Tag: human-condition

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Memory

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more ambitious translation and publishing projects in Canadian letters — and vequinox has been keeping pace with it post by post.

Mara: Today we're moving through three territories: the Greek poets Aligizakis has translated and championed, his own original collections where myth and lyric reflection do the heavy lifting, and the fiction and memoir excerpts that round out the catalog. Let's start with the translated poetry.

Greek Voices, Exile, and the Weight of the Word

Pip: The Greek poetry translations here span decades and temperaments — Ritsos, Cavafy, Livaditis, Engonopoulos, and more — and the question they collectively raise is what it costs to carry that tradition into English.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis Selected Poems, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, gives you a sense of the stakes. The poem opens: "Tonight, we decided to write a letter for you, mother. Perhaps we may hear the rain dripping on your worn-out clogs."

Pip: That "we decided" is doing a lot of work — collective survival addressed to one exhausted woman. The grief is completely specific and completely transferable.

Mara: Ritsos shows up across multiple volumes here. In Volume III, the Exile Diaries entry for the thirteenth of December reads: "Ball forever between two kicks and I see myself played, the only spectator, punished not to be sad."

Pip: Ritsos in exile, watching himself from the outside. That's not self-pity — that's a man who has outlasted his own feelings and is just reporting the weather.

Mara: Volume I and Volume V extend that range considerably. Romiosini in Volume I is a long mythic address to a woman who embodies Greek endurance, while The Dead House in Volume V turns inward — a family scene held in suspension, the mother embroidering under an oil lamp while the father is away hunting.

Mara: The Katerina Anghelaki Rooke Selected Poems opens with a figure whose face extends "like the whitewashed rooms of the paternal home" — domestic scale carrying enormous emotional freight. The Kariotakis-Polydouri volume pairs two poets whose real-life tragic love story frames the work; the Cavafy collection gives us souls sitting in withered bodies, loving and fearing the miserable lives they lead.

Pip: Engonopoulos reaches for the Phoenix myth to explain why Greek cities keep burning down and rebuilding. The Neo-Hellene Anthology pulls the widest lens — a seasonal love poem that ends not with waiting but with going to find the beloved when autumn arrives. Titos Patrikios closes it out with words that never got said, slowly petrifying into silence.

Mara: What connects all of it is that translation here is not a neutral act — it is an argument that these voices belong in English.

Pip: Which makes the next territory feel like a natural extension — Aligizakis's own original work, where the myth-making is his.

Myth, Rebirth, and the Lyric Self

Pip: The original collections gathered here are doing something specific: they're using mythic structure — rebirth, dissolution, the cycle of loss and return — as a container for very immediate lyric feeling.

Mara: Mythography makes the argument plainly. The poem "Rebirth" reads: "lonely I now feel and in salinity I shall dissolve to dust I shall turn and as a vesper I shall return slowly digested breath by breath particle upon particle wave against wave I shall endure with hope over new hope."

Pip: Dissolution as a form of patience. That's a genuinely hard thing to write without tipping into sentiment, and it doesn't tip.

Mara: Entropy's "Archer of the Unfeasible" runs a similar arc — a speaker who is very late, hung between meaning and fate, spending the unfeasible. Troglodytes frames the poet himself as a force of nature entering "the heart of July's noon hour ruffling the petals of the jasmine." Wheat Ears catches an echo of a raindrop falling into a fountain and greets life directly: "splash."

Mara: Rendition, Impulses, Nuances, and UGGA each work at smaller scale — a bronze statue waiting for a shard of sun, heroes rising moistened by fish scales from old newspaper wrapping, a scarf dropped and snatched, a collective body refusing mass death. The register shifts but the underlying motion is the same: something dissolves, something returns.

Pip: From rebirth in lyric form to rebirth in narrative — the fiction excerpts are next.

Stories in Motion: Fiction and Memoir on the Page

Pip: The prose excerpts span genre and geography — a wartime thriller, a Vancouver taxi story, a painter's Arctic odyssey, a hospital corridor, a widow deciding to live — and what they share is a particular attention to physical detail carrying emotional weight.

Mara: In Turbulent Times sets the scene precisely: "Clifford cut the car's bright beams, plunging the passengers into pitch darkness. Then the interior lights came on as the Bentley doors opened. Ian took Nora's hand and helped her out." A cottage materializes around them — willow-patterned plates, a pendulum clock, a fire already set.

Pip: The physical world doing the work of welcome. You know everything about the people in that room from what they notice.

Mara: Straits and Turns goes somewhere rougher — a Vancouver cab driver named Costa, a fare that ends with a raised middle finger and eleven dollars sixty cents that nobody can produce. The scene earns its tension through accumulated small indignities before the confrontation lands.

Pip: Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada is the one that swings the widest. A boulder, a ten-thousand-dollar stunt, a breakfast meeting with the Speaker of the House, and eventually a private conversation with a federal minister about letting Nunavut be a land of its own ideas.

Mara: Wellspring of Love turns on a hospital doorway — a surgeon walks in and Tyne realizes she knows him from a long time ago, both of them carrying more history than the room can hold. The Circle closes on the simplest of the bunch: Cathy telling Emily to go where her heart takes her and never look back with regret. Savages and Beasts holds the balance between violence and a moment of golden evening light in Kamloops, just before Anton explains where the missing children are.

Pip: Six different worlds, all of them asking what people do when the next move is genuinely uncertain.

Mara: Across all of it — the translations, the original poems, the fiction — the through line is that language is where you go when survival requires more than silence.

Pip: Which means the next episode has a lot to live up to. We'll see what Aligizakis brings next.

Straits and Turns

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excerpt

FROZEN SALMON

…worst of all had occurred when a passenger couldn’t hold his or her
bowel and the cab would turn into a crapping space, which would
take two good hours of disinfecting and cleaning before one would
be allowed to take another fare. It happened to Costa once, when he not
only lost most of his shift, but he also had to do the cleaning, to boot.
The driver’s thoughts kept him busy as he travelled over the Granville
Street Bridge, and upon reaching Broadway, he turned to the right,
and after two miles of distance, he turned left on Blenheim Street, which
would take them to the reservation. He noticed that his customers were
half-asleep; yet the stench of their breathing forced him to open his
window to get some fresh air. Night had fallen when they arrived at the
Indian reservation community, although towards the west, there were
some bright gleams of the sunset that no one paid attention to. Such
romantic images weren’t important since his customers struggled as
they searched their pockets for the money to pay the fare.
“Where is your money?” the white man asked the Indian, who
pretended he didn’t follow his buddy’s question, and he started getting
out of the car.
“Where are you going?” the driver asked angrily, “Who’s paying
the fare? Eleven sixty…” he indicated to them, pointing at the meter.
They stared at each other. No word was spoken. No fart or any
other foul smell was detected. Then, the Indian showed his middle
finger, as if to say, you know what a man means when he raises his
middle finger to someone and now Costa was angry since the fare
turned into something dramatic. Nonetheless, he had not the slightest
inclination to forego his fare for these two assholes. Costa grabbed
the white man by the sleeve and yelled,
“Eleven dollars and sixty cents, or I call the cops.”
They both started searching their pockets again. No money was
found.
“I don’t have a dime…” the Indian said.
“I don’t…” the white guy said, “you knew I had nothing left, I
bought the last round, don’t you remember?” he said in a questioning
way, then he suggested, “Ask your wife for a twenty-dollar bill.”

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Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Love Stories

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the ancient and the immediate share a table without much ceremony — gods in the grapevines, desire in the cinema balcony, and families arguing about whiskey.

Mara: vequinox has been busy across poetry, prose, and the complicated territory where love and loss overlap — that's the ground we're covering today. Let's start with Modern Greek Poetry.

The Voices of Modern Greek Poetry

Pip: This segment is about what it means to translate and champion a tradition — to bring poets like Engonopoulos, Seferis, and Ritsos into English and ask what survives the crossing.

Mara: The Nikos Engonopoulos post opens with a poem called "Difficulty," and the line that lands hardest is this: "the difficulty arises when no one of the just people accept the other just — what am I saying — they never appreciated each other."

Pip: That's the tragedy of righteousness in miniature — everyone correct, no one reconciled.

Mara: The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets reaches further back into myth, with Pan moving through the grapevines at night, his reed producing "discordant yet so sweet, hatred mixed with laughter." Titos Patrikios asks how long we carry faces that steadily shrink inside us. Katerina Anghelaki Rooke opens a voyage with the body itself as the departure point.

Pip: Seferis goes looking for a king who left nothing but his name carved in stone, and Yannis Ritsos turns an empty ice cream cone rolled by a blind man's cane into a small catastrophe of attention. Antony Fostieris frames the whole tradition as a noble funeral — poetry burying its dead with official music, waiting for resurrection.

Mara: That's a lot of weight for a reed instrument to carry — but desire carries its own weight too, and that's where the fiction and the lyric poems take us next.

Love, Desire, and the Distance Between

Pip: The question this segment keeps circling is what love actually costs — whether it's measured in longing, in loss, or in the gap between what we say and what we mean.

Mara: The novel excerpt from Redemption sets the stakes immediately. Hermes and the unnamed woman are in a cinema balcony, and the prose is direct: "She took his hand and placed it between her legs, a move he took even further by sliding his hand up and touching her pubic hair. That made her go wild."

Pip: Desire rendered without apology — the body as fact, not metaphor.

Mara: Swamped works the same territory from a different angle — Eteocles and Antonia circle each other at the sea, and the promise deferred to the party that evening hangs over everything. The collection Hear Me Out strips it down to geometry: "We walk on parallel paths going opposite directions."

Pip: Parallel paths going opposite directions — which is technically just two people walking away, but somehow that's the whole of heartbreak.

Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri frames love as historical tragedy, the two poets remembered as figures who sent signs of fire from their loneliness. Cloe and Alexandra turns the polite exit line "I wish you the best" into an indictment — what the lover really means, the poem suggests, is what's best for himself.

Mara: Rendition finds love in the miniature: a ladybug crossing a palm, "an immense love springs from my river." Tasos Livaditis goes the other direction, into total devotion — "In the tiniest moment with you, I lived all my life." And Wheat Ears names the particular cruelty of someone who tends everything in the world except the lips waiting for them.

Pip: From longing that outlasts the body, the fiction moves into something messier — families, history, and what gets passed down whether anyone wanted it to be.

Fiction's Turbulent Families and Contested Histories

Pip: Across the fiction excerpts, the recurring pressure point is inheritance — what families hand down, what communities bury, and what surfaces anyway.

Mara: In Turbulent Times opens in a hotel gathering where the social scaffolding is doing all the work — introductions, drink orders, careful pleasantries — and underneath it, Nora's unease. The exchange lands here: "You're becoming cynical in your old age, Nora. You need cheering up."

Pip: The diagnosis delivered as a joke, which is how most family diagnoses travel.

Mara: Still Waters puts Tyne on a train, quietly reckoning with class — her fiancé's family is offering a car as an engagement gift, and she thinks, "Maybe I'm out of my league. We're just simple country people." The anxiety is precise and quiet.

Pip: Poodie James runs a different kind of reckoning — a former lawyer living as a hobo, a journalist who's traced him, and a negotiation over what story gets told and on whose terms.

Mara: The Unquiet Land goes further back, into an argument about hubris between Caitlin and Padraig — she defends her father's defiance of the gods to the end, and the exchange is fierce. Arrows moves into historical adventure, a bribed torturer and a leather bag of coins buying someone's freedom through a back exit.

Pip: Straits and Turns and Fury of the Wind both circle men shaped by what they can't say — one a dying man whose last word is desire, one a community holding a secret about what happened in Nimkus. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men reaches across cultures entirely, Norse brothers ransomed back by a First Nations village, negotiating loyalty and obedience in a new world.

Mara: Hours of the Stars and The Incidentals pull back — one a prayer at supper, the other a clown who reaches for the eternal and disappears behind a red curtain, still smiling.

Pip: The curtain closes. The clown never quite touched the stars. That feels like the right place to stop.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the question of what endures — in a language, in a family, in a body.

Pip: The just people never appreciated each other. The parallel paths keep diverging. Next time, we find out what else surfaces.

Straits and Turns

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excerpt

…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…

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Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Rural Fiction

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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.

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more ambitious translation and publishing projects in contemporary poetry — and this week's posts from vequinox make that scope impossible to ignore.

Mara: We're covering two stretches of territory today: the Modern Greek poetry tradition, from Ritsos to Seferis to Patrikios, and the narrative fiction side of the site, with excerpts ranging from small-town drama to historical adventure.

Pip: Plus a short stop in the territory where longing and unrest do most of their best work — which, it turns out, overlaps with both.

Mara: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, From Guilt to Glory

Mara: This segment is about what Modern Greek poetry actually does — how it moves between the intimate and the historical, the personal guilt of a single speaker and the collective weight of a whole tradition.

Pip: The Yannis Ritsos post, from Poems Volume II, opens with a poem called "Suspicious Sleep," and it sets that tone immediately. The setup is a small, almost domestic guilt — a star announcing happiness, a fruit seller's voice — and then the speaker turns inward: "You felt guilty because you didn't have the urge to respond. If you at least hadn't seen, hadn't understood. Guilty, not counting the guilt of others. You, all alone, put all the responsibility on your shoulders and you understood all your innocence."

Mara: The consequence there is the paradox at the heart of a lot of this poetry — that full awareness of your own innocence arrives only after you've already accepted total responsibility. That's not a comfortable place to rest.

Pip: Ritsos Volume IV, "Maturity," goes the other direction — outward, chaotic, guards running, flags lowered, and a crowd that can't decide whether it's laughing or crying. The intimacy is gone; what's left is noise and doubt.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis post, Selected Poems, is warmer — a spring morning, flour on lips, a name written on steamed windows. The Kariotakis-Polydouri piece, "The Tragic Love Story," pulls the other way: bells that spread evil, a prayer to beauty, an untimely death. George Seferis's collected poems land somewhere between — "a great sun greater than light," the garden between equinoxes, but arrived at only after staring into a black cloth.

Pip: Titos Patrikios writes a love made of "bones of our dead comrades" and "a black wind that spreads its fiery metal on words, in jails and exile camps." That's a tradition that has earned its darkness.

Mara: The anthology post, Neo-Hellene Poets, gives the broader frame — voices across generations asking the same question: "Why does our joy, our little joy, to sadness only lead us?" Antony Fostieris, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, the collections Impulses, Marginal, and Wheat Ears all circle that same tension between sensation and loss.

Pip: And then the fiction asks it differently — through plot.

Stories Under Pressure

Mara: The fiction excerpts this week span centuries and continents, but they share a structural pressure: characters navigating power, prejudice, and survival in confined spaces — a chair across a mayor's desk, a ship in plague, a monk tied to a stake.

Pip: Fury of the Wind opens that territory with a scene that looks domestic and turns out to be a confrontation about social standing. Will Andrews has put a woman named Sarah Fielding to work alongside the town women, and his wife Molly is furious. The exchange lands here: "Then it would be their loss, not mine. Anyway, none of you even know Sarah. What've you got against her except that she married Ben Fielding?" And Molly's answer — "She married Ben Fielding, and only a coarse woman or a slut would have considered doing that" — is the whole town's prejudice compressed into one line.

Mara: What this means in practice is that Will is fighting a social order that has already decided the verdict. His mild needling doesn't move it; Molly slams the door, and he's left muttering at his papers. The power isn't in the argument — it's in the silence that follows.

Pip: Poodie James runs a similar dynamic at higher stakes. Engine Fred sits across from a mayor named Torgerson and tells him, quietly, that he knows what Torgerson did twenty-one years ago. Torgerson's defense is pure contempt: "He's a freak, an unclean little freak. He contaminates the town." The machinery of official cruelty, dressed as civic concern.

Mara: In Turbulent Times opens differently — a birthday drive through the Irish countryside in a new Bentley, stories of drumlins and dolmens, a hotel dinner. The ease of that scene is doing work; it establishes exactly the kind of world that turbulence will later disrupt.

Pip: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts Brother Rordan tied to a pole, a burning bough at his scalp, a painted warrior demanding he sing. He chooses the Salve Regina. That's not a metaphor — it's a man deciding what he is in the worst moment available.

Mara: The two Arrows excerpts — posted on different days but from the same novel — follow a narrator navigating the Spanish Inquisition, protecting a plague-stricken captain and outwitting an inquisitor with a well-placed mention of the king. The stakes in both are life and death, and the tool is language used precisely under pressure.

Pip: Small Change is quieter — a boy sent home from choir practice for looking at stained glass windows, explaining to his mother that the other kids are slow. The Circle is quieter still: a retired admiral visiting his sister's vegetable garden, at peace with himself for reasons he can't yet explain aloud.

Mara: Swamped and Straits and Turns round out the range — one a business negotiation over wine, warrants, and commissions; the other a solitary traveler burying a wolf with stones and walking away smiling. Hours of the Stars adds a poem in the mix, a Roman galley caught in the Euroclydon wind, cargo thrown overboard, salvation uncertain.

Pip: Cloe and Alexandra sits at the edge of both fiction and lyric — a poem that asks what "I wish you the best" actually means, and answers: probably not much. Which is its own kind of pressure.

Mara: That question — what words mean when feeling has already left the building — is exactly where the longing segment picks up.

When Longing Outlasts Its Object

Pip: This is the territory where the poems aren't about a tradition or a history — they're about the specific ache of wanting something that has already shifted into absence.

Mara: Cloe and Alexandra frames it as a linguistic problem: "Would have been better if he wrote: 'Sorry that I couldn't?'" The polite farewell as evasion — the nine-headed monster of circumstance doing the work the speaker won't do.

Pip: Marginal puts the same absence in physical terms: "night laments her dark role in the photosynthesis of your absence." That's longing metabolized into the body's own chemistry.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's selected poems move through environmental grief into something stranger — horror at the destruction of forests that "strangely mixes with elation" when the ego finally releases its grip. Tasos Livaditis, Poems Volume II, carries a grief that leaves no footprints. Titos Patrikios turns it political. The Neo-Hellene anthology, Antony Fostieris, George Seferis, and Kariotakis-Polydouri all ask the same question from different angles: what do we do with what we cannot stop feeling?

Pip: Impulses answers with a sculptor making everything too large — hands big enough to embrace the world, legs to straddle the universe. Overcorrection as grief's own logic.

Mara: The fiction excerpts were asking the same thing. The ideas don't stop at genre lines.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the longing — is about the gap between what language can carry and what it can't.

Mara: The next episode will likely push further into that same territory. There's more to cover.

Podcast Episode: Poetry, Place, And Human Frailty

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where ancient Greek verse, Irish family secrets, and Soviet farm life share the same address — and somehow that feels completely reasonable.

Mara: vequinox has been busy. Today we're moving through Greek poetry and translation, crime and family fiction, art and memory, and a jazz-inflected novel set between two very different worlds.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Verse Across Centuries

Mara: The posts here are doing something specific: bringing Greek voices — classical, modern, and original — into English, and asking what survives the crossing.

Pip: The poem "Troglodytes" makes the stakes plain from the first image: "the modern shaman's imposing figure with the glittering tiara always commands him to kneel, his slavery is a smooth curse he cannot escape."

Mara: So the troglodyte is not a relic — he is anyone still kneeling before spectacle dressed as authority. The poem argues that the costume changes; the command does not.

Mara: The translations of Yannis Ritsos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Tasos Livaditis extend that argument across different registers — Ritsos lyrical and rural, Engonopoulos urban and restless, Livaditis brutal and spare. The anthology "Neo-Hellene Poets" and the Kariotakis-Polydouri volume show how wide that tradition runs.

Pip: "Entropy" and "Chthonian Bodies" are original work sitting alongside those translations — which is either an act of confidence or an open invitation to compare notes.

Mara: "Red in Black" and "Medusa" round out the range, moving from quiet metro-car intimacy to a poem that weaves erotic longing and domestic interruption into the same breath. The translation project and the original work are in genuine conversation here.

Crime, Family, and the Weight of Consequence

Mara: The fiction collected here keeps returning to one question: what do people do when a secret arrives and demands an answer right now?

Pip: "Straits and Turns" opens with George walking alone through the Bulgarian mountains toward something — the excerpt is all forward motion, all deliberate distance covered, one careful camp made in the dark.

Mara: The prose earns its patience. "He put his backpack against the boulder and gathered a bunch of leaves from a tree, which he used to make a makeshift bed onto which he laid his sleeping bag." Every detail is functional, which makes the isolation feel real rather than atmospheric.

Pip: That's a man who has thought through exactly how far he needs to get from wherever he started.

Mara: "In Turbulent Times" puts the secret right on the kitchen table — literally a birth certificate, no letter, just a name where it should not be. Caitlin's voice stays calm and controlled even as everything shifts: "May to February is nine months, Michael."

Pip: Calm is the most devastating register for that line.

Mara: "The Unquiet Land" works in a similar key — a witness who almost certainly knows who beat the priest, and decides, quietly, that he will not say so. Community loyalty and personal feeling outrun the facts.

Pip: "The Circle" pulls back to San Francisco, two old colleagues in a twenty-year-old Chevy Impala negotiating what retirement means when your whole identity is the job.

Mara: "Swamped" moves into financial territory — stock tips passed in hallways, lunch invitations with unstated agendas, the low hum of a world where every conversation is also a transaction.

Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" is the sharpest tonal shift — a childhood narrated with the flat precision of someone who learned early to read a room and trust nothing.

Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" and "Prairie Roots" anchor the domestic end of the range — a girl who decides she does not deserve kindness, and a Saskatchewan winter where the horses were always fed before the family sat down. "Small Change" closes the loop with something warmer: a ukelele passed down through grief, summers on the farm, a family that keeps showing up.

Pip: The fiction here spans continents and decades, but the engine is always the same — someone knowing something they have to decide what to do with.

Mara: Which is also, in a different key, what the poems are about. Let's move to the work that holds art and memory together.

Cities, Canvas, and the Accountant's Ledger

Mara: This segment asks what art preserves — and what it cannot.

Pip: "Hear Me Out" builds its answer slowly: "All the cities are the same at dawn; they're all alike you told me once and I didn't believe you."

Mara: The poem earns that return. By the end the speaker has lived enough departures to know the other person was right, and the recognition lands as loss, not wisdom.

Pip: "Ken Kirkby, A Painter's Quest for Canada" takes the canvas into the tundra — literally, since Kirkby ends up pushing a boat through a freezing river for four days with no tent poles and mushroom soup.

Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" and "The Incidentals" complete the picture — the first a healing ceremony where old grief and new arrivals find common ground, the second a poem about an accountant whose entire life was other people's numbers and whose funeral drew almost no one.

Pip: Art and memory, it turns out, are what fill the space the numbers leave behind.

Mara: Speaking of filling space — the last post is set to music.

Pavel, Vera, and the Long Way to a Passport

Mara: "Jazz with Ella" lands in Soviet agricultural life, which is not where the title points — but the novel earns the contrast.

Pip: Pavel is a man with plans for sunflower-field picnics and a growing competence with a broken-down motorcycle, living entirely outside the system that made him: "he lamented all the years spent in studying academic subjects without getting a good grounding in what every adolescent learned while growing up: working on the family car."

Mara: The upshot is a man rebuilding himself from practical knowledge up, while the larger problem — no papers, no passport, winter coming — waits just outside the frame.

Pip: Bureaucracy as dramatic tension. The oldest jazz structure there is.

Mara: From troglodytes kneeling before tiaras to Pavel fixing a motorcycle in the provinces — the through line is people navigating systems that were not built for them.

Pip: And finding, occasionally, a ukelele or a sunflower field or a line of poetry that makes it bearable. More from this site next time.

Hear Me Out

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All Cities are the Same at Dawn
“All the cities are the same at dawn; they’re all alike” you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
When day break arrives to their beds they all sigh the same way. And the night lovers whisper things or embrace each other before they get up and at the first light walk away with heavy footsteps.
They wear clothes half undone some inn their underarm when they kiss a soft silent kiss not to awaken the one sleeping next door.
And the door closes behind them most carefully, silently.
The car is turned on, a sound that seems very loud in the quietness of the night and even the gas petal seems to be half asleep and heavy from being asleep or exhausted from making love all night.
And the home they return to is always empty and cold.
Only the blackbirds chirp in the garden.
Half of the sky is lit and the day commences when you enter the shower to let the water run over it and take away the breaths and sweat of the night.
All cities are the same you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
Because I saw you leaving and I still wanted you in my bed, to take you in my arms, to breathe your breath one more time and to go back to my dreams.
And you kissed me softly and closed the door behind you.
How long has since gone?
I don’t remember.
How many times I closed the door behind me after I kissed someone softly on the cheek and whispered good night?
How many empty streets have I driven to reach home?
You were so right!
All the cities of the world are alike at dawn…they all sigh, they toss and turn in bed, some empty and others full of the all night long lovemaking.
Each day break one door closes slowly and one other opens and welcomes the loneliness of the traveller.
Only blackbirds chirp in the garden always the same way like the day break.
People change.
Some leave others come. What difference does it make in which city you are?

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Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Social Struggle

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the ancient and the urgent share the same page — Cavafy and civil war, hobos and murder investigations, all in the same week.

Mara: vequinox has been busy across a wide range of territory — modern Greek poetry, political conflict and social upheaval, and narrative fiction with some sharply drawn characters at the center of it all. Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, Ancient and Modern

Pip: The poetry posts here span centuries of Greek sensibility — from Cavafy's cool historical ironies to contemporary voices wrestling with longing, identity, and the weight of the body itself.

Mara: The Cavafy post sets the tone. Translating the poem "In 200 B.C.," it ends with a pivot that reframes the whole Macedonian campaign: "And from this marvellous Panhellenic campaign, the victorious, the splendorous, the most famous, glorified, as no other has been glorified, the incomparable: we were born."

Pip: So the Spartans sitting it out becomes almost beside the point — the world that emerged from their absence is the real subject.

Mara: Exactly the move Cavafy makes. The Yannis Ritsos posts — two of them, from Volume VI — work very differently, in tight, surreal domestic images: a severed antler left by a mirror, an owl made of sheet metal perched quietly on a roof.

Pip: Ritsos does a lot with a very cold room.

Mara: The Livaditis post, "For Maria," takes grief further: "as I stretched my arm to find your hand, it was as if I stole bread from the hands of the hungry." The Titos Patrikios piece, "Obstacles," turns inward — the speaker raising walls not to repel but to test how far endurance can reach. Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Stowaway in a Dream" and the Kariotakis-Polydouri post, "Lost," both circle longing and absence. The Fostieris, Livaditis, Introspection, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Medusa, and Neo-Hellene Anthology posts fill out a week's worth of translated voices, each one landing a different emotional register.

Pip: A lot of that longing has a political undercurrent — which is where the next segment lives.

Conflict, Division, and the Cost of Conviction

Pip: Several posts this week place characters inside political fracture — moments where ideology hardens into something people are willing to die, or kill, for.

Mara: The novel excerpt from Redemption captures it in texture rather than argument. Two characters are hunting near an olive grove when the mood shifts: "Hermes bent down and reached for the fluttering bird; he could see the huge pain in its eyes. Suddenly, the strange shudder overtook his body again, like when he was aboard the ship."

Pip: A man who can shoot without hesitating suddenly can't. That's doing a lot of quiet work.

Mara: The Unquiet Land goes louder — a pub argument about Irish partition, Lloyd George, Carson, and Sinn Fein, where Flynn Casey and Jim Patterson talk themselves toward the edge of civil war. The Troglodytes poem frames the same pattern more abstractly: institutional power dressed in sanctity, "Four Golden Gates to Heaven still stand firm while dividing into castes, races, and creeds." Ugga compresses it to almost nothing — half the planet on the line of fire, white doves, international agreements, and a dead avatar. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy asks where conviction actually leads: "Strike Chimera mercilessly, life is just a dream."

Pip: From a pub in Ireland to a collapsed avatar in seventeen lines — the scale changes, the problem doesn't. Which brings us to the fiction, where the conflict gets personal.

Character Under Pressure

Pip: The fiction excerpts this week are less about plot than about the moment a character's interior life collides with what the world expects of them.

Mara: Small Change is the clearest example. Rico comes home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than cross the street. When Marianna finds him, she asks what's wrong, and the excerpt gives us this: "He goes to the piano bench and opens it. He takes out the papers he has worked on and holds them up to her. Suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy."

Pip: A kid showing someone his work in the dark — that's the whole thing, right there.

Mara: What the excerpt does well is hold the reader inside Rico's hesitation without explaining it. Poodie James works a different register entirely — a public hearing where Engine Fred defends a hobo against a bully's insinuation. He tells the council: "It is so not because he risked his life to save someone. It is so because under circumstances that would defeat most of us, he lives his life with independence, dignity and joy."

Pip: A defense of dignity delivered at a lectern, which is somehow more moving than it has any right to be.

Mara: Savages and Beasts stays procedural — RCMP officers questioning a caretaker and a Cretan cook about a murder, a missing kitchen knife surfacing as the key detail. Fury of the Wind puts Sarah in the middle of a crowd enjoying her distress, with Will Andrews forcing his way through to help her. Swamped follows Eteo walking English Bay, his thoughts moving between a drilling project, his parents in Crete, and Vietnamese fishers working nets in the shallows — immigration and displacement held in a single afternoon walk. And Cloe and Alexandra delivers the sharpest scene of the week: Antigony standing before six judges, hearing none of their words, then offering them her severed breast and announcing her name.

Pip: Antigony gets the last word, which feels right.

Mara: What ties the week together is that question of endurance — whether it's Cavafy's Alexandrians, Flynn Casey's republicans, or Rico in the dark with his papers.

Pip: Everyone's deciding how much of themselves to show, and to whom. More of that next time.

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more unusual literary archives on the internet — translations, original poetry, fiction spanning centuries and continents, all landing on the same site like it's nothing.

Mara: vequinox is behind all of it, and today we're covering the range: modern Greek poetry in translation, a wide stretch of literary fiction and drama, and poems that sit at the intersection of love and loss.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices From Modern Greek Poetry

Mara: The question this cluster of posts raises is what modern Greek poetry is actually doing — what it reaches for, and what it refuses to let go of. The anchor here is Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Unexpected Development."

Pip: She sets it up plainly: "It was when words overflowed / images flew like wild birds / that refused to feed on words / even if they were hungry for them."

Mara: That tension — images that won't submit to language even when they need it — runs through the whole collection. Anghelaki Rooke is mapping a kind of loss that precedes grief.

Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder geometric line in his selected poems: a snake eating its tail, beginning collapsing into end, the body always absent. Tasos Livaditis, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, closes his poem "Coincidences" on the line "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth" — which is either profound or a very elegant shrug.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos writes about Georg Trakl — a poet who "never agreed with them" and whose only longing, once he understood what it meant to be alive, was to escape. Yannis Ritsos, the Neo-Hellene Poets anthology, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Ugga, and Troglodytes all appear here too, each finding a different pressure point between the lyric and the world pressing in on it.

Pip: Fiction carries some of that same weight — let's go there.

Literary Fiction And Drama Across Time And Place

Mara: What this range of fiction shares is an interest in pressure — the moment a situation tips, when a character can no longer hold the ordinary shape of their life. Straits and Turns is the anchor, and it earns it.

Pip: The excerpt follows a couple and their dog Elvis through a cancer diagnosis and a slow, careful goodbye. The prose doesn't reach for drama; it just watches. "Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs."

Mara: What that sentence does is hold clinical language right next to love, and the gap between them is where the whole excerpt lives. The decision not to pursue chemotherapy, the daily medication ritual, the final day when Elvis doesn't touch his food — it's a portrait of grief that arrives before the loss does.

Pip: Jazz with Ella moves in a completely different register — Cold War tension, a border crossing, a woman watching a man she's trying to protect navigate an interrogation line. The stakes are geopolitical, but the writing keeps its eye on the human pulse of the scene.

Mara: Fury of the Wind is quieter — a community fair, a husband and wife negotiating small social obligations, the ordinary friction of a marriage visible in a single exchange about who covers the preserves booth.

Pip: Redemption takes a young man named Hermes Dragakis back to his village with a diploma and a scholarship to Canada, and the scene where the mayor tries to understand what an economist actually does is somehow both funny and genuinely moving.

Mara: In Turbulent Times goes somewhere more intimate — an Irish drama of paternity, secrecy, and a woman who tells a man quietly, "You let me down, but I forgive you."

Pip: Wellspring of Love watches a woman named Tyne move through her sleeping children at night — each child rendered in a sentence, the accumulated tenderness of a parent who has already known loss. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a monk named Rordan in early medieval Ireland, furious that the Church buries medical knowledge while people die of infected throats. He's not wrong, which makes it worse.

Mara: Arrows delivers its moment in a single blackout — a priest counting the dead, touching foreheads, finding one name missing. Savages and Beasts opens on a murder inside a residential institution and the slow, formal way the news spreads through the building. In the Quiet After Slaughter follows a bush pilot whose final chapter is written in retrospect, quietly. The Unquiet Land gives us Caitlin and Michael on a clifftop after something has broken, and Caitlin describing a dream of the sea gone still and black "the way the world will look when it's ended and we've all gone."

Pip: Poodie James puts a police chief in a room full of political pressure, defending a hobo from a sabotage charge with nothing but logic and a flat refusal to perform certainty he doesn't have. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Marginal round out the theme — the first a lyric sequence of departure and transformation, the second a short, still poem about absence that ends on silence mimicking footsteps. And Ubermensch contributes a poem called "Funeral" — a poet buried while the hawk watches and the wine flows and someone begs for two bits at the edge of the scene.

Mara: The emotional through-line from fiction into poetry is loss — anticipated, survived, or simply witnessed. That's where the next segment lives.

Poems Of Love And Loss

Mara: The question here is what poetry does with grief that prose can't — how it compresses the experience until the image does the work the argument refuses to do. Yannis Ritsos anchors it.

Pip: The poem is called "The Dead House," and Ritsos doesn't soften it: "Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood."

Mara: What that gets the reader is abandonment rendered as a physical law — the house bleeds no matter who tries to clean it, and eventually everyone stops trying, including the people who live there.

Pip: Antony Fostieris in his selected poems makes the same point through pure geometry — the circular trap where every beginning joins the end. Tasos Livaditis, the Griffin longlisted volume, closes on "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth." And Troglodytes frames the young poet standing against bigotry, recording grace — which is its own kind of elegy for what keeps getting buried.

Mara: Grief and witness, across every form the site carries.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the elegies — is about things that refuse to be cleaned up. Blood in the marble. A dog that won't eat. A monk who can't make the Church listen.

Mara: Persistence against forgetting. That's the thread. More of it next time.