…lavishing her body, erotic and desirous, promising and promiscuous; Mona, the nurse who came to replace his gauzes. Mona, a woman, came to the help of a man desiring nothing more than what nature has allotted to him: lust, even with his half-severed penis, a man desires to ride on top of a woman’s body, this woman’s, Mona’s. In this war zone, man never stopped longing for that exquisite moment of coupling, nature’s first and most powerful expression: a man, an injured man, coupling an eloquent, musical, poetic, female body. His eyes still closed, he saw himself on a bed where he was battling his last, three days and three nights, with his stressed breath in irregular spasms of a living-dead man, skinny, leftover of stamina recluse in his austere village bed. Shadow of a man left to perish as nature commanded, yet, his last breath was delayed as for three long days and three long nights, he kept on gasping for air unable to release his soul to his creator while from time to time he would whisper in his so ever weak voice one word, “pussy” to the amazement of his relatives, especially to his two sons who didn’t know how to play out their father’s last wish. And the night arrived again for the fourth time, and the owls sang their lonely songs in the nearby barn while the moon kept on playing hide and seek behind the clouds, while the unrested soul of the old man repeated the same double syllable word, “pussy”. Indeed, it was tragic and comical for the three relatives who stayed for the vigil: one of his sons, the old man’s niece, and the servant girl who attended to the wishes of the almost-dead man. Not any special wishes did the moribund man have other than perhaps stir him from time to time to check whether he was still on the upper stratum, although his occasional whisper, “pussy” was witness to the fact. At the desperate moment of ambivalence when no one of the three knew what to do to help the old man relax and let his soul be released to the elements, Mona, the twenty-four year old maid with her flaming eyes and promiscuously half-open lips and her voluptuous breasts, an angel of mercy nonetheless, neared the bed of the old man, raised her skirt, took his fragile hand and placed it behind her light undergarment and between her legs upon which time and upon feeling the touch of his…
‘Yes, Nora. Yes, I honestly do.’ ‘I wish I could share your optimism.’ ‘You’re becoming cynical in your old age, Nora. You need cheering up.’ Nora looked behind her towards the door. ‘I don’t know what’s keeping Janet.’ ‘I wouldn’t even like to hazard a guess,’ Clifford said with a smile. ‘Would you like me to order drinks for you now? What were you and Janet … ? Ah, here she comes.’ He stood up as Janet rushed in. ‘Sorry I was so long, Nora,’ Janet said, ‘but I kept meeting people. Robert Purdy’s here with his fiancée. And the whole Morgan family from Clondarragh.’ ‘Janet, you know Dr Hamilton, don’t you?’ ‘But of course I do. How are you, Dr Hamilton? We haven’t seen you down in our part of the world for ages.’ ‘I’m fine, thank you, Janet. It’s a pleasure to see you again. I hope your mother and father are well.’ ‘Hale and hearty, Dr Hamilton. I’ll tell them you were asking after them.’ ‘Yes, please do,’ said Clifford. ‘I actually came to invite you and Nora to join us at our table. My wife, my son, his girlfriend, and some friends of ours are there.’ ‘That would be very nice,’ said Janet. ‘We usually have more company with us, but they all had other things to do this evening.’ Clifford led the way to his own table and made the necessary introductions. Nora and Janet sat down on two extra chairs that John had already added to the group. Nora sat between John and Ian, Janet between Ian and Clifford. ‘Now, what is everyone drinking?’ Clifford asked. Fiona and Susan had had enough, they said. Janet and Catriona asked for lemonade. Julian a Macallan single-malt Scotch—‘If they have any.’ Nora ordered gin and orange. ‘Mother’s ruin, Nora,’ said John. ‘Make mine a John Powers, Clifford.’ ‘Julian’s choice of Scotch for me too,’ said Ian. ‘Do you ever drink anything else, Ian?’ ‘Only Drambuie, but not now.’ Clifford smiled. ‘You’ll have Coca Cola in your whiskey, I suppose.’ ‘Get away with you, man,’ Ian scolded. ‘Even though I know you’re joking, you should still be horse-whipped for a crack like that. In Scotland we don’t joke about our Scotch.’
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog, if libraries had this much range — Greek exile poetry, Canadian prairie childhoods, Soviet-era blackmail, and a taxi ride you would not want to be on.
Mara: vequinox has been posting across all of that territory, and today we're moving through three areas: modern Greek poetry collections, literary and crime fiction, and the theme of identity, memory, and exile. Let's start with the poetry.
Greek Verse, Exile, and the Long Tradition
Pip: The question underneath all these poetry posts is what it means to translate and collect Greek verse — not just linguistically, but as an act of cultural preservation, pulling work from Ritsos, Seferis, and others into a form that travels.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volume sets the tone early. From "The Exile Diaries," dated the fourth of December: "Moon, take off your shoes / I can't sleep on my back / if I'll turn to my side I'll hurt. / The door is open / I can't leave."
Pip: That last line does a lot of work. The door is open and he still can't leave — which is exile's specific cruelty: the constraint isn't always a lock, it's something internal, something the body carries.
Mara: George Seferis's collected poems push into similar territory with "The Sentence to Oblivion," and Tasos Livaditis, whose volume was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, writes of being "completely dishonest like this world that it belongs to you only when you promise it to someone." Titos Patrikios in his selected poems warns readers to "protect yourselves from the poets who steal verses from graves of the unknown."
Pip: There are also original collections here — Entropy, Ugga, Medusa, Troglodytes, Hours of the Stars — each posting a single poem as a window into the full book. Hours of the Stars centers on Ionia, lost in 1922, where "man tried to create the face of god and at last he created his own thoughtful face." The Neo-Hellene anthology rounds out the range, gathering voices across the modern Greek tradition into one place.
Mara: That breadth — from Ritsos's internment diary to an anthology spanning the whole tradition — is the argument these posts make together. The fiction excerpts are making their own kind of argument, and it runs across a very different set of landscapes.
Novels at the Edge — Fiction and Crime Excerpts
Pip: What connects this stretch of fiction posts is that nearly every excerpt drops you into a moment of pressure — someone is hiding something, someone is about to find out, and the social fabric is visibly straining at the seam.
Mara: Wellspring of Love opens in a hospital corridor. Tyne has just entered her aunt Millie's room and the excerpt lands here: "Tyne was conscious of two disturbing thoughts, the first that Dr. Dunston had seldom greeted her in any other way than with his usual cheery, 'Hi, sis.' Her second thought was that the woman in the bed, frail and ashen-faced, was hardly recognizable as her beloved aunt."
Pip: Two small observations, and suddenly the reader knows the diagnosis is bad and the relationship is complicated. That's efficient fiction — the weight is in what goes unsaid.
Mara: Jazz with Ella works the pressure from a completely different angle. Pavel, Vera, and Shukshin have cornered a Soviet bureaucrat named Pyotr — they have photographs of him with the police chief's wife, and they need forged documents. Pyotr sputters through a tantrum, and then Vera simply asks, "May I pour you another drink?" The coercion is wrapped in perfect politeness.
Pip: Nothing says "you have no leverage here" quite like being offered a refreshment mid-extortion.
Mara: In the Quiet After Slaughter takes a coming-of-age angle — two teenage brothers drawn into a scheme involving a mysterious receiver on a hill called Pork Chop, with a cast of characters that includes a man with a wart that "looked like a ladybug" above one eye. The Qliphoth is denser, set in a flat littered with occult paperbacks and failed technology, a woman piecing together who her missing lodger has become. Savages and Beasts puts a boy named Anton in possession of a dead priest's diary, paralyzed by what he should do with it.
Pip: He Rode Tall goes quieter — a maritime engineer named Joel, decades of city noise behind him, sitting on a horse in a pasture and feeling his heart come back online. In Turbulent Times is a social novel, a dinner table of doctors and their partners trading sharp observations about a young woman Clifford delivered as an infant under difficult conditions. The Unquiet Land sets its pressure in Ireland, where Mother Ross tells Padraig that "forgiveness is a rare commodity in Ireland — Irishmen never forgive and never forget." Redemption and Straits and Turns close the set — one a quiet departure from a Cretan village, the other a Vancouver taxi ride with a passenger whose presence is described with the kind of sensory detail that makes you grateful for fresh air.
Mara: What holds these excerpts together is that each one catches a character at a threshold — a decision, a revelation, or a departure. That threshold question carries straight into the next set of posts.
Where You Come From, Who You Are
Pip: The identity and memory posts are asking a version of the same question across very different geographies: what does a person carry when the place they came from is gone, or far, or changed beyond recognition?
Mara: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy opens at the largest possible scale: "before we existed the Earth lived, before it spread its plains it was alive with its knowledge and wisdom." It's a cosmological frame for belonging — rootedness as something older than any single person's story.
Pip: Which makes the smaller, more personal accounts feel like they're answering that opening from the ground level.
Mara: Prairie Roots does exactly that — a childhood memoir of Saskatchewan winters, threshing season, geese in formation, paths worn single-file through snowdrifts toward a school facing a rising sun with no warmth in it. Red in Black brings it into the present tense, a poem about wilted supermarket vegetables and rotten tomatoes that pivots sharply to a man shot by a police officer. And Introspection's poem "Delta" traces a speaker who walked to the far ends of the world arguing for elegance and freedom, and was called a lunatic for it.
Mara: The thread running through all of it is that identity under pressure — exile, displacement, the refusal to forget — keeps finding its way back into the work, whether the form is a Greek lyric or a prairie memoir.
Pip: Exile poetry, coercive Soviet bureaucrats, a boy with a priest's diary, and a cosmological origin story for belonging — it's a wide orbit.
Mara: The site keeps returning to what people carry across distance and time. There's more of that to come.
Every couple of days Swanson visited Aunt Peggy’s. He and Bud held court at the kitchen table. They fell silent if any of us came too close. Most evenings Burt retreated to a spot on the river and helped Mark with his knots. A fear of cougars prevented me from joining them. One night Swanson and Bud asked to talk with us. They waited until our cousin was asleep. – We’re gonna hook up the receiver on Sunday, Bud said. – What of it? Burt said. We’ve got a TV back home. – We’ll need assistants. – Paying top dollar, Bud said. Up to it? – Why tell us? Burt sparred. We’re students. On vacation. –We’ve had dozens of applications, Swanson said.He removed his cowboy hat. There was a wart above one eye looked like a ladybug. – We don’t know nothing about receivers, I said. We don’t even know what one looks like. – You boys ever heard of the Sherpas? Swanson asked. They help climbers in the Himalayas. – Think it over, boys, Bud said. It’s a great opportunity. After Swanson had left, our aunt scouring dishes, Bud leaned into Burt and said, Jails are full of punks like you. He slid a fresh toothpick into his cheek, then quickly removed it again. – One night changes their whole outlook. Get my meaning? – I was 14. I didn’t. Burt wedged one of Bud’s toothpicks between his lips. – That the reason, Uncle Bud, you walk like a girl? Pork Chop Hill seemed considerably steeper standing in a pasture at its base than it did from downtown Coppermine. Its flanks were dressed in dense old growth, the highest point smothered in cloud. A hundred people must have turned up to see us off. A photographer from the Gazette snapped photos; the school band did its best. Flatulent cows grazed lazily amongst the muddy pickups. Swanson reiterated our tasks. He and Bud, carrying sensitive…
“Because you don’t want to face the consequences of not helping.” Shukshin glowered at the public official. “What do you mean?” Pyotr became agitated. “Are you threatening me? If this is a joke it’s gone too far!” “It’s no joke.” Pavel spoke again. “I need all of the documents: permits, propiska, passport, whatever is necessary, and I need them soon. As to why you should help me then I’m afraid it’s like Shukshin says. You don’t want others to know what we can tell them about you.” Pyotr froze to his chair. It was not a joke. To his surprise, Vera chimed in. They were all in it together. “You were seen…at the boathouse. You understand me?” He remained silent so she continued. “With the police chief’s wife—what’s her name, Tanya?—and we all know that the police chief would not like your activities with his wife, would he?” Pyotr was stunned. It was all collapsing in front of him—the careful secrecy, the hidden assignations. “We…simply meet to talk. There’s nothing harmful….” He stopped. Vera was shaking her head. “We have photos,” and she pointed to a large American-style camera on the bed. “We took photos of you and Tanya together. Believe me, you were not just talking.” “What! Devil take it! Give me those photos. You have no right…” He stood up, prepared to invoke some bureaucratic rule that would force them to comply—or what? Report them to the police? They sat politely while he worked through his tantrum, sputtered another oath or two and smacked the table with his fist. Finally he sat again and slumped in the chair. “May I pour you another drink?” Vera inquired with a sweet smile as if he were a friendly visiting uncle. “I think it would be best to find the passport first, don’t you? That way we can make the other documents match whatever the name on the passport.” “Yes, I suppose so,” Pyotr agreed at last. “I know of just such a widow who would probably give up a passport for a sum of money. I hope you people have some cash to pay her.” “We’ll find the money,” said Pavel. “You find the goods.” “And some cash for me, for my trouble in locating the passport,” the official continued. But Shukshin had only to glance at him quizzically and indicate the camera once more for Pyotr to understand that any cash benefit to him would not be forthcoming.
Joel was not a spiritual person. Never had been. For almost thirty years as a maritime engineer, Joel had spent most if not all of his time in his head. His brain had earned him some degree of respect in his profession and helped him to survive disaster after disaster on the bumpy journey of life. But at this very moment, sitting astride the orange horse on the crest of a hill, admiring the grazing mares and foals, Joel felt for a moment the power of his heart. It had been a long time since he had this kind of feeling, but Joel knew that he was feeling rather than thinking. He could feel his heart coming to life. With the exception of the sounds of nature, the silence was so powerful that the only way he could think to describe it was that it was very huge. Or so it seemed to Joel who had spent most of his mornings for the last thirty-two years nursing a hangover in one urban ghetto or another as horns blasted and fumes rose from the heart of the city outside his hotel room or apartment. Compared to the city this was looking like a pretty good way to start a day. Sure, it didn’t have a Starbucks. But you know what. This was better. And with this realization Joel made amental note to himself that yes, it surely was a wonderful day to be alive. It must have been an hour since he had let himself through the swinging ranch gate that led to the pasture of abundance. Abundant with the kind of grass that only a true son of the prairie could appreciate. Sure, it had been a lot of years since his childhood days on the ranch, but he still knew the value of good pasture when he saw it. And this pasture was very good, having a thick mat of hearty wild grasses standing a foot high in some places. This was the kind of grass that cattlemen yearned for, and if they got excited about the grass, you can only imagine the kind of impact it had on the livestock. Beyond the natural abundance of the grass, this pasture was special for another reason. Unlike the farmland on the plains below, these hills had never been cultivated to grow a single crop of grain. He was riding on the real thing.
…she died of consumption, God rest her soul. Flynn was well up in his teens by then and already working in McGuigan’s quarry. But he grew up with a chip on his shoulder as big as a boulder and a fierce hatred of the English that he’s nurtured for years.” “He needs to learn the lesson of forgiveness,” Padraig remarked. “Forgiveness is a rare commodity in Ireland, Padraig,” Mother Ross said. “Irishmen never forgive and never forget. That’s their nature.” She paused, staring into the hearth. Then she asked, “What about Caitlin?” “What about Caitlin?” Padraig repeated with more feeling than he meant to show. Mother Ross looked suspiciously at Padraig, but gave him no inkling of the thoughts that rushed through her mind. “Is Caitlin ready to be married in church?” “She is now, yes,” Padraig replied with a touch of petulance. “Finn didn’t know, did he?” Padraig walked across to the door and leaned against the wall beside it. His shoulder and his broken ribs were painful. “Oh Finn knew all right,” he said, but his face had an uncomfortable, guilty look. Mother Ross made no comment. She felt that Padraig and Caitlin together had indecently betrayed the man who had been closest to both of them. And yet she could not see how anyone but Finn MacLir himself could live outside the Church. She was happy for Caitlin, but disappointed at the same time. “Then they won’t have to wait long before they can be married.” “They have only to name the day.” Neither Mother Ross nor Padraig spoke, and they were still silent when voices and footsteps were heard outside, and doors opened both in the front and the back of the house. “I still think we should have buried his wine alongside of him,” someone said. “Yes, think how happy he’d be if he woke up one night and found it there beside him.” “He wouldn’t want to get out.” “Not till the bottle was empty at any rate.” “Bottle be damned; he drank it by the barrelful.” “What an old sot he was.” “Ay, but you don’t find his likes below every hedge.” “I’ve heard many a woman between Iceland and the Isle of Wight say the same thing about him.”
In any case, she suspects that in recent months he became bored with the whole techno consumerist thing, because she no longer heard the all-night jingle of marathon game-play with Doom Wizards of Gorm, he abandoned his painful experiments with sampling and sequencing old guitar riffs, he now longer nagged her for a loan to buy a faster modem or a bigger hard drive. And he’d play the drawling media philosopher over breakfast, displaying a growing impatience with the digitised world-picture. “The trouble, you see, with Virtual Reality, Pauline, is that it will all be designed in Tokyo. You’re going to walk around in a Japanese executive’s dream helmet . . .” She’d ignored such performances—typical of his late night TV manner, which she’d found so irritating when she was trying to cope first thing in the morning with lesson plans and job applications, an overdraft and and mental overdrive. But discs and cartridges are littered all over the table, the floor, the bed, as if he’d tossed them away in disdain, packages of memory that had somehow failed him. His books are stacked on the sagging shelves behind the bed. Many were actually hers, donated to help him with A levels, like all those Pelicans on sociology and history. Of course, he never opened them. And he’d only done half the literature coursework properly, and then perversely he’d concentrated on a few obscure corners, like symbolism in Yeats, while flippantly trashing George Eliot or Jane Austen in random bursts of invective, not for any clearcut ideological reason. Lucas wouldn’t read systematically, he’d rather drift around CND jumble sales trawling for dog-eared things like Colin Wilson’s The Outsider or those poems of mad skinny Patti Smith, or coffee-table books on Salvador Dali.. Here’s Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. ‘These metaphysical detective stories take the reader through the forking gardens of Time and Space!’ Forking hell . . . She sprawls across the bed for a closer look, across crumpled paper tissues, yellowing vests, that horrible black shirt with eagles on the buttons, his broken sunglasses . . . She never bought an ex-library copy of The Rosicrucian Mysteries. Or The Ufo Encyclopedia. And what’s this disintegrating edition of Morning of the Magicians doing in her flat? A signed copy. ‘Nick Beardsley, London, 1966’. She can hardly bear to touch it. ‘The black tide of occultism.’ That’s what old Daddy Freud called this yuck stuff. This is a residu, a glistening slug-trail excreted by Nick, and it looks as if it’s sticking to Lucas. She’d thought she’d got rid of all Nick’s ticky-tacky rubbish. And here she goes again, hurling it across the room, any moment now she’ll find some more lurid trash. They’re all the same, stupid schoolboy men.
‘Susan, that’s unkind.’ Clifford considered Susan rather trying at times. ‘It’s also unkind of you two to get on to shop-talk when we’re out enjoying ourselves,’ Susan countered. ‘Ask her to join us. Let’s give her a good time.’ ‘Maybe I will in a moment.’ Clifford took a thoughtful sip of his brandy. ‘I suppose Liam’s looking after the children,’ said Fiona. ‘Or Nora’s mother is,’ Clifford suggested. ‘You mean that pretty girl has children already?’ John could not conceal his surprise. ‘Two of them,’ Fiona answered. ‘A boy and a girl.’ ‘She didn’t waste any time,’ Ian remarked. ‘They’re young, of course,’ said Fiona. ‘Four years and two and a half, I believe.’ ‘Don’t look now, Ian Anderson,’ said John, ‘but Clifford has just gone to get you a woman: a dark beauty of black, remorseless tragedy.’ ‘You’re drunk, John Simpson,’ Susan said. ‘How many sneakies did you have at the bar?’ ‘Listen to her, Ian,’ John said. ‘Not a month married and she’s nagging the hell out of me already. Are you sure you really want a wife?’ ‘Very sure,’ Ian replied firmly. ‘I don’t imagine that you would be nagging Julian, Catriona,’ John said, ‘when you are only a month into your marriage.’ ‘I’d wait for two months,’ said Catriona. Like Ian’s, her voice too was richly seasoned with Fiona’s lost ‘oats and haggis.’ ‘You’d better watch that one, Julian,’ John warned light-heartedly. ‘What Clifford didn’t tell you,’ Fiona began, leaning forward to speak in confidence, ‘is that he delivered that young lady—at her birth, I mean—when he was barely two months into his internship. It was a very difficult placenta previa delivery that required a C-section under the most primitive conditions. He almost lost the mother and the baby too.’ ‘Good old Clifford,’ said John. ‘A born surgeon and one of the best we have in the country.’ ‘But the sad result of Clifford’s first major surgery,’ Fiona said, ‘is that the mother was left unable to bear children. Clifford blames himself for that. Unfairly, I think. Given his age and inexperience at the time, he did well to save the lives of both the mother and her baby. But he rarely talks about it. He has received both high commendation and strong condemnation from the local doctors in the area.’
Jeff straightened up and took a deep breath. “Maybe you’d better go in now,” he said hoarsely. “She was asking for you earlier. She’s in room one.” Tyne patted his hand and got to her feet. “I’ll let you know what Dr. Dunston says, Dad.” A brief nod was the only sign that he heard her. She turned away and headed for the corridor leading to the two private rooms in the building. She was not surprised her aunt had been put into a private ward; after all, no one deserved it more. Millie Harper had been a tireless advocate and worker for the hospital since before it had been on the drawing board. Tyne remembered her own brief stint on her aunt’s committee during the building year. She had come home from Calgary to nurse her dad back to health following his stroke, and Millie had recruited her for the Building & Furnishing committee. Since then Millie had been a fixture on the board of the Emblem hospital, at times serving under Morley’s chairmanship. Tyne stopped before the door which bore the room number and a plaque with the name of the donor who had furnished it. She could hear low voices which stopped when she tapped lightly. The door opened to reveal her mother, an anxious look on her pale face. “Oh, Tyne, come in. Dr. Dunston is here.” She stood aside to let Tyne enter. Grant Dunston raised his head. “Hello, Tyne.” Then he turned his attention back to Millie Harper who lay quietly in the bed, her eyes closed. Tyne was conscious of two disturbing thoughts, the first that Dr. Dunston had seldom greeted her in any other way than with his usual cheery, “Hi, sis.” Her second thought was that the woman in the bed, frail and ashen-faced, was hardly recognizable as her beloved aunt. Her heart in her throat, Tyne made her way to the bedside and gently took hold of the cool hand that lay motionless on top of the covers. Millie opened her eyes and a flicker of a smile made her lips twitch.
Manolis Aligizakis 