Bevan Longhorn dresses in casual clothes and goes down to the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. It’s Sunday morning and the lobby is filled with people coming and going. Bevan has stayed here before, and this time, although he has only been here for one night, intends to make the best of it. He has arranged his departure for the evening with American Airlines and is to arrive in Washington sometime before midnight, giving him enough time to relax and get to his office Monday morning. On the other hand, if he feels tired the next morning he can always skip work for a day; the agency will survive without him. What presses on his mind today is making sure he can put his hands on what he needs to proceed with his plan of exit, as he calls it. These two young men better have thought of everything; he doesn’t have the time to pussyfoot. However, he has faith in the old man, whom he has always trusted to deliver what is necessary. He walks into the hotel restaurant and orders his breakfast. He opens the morning paper and reads the headlines; the same stuff again and again. His breakfast comes and he tries to enjoy it, despite the headlines and his thoughts. What happens if the two young men cannot get what he needs? A shiver travels down his spine like a thunderbolt as this thought sinks deep in his mind, and he squirms out of fear that all his mental preparation for this last mission might be in vain. He overhears two couples next to him talking about the Oscars scheduled for sometime in March. They seem to be very absorbed in what they are discussing; he hears one of the men supporting one actor over the others, and the other three people seem to agree, as Bevan doesn’t hear any objection to the first person’s remarks. His thoughts take him away again to his plan of action, and he glances at his watch; it is only 10:30 a.m. He’s so anxious about his plan that he cannot wait to meet Hakim at Earl’s and get answers. Ibrahim’s nephew had better have good news for him, or else. What can he do if they cannot get it? He finishes his breakfast, pays his check and goes for a walk around the hotel grounds with the manicured lawns and the pretty shrubs and flowers everywhere. He needs to clear his mind and the crisp morning air will help. He also needs to stretch his legs.
…his training at the seminary, his acceptance by the Church. Obviously His Holiness did not know the full story of this dark man from the mountains of Drumard or wherever it was he came from in the first place. Obviously His Holiness did not know from whom this same man received his education: from pagans and harlots. To have sent back to them this man from the shadow side of time and place, to have ordained him as their own new priest, the old ones regarded as an insult and an outrage. Padraig knew when he returned to the village that few of his flock had accepted him with any willingness and far less with trust. But he had proved himself in only a short time. Now all was lost. Their old suspicions had returned. They remembered. They talked. They retold stories. Some no doubt had seen him shudder or shake or stiffen or stumble and fall. They knew that Satan had come back for him. They knew that his celebration of the Mass was a sacrilege. They were affronted. Their gaze burned like hell-fire. Even the young spurned him; they spat at his passing in the street. When he stood at the altar, holding aloft the Host in celebration of the Eucharist, Padraig could feel their conspiratorial sneaking-forward down the hushed nave of the church, their long knives drawn, their white teeth gleaming like the fangs of wolves, their wild hearts pounding with the urgent wish to kill him. Padraig no longer had his arm in a sling, but the cuts and bruises on his face had not yet completely healed, though the earlier discoloration was fading. He strode across the stone floor of the sacristy and stopped at the door, his hand outstretched but unwilling to lift the wrought-iron latch. His head ached. Satan thumped the insides of his temples, punched the backs of his eyes, drummed loudly in the whorled cavities of his ears. Padraig opened the heavy, dark door, and his arm jerked with pain. He looked out into the church. In less than two hours he must face the hostile crowd that would come to the wedding of Caitlin MacLir and Michael Carrick. The church was empty yet, except for two young altar boys who were talking earnestly in the front pew. “Stephen,” Padraig called, steadying himself against the door post. “Stephen, come here a minute.” His voice boomed like explosions in his head. One of the altar boys, one of Joe Carney’s sons, came forward, unsurely as the young Samuel. “Yes, Father?” “Stephen, do you have your bicycle outside?” “I do, Father.” The surprise that showed in Stephen’s eyes was a response either to the unexpected question or to the look of black-eyed distraction in the drawn face of the priest.
“You know why I left. An excuse is irrelevant.” He could see she didn’t like his vocabulary, for which he had already been chastised by Sister Assunta. It’s good you know words, she had said, but you use them with too much pride. If saying what you know to be true is prideful, Rick decided he would have to continue to do it, and take his chances with God. “You know very well that I sent you home because you were a disruptive influence. You simply cannot pay attention and it interferes with the other children.” “I’m sorry to have to say this, Sister, but you know very well yourself that I don’t need to practise as much as the others. I can sight read and I know all the parts I have to sing by heart. And you didn’t send me anywhere, I left.” Her face was a faded parody or horror and spiteful righteousness. “You are a proud and sinful boy!” “I’m just being truthful, Sister. Isn’t it very important to tell the truth?” Rick could see that she was not willing to deal with his question. All she said was, “Well, I don’t know why you’re acting so contrary, but I just won’t have it. Now. If you are truly sorry for the way you have spoken, the Lord will forgive you.” “Forgive me? For what?” “For your sins.” “What sins? Is it a sin to know how to read music?” “Don’t get smart, young man. You know your sins. Disobedience, vanity, willful…” He cut her off. “Is it true that choir is a voluntary extra-curricular activity?” Sister Rose glared suspiciously at him out of her small, pale blue eyes, their pink rimmed lids and short blond lashes flickering with confusion. “Yes, of course, once you’ve been accepted for the privilege. But what has that got to do with anything?’ ‘Just this,” he said. “I quit.
She’s not a bad person. The kids from church call her fast, whatever that means, but she’s not what they make it sound like.” “If you say so. Anyway, you were at her graduation ceremony yesterday. Isn’t that enough?” “It’s not the same thing, Ronnie, and you know it. The party tonight is at her place and it’s just for special friends.” “Well, you’d just better forget it.” Ronnie picked up his mug and got to his feet. “I’ve got to get to work. Morley’ll be ready to start the cutting. And listen, Rachael, give your mom a break and don’t make things harder for her. She has enough to worry about with Aunt Millie being sick.” Rachael’s look changed from one of self-pity to a worried frown. She stood up. “Ronnie, do you think … that is … is Aunt Millie going to make it?” A cloud passed over his face. “I hope so, I really hope so. But only God knows that, and all we can do is pray for her.” He put his mug in the sink, retrieved his cap and went out. Rachael stood for a minute longer staring at the closed door, then she went to the phone to call Lyssa. ͣMorley and Ronald were sitting at the kitchen table when Tyne walked in a little before nine o’clock that evening. Both men turned quickly to look at her. The aroma of coffee drew her eyes to the stove where a pot hissed and bubbled an invitation. Responding to their greeting, she bent to kiss Morley’s cheek. Sensing his intention as he started to rise, she murmured, “Don’t get up, honey. I’ll help myself to the coffee.” “But you look worn out, Sweetheart.” “And you have been working all day in the fields.” She filled a mug with coffee and sat down at the table. Both men spoke at once. “How’s Aunt Millie?”
Poetry as a Return to Origins and a Form of Resistance
By Attila Balazs
…One of the volume’s significant achievements lies in its capacity to unite seemingly incompatible registers. Mythology, philosophy, eroticism, biography, personal history, and social criticism coexist in expansive, discursive poetry that at times approaches the prose poem. The language moves from solemnity to sarcasm, from prayer to invective, and from contemplation to revolt.
Images often accumulate with torrential force. The poet does not always seek classical clarity, but rather intensity. He constructs through associations, returns, repetitions, and contrasts. Light and darkness, flesh and pneuma, humility and pride, logic and madness, life and death define one another.
Madness occupies a privileged place within this poetic system. It may represent suffering and psychological rupture, but also freedom from the logic of a diseased world. The madman possesses the right to speak the truth that rational people avoid. The poet and the philosopher stand at the margins of society precisely because they see what others refuse to see.
From here arises the ambivalence of the title Introspection. The inward gaze does not lead to withdrawal or passivity. On the contrary, the inner depths become the place from which the confrontation with the world begins. The self descends into its own viscera, into memory, desire, and the abyss, only to return to the surface with images and truths it offers to others.
Introspection thus becomes a form of responsibility. To know oneself means to know one’s roots, wounds, desires, and contradictions. It also means understanding that individual experience is not isolated, but belongs to a shared history and a common humanity.
The poetry of Manolis Aligizakis is a poetry of deliberate excess. It does not fear great words: destiny, eternity, truth, freedom, immortality, beauty. In an age in which such notions are often viewed with suspicion, the poet recovers them and restores their gravity. He still believes in art’s capacity to change the human being, defend dignity, and save something from death.
At the centre of the volume lies a paradox: the human being is mortal, yet consciousness aspires to immortality; man is fragile, yet dreams of the Overman; he is alone, yet speaks in the name of all humanity. From this contradiction arises the energy of the poems.
Introspection may be read as a symbolic autobiography, a modern epic, a philosophical meditation, or a testimony to the condition of the creator. All these readings are possible because the volume refuses to remain within a single genre or a single era.
Aligizakis constructs his own mythology from fragments of the Greek world, family memory, the experience of exile, and the great questions of European philosophy. Within this mythology, the poet is simultaneously child, lover, fighter, recluse, prophet, and martyr.
At the end of the book, the feeling remains that poetry is his true homeland. It is the place where the past may be revived, where the dead may be summoned back, where love may suspend time, and where the human being may transcend his limits for a moment.
Through creation, the poet does not definitively defeat death, but he refuses to grant it the final word. His traces remain imprinted in language, like the footsteps of his ancestors in the native soil. And the journey from Alpha to Omega does not end, but is transformed into a new beginning.
This is perhaps the true meaning of introspection for Manolis Aligizakis: not an enclosure within the self, but a descent into the depths of being to discover a light that may be brought to the surface and shared with others. A fragile and dangerous light, capable of burning, but also of guiding. A light that bears the name of poetry.
…what beautiful mound hidden under that skimpy bathing suit she wore, the Muse of my day with her flowing brunette hair, her balanced curves, her excellent sized breasts, her exquisite buttocks which she moved in an erotic way unparalleled to any I had ever seen and trust me I’ve seen many, far too many to know the beauty from the average and even more so from the unworthy of my glance and this ethereal beauty walked as if floating over the smooth sand just as my dream of touching those exquisite curves brought me to heavens. Indeed, the ancient Muses were there interacting and playing with her, and I couldn’t see any difference between today’s earthly Muse and the Ancient ones, and here she was turned towards me when, suddenly, our glances met. She sensed that, behind my sunglasses, my eyes were fixated on her ethereal saunter, and she remained focused on me for more than ten seconds: the first acknowledgement. Yes, I was looking at her, and she knew it, and that was enough for the game of love to be played when she went back to her chair and, turning it to the sunshine, she lay her calligraphic body onto the multicoloured towel and gazed at the open water of the quiet and serene cove. I let myself travel along with her glance. I marvelled at the natural beauty of the cove with lapping waves and its whooshing breeze, while I didn’t hesitate to imagine this day’s wonder in the body of the tourist. In her early thirties she represented the female queen of the beach, yes, there were others too, some very pretty as well, yet this one was the special one of who one with exquisite taste, like myself, could easily get himself loose in the imaginary game two people play when the chance arises and this were my thoughts when suddenly the Ammoudara Aphrodite turned her body to her stomach letting the bright sunshine play with her back, from the top of her head to the very lustful buttocks and legs of hers, indeed it was that moment that she stared towards where I was sitting and realizing I was still with her she fixated her glance towards me. I raised my hand and lowered my sunglasses a bit, and seeing her from the top of my glasses, I smiled a full smile at her, to which, to my utter surprise, she also lowered her sunglasses and stared at me from the top of hers.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a catalog that moves from ancient Greek anguish to Canadian prairie winters to stock market schemes — which is either a literary festival or a very ambitious reading list, depending on your weekend.
Mara: vequinox brings all of it together on this site — translations of modern Greek poetry, original verse on love and desire, and a run of novels spanning hardship across continents and generations. Let's start with the poetry coming out of Greece.
Voices From Modern Greece
Pip: The modern Greek poets gathered here are working a particular problem — how do you hold loss, resistance, and beauty in the same breath without one canceling the others out.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volume sets the tone early. The poem "The Inexpressible" builds toward this image: "the blind musician, tired, goes back up. He puts his violin case on the chair. He opens it; two of the three glasses are in it. They are shining and whole."
Pip: So the broken things you carried out in guilt come back intact — the poem turns on that reversal, the indestructibility of what you thought you'd lost for good.
Mara: Constantine Cavafy's "Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto" works a related tension — the great No that is right and still burdens its speaker for life. Nikos Engonopoulos in "Goalpost" pushes into civic dread, asking whether the Sunday bells will be followed by hymns or machine guns.
Pip: Engonopoulos lands the ambiguity without resolving it, which is its own kind of answer.
Mara: Tasos Livaditis in "Simple Talk" insists on plainness as survival — speaking, loving, dying "in a simple way." George Seferis in "The Shape of Fate" asks who orders destruction from behind, and Titos Patrikios watches a man of creative mind reduced to counting whether his wages last the month.
Mara: Antony Fostieris names "certain pain" that strikes the empty heart beyond all desire. The Neo-Hellene anthology and the Troglodytes collection round out the range, from birch-forest dawn to an invocation of the Goddess to purge the ego entirely.
Pip: Ten poets, one through-line: the thing that survives is rarely the thing you expected to keep.
Mara: The love poems take that survivorship somewhere more intimate — let's move there now.
Love At Both Edges
Pip: The love and desire poems here are not soft — they treat longing as a force with weight and consequence, something closer to weather than to sentiment.
Mara: "The Incidentals" opens the territory directly: "the seething angst of lust demands her body's contours and dark caves on the altar of Aphrodite deserving unemotional dedication, like any archon sitting up high, like any God jealous or self-absorbed and relaxed."
Pip: Desire framed as liturgy — the body as offering, the worshipper as functionary. That's a cold altar.
Mara: "Hear Me Out" pulls in the opposite direction emotionally but lands in the same isolation: two people on parallel paths going opposite directions, past the point where they first met, with only the roundness of the earth as any possible reunion.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" compresses the whole arc into image — "two bodies defining the shape of a monad," synthesis as astronomical and emotional at once. "Rendition" closes it with a line that strips possession entirely: "Of all you have amassed, none is yours."
Pip: Love, desire, and ultimately the inventory comes up empty. The novels take that emptiness and put it in a house with bad insulation — let's go there.
Novels Of Endurance And Reckoning
Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to people held in place by circumstance — weather, pregnancy, poverty, complicity — and asking what they do with the time they cannot escape.
Mara: "Fury of the Wind" makes that literal. Sarah, isolated on a prairie homestead through a brutal winter, moves house plants to the kitchen table each night to keep them from freezing, writes letters that take weeks to arrive, and waits. The passage reads: "she missed the companionship of others, especially Penny. What would she give to be able to sit down to a cup of tea in Penny's cheerful kitchen?"
Pip: A cup of tea as the full measure of what isolation costs. That's a precise kind of grief.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" puts a different kind of waiting at its center — Mother Ross, who knows Caitlin is pregnant before the wedding, removes her own mother's ring from her finger and gives it to Michael for the ceremony. She hears Caitlin sobbing upstairs and swallows her own agony whole.
Pip: Respectability as ransom, as Mother Ross calls it — and she's already paid her installment.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" moves the tension into a seedy hotel corridor, Tyne's knees going weak as she waits for a deteriorated Corky Conrad to open his door. "Prairie Roots" grounds everything in the farming community's frank hierarchy — survival first, schooling second, and a father who insisted otherwise.
Mara: "Jazz with Ella" sends Jennifer onto a plane into a storm, retreating into questions about why she was chosen over Paul for a Soviet Union language tour, and what it cost her in salary to say yes. "Introspection" and "Hours of the Stars" work in verse — the first building toward "the final, greatest monad," the second catching grandparents' long faces at a christening where the names chosen feel like paganism to them.
Pip: Naming a child wrong, apparently, is its own form of hardship.
Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" and "Poodie James" both circle institutions — policing and journalism respectively — where the people inside them are just competent enough to see the problem and just constrained enough to struggle with what to do about it. And "Swamped" drops into the financial world, where Eteo watches Platinum stock move and starts making his list of who gets rewarded.
Pip: Every novel here is about someone watching a system from just inside or just outside it, trying to figure out the angle of least damage.
Mara: Which is, when you step back, exactly what the Greek poets were doing too — just with fewer stock tickers.
Pip: The thread running through all of it is endurance — the blind musician climbing back upstairs, Sarah moving the geraniums, Cavafy's speaker living with the right No.
Mara: And the question underneath: what holds its shape when everything else breaks. More of that in the next episode.
This was bound to be about the Poodie James story. Sonny’s face was reddening. That meant they had a problem, but Sonny ran the newsroom. She would not jump in. She reached for the pile of budget sheets on her desk and got back to work, envying the editor and reporter wrestling with a story. My god, would the price of newsprint ever stabilize? She sank into the pages of figures, enjoying the whir and the rhythm as she cranked the handle of the adding machine. “Got a minute?” Winifred looked up at Sonny standing in her doorway, with Pease a step behind him. “Ned has something you ought to know about.” She pushed the budget aside. “Well, Ned,” she said after she had heard Pease’s story, “nice work, I must say. Poor George Pearson, carrying that around all these years. But we can’t go with it. Sonny is right, it’s hearsay. The hobo, Clarkson, thinks he saw Torgerson that night. You say Clarkson told you Torgerson denied it. This certainly could explain the mayor’s hatred of Poodie James, but we need the other man to confirm Pearson’s story. Even then, Torgerson may not confess. Have you gone back to Pearson to try to get the name?” “Yes. He’s terrified,” Pease said. He won’t tell me any more. I think he has visions of prison. He probably doesn’t know the statute of limitations on assault.“ “More likely he has visions of his reputation and his business going to hell,” Sonny said. “And he has a point.” “I don’t know any other way to find out who was with Torgerson and Pearson that night,” Pease said. Winifred straightened up and fixed her gaze on the middle distance. “I think I might,” she said after a few seconds. She pulled a scrap of paper from a desk drawer, reached for the telephone, propped the handset on her shoulder, started dialing and shooed the men out of her office. They watched from Sonny’s desk. After she hung up, she waved them back in. “Ned,” she said, “you’re about to meet your first madam.” She gave him a look of appraisal. “I hope she’s your first.”
“Have you heard anything?” Eteo asked him “No, nothing so far,” Richard admitted. “When did you call last?” “Yesterday afternoon. I guess they must still be working on it.” “I wouldn’t assume that. I don’t like this at all. Why don’t you take a quick flight down there and check things out for yourself?” “Go to Texas?” Richard’s voice sounded alarmed. “Why not? It’s your money they’re spending.” There was an uncomfortable silence at the other end of the line before Richard said, hesitantly, “I’m actually not that fond of airplanes and flying.” “Okay, send one of your directors.” “There must be another way,” Richard replied. “Let me call the finder, the man who brought me this deal. I’ll talk to him.” “All right, but let me know what you find out. Who is it anyway? Do I know him?” “It’s Walter Cooper.” “I know Walter. I could talk to him. Yes, it might be better that way. Leave it to me. I’ll call him and get back to you,” Eteo said and put the phone down. He noticed he was breathing fast. It upset him. Then he saw the big trades of Platinum stock, big chunks all bought by Nomura. He smiled and relaxed. The market looked clean even beyond the three-dollar mark. He had hit a good one, he knew, and if Mario’s Nostra is agreed on by this group, he had better keep as much stock as he could for his accounts and give lots of it to his key people, the ones who did most of his business. Eteo had a large number of accounts, but only about fifteen percent of them traded often. Those were the clients he needed to reward when a good issue came along. Mario’s Nostra Ventures was beginning to look like it could be one of them. Eteo started making a list of where the big chunks of Nostra shares should go, starting with Yannis, Angelo, Spiro and his brother Michael, Herbert, and then Eteo’s personal accounts, Ariana’s, Logan’s, and Mitch’s. George and Peter, whom Eteo had used as directors of his shell companies a couple of times, should also be there…
A widower, Dwayne Levine was the recipient of a disabled worker’s pension. Those who had observed him flinging heavy engine parts around his yard or stumbling home from the Kingsway Pub most nights viewed with suspicion his claim of an irreparable lower disc. Few car club members knew—as my pal O’Donnell did, living across the alley from Ed’s garage—that Mr. Levine routinely took the Dodge out after midnight. He also disappeared with it on those occasions when a member was ill and the car at rest. He was something of a philanthropist with the housewives, Mr. Levine was, often loitering in the Shop Eazy parking lot offering free deliveries. – Boys everywhere love two things, Dwayne Levine philosophized: girls and cars. His sobs had been reduced to a snivel with a second complimentary wedge of pie. – If we had what these young fellas have today, he said, the war never would have happened! Back on patrol, Mahoney aired another possibility. – I say the club’s a front for some kind of gangland activity. Maybe one of us should go undercover. Whaddya think? – Spit it all out, Mahoney! barked the senior policeman. The Huns are scaling the walls! – One of us — me, I guess — could pose as a potential buyer. I could ask to see the vehicle up close. Maybe get inside the garage without a search warrant. The sergeant feared for the future knowing the likes of Mahoney represented the next generation of law enforcement, although he agreed the need for a search warrant was the most damaging invention since the right to silence. – People in this part of town, McManus reminded his young partner, distrust strangers with crewcuts and the physique of a footballer. Besides, he added, perhaps you hadn’t noticed? The Dodge isn’t for sale! McManus allowed himself a moment to despair. – An Indian shaman said the Creator gave us two eyes, two ears and one mouth, Mahoney. He reminds you of this so that you might observe and listen twice as much as you talk.
Manolis Aligizakis 