holiday. ‘Never mind, Ian; we’ll all enjoy the return trip to Gourock at the end of the week,’ his mother said. ‘It’ll be so lovely to have us all together again, the whole family, sailing up the Clyde towards home. I bet your dear father is sighing so contentedly if only we could hear him.’ ‘I won’t be going back with you at the end of the week.’ ‘What do you mean, Ian; you won’t be going back with us at the end of the week? Of course you will.’ His mother’s voice grew shrill, like the high-pitched squeal of scraped metal. ‘I won’t be. I’m leaving this morning. I’m catching the boat back to Belfast tonight.’ ‘But Ian, it’s only Tuesday,’ Morag pointed out. ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’ ‘Look your fill,’ said Ian, glancing at his watch. ‘You’ve got one hour and thirty-five minutes.’ ‘Oh you insufferable, inhuman monster,’ Morag yelled. ‘You’re making a mockery out of family feelings and affections.’
