Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the archive is essentially a library — except the library is on fire, in the best possible way.

Mara: vequinox has been publishing across a wide range of work here: modern Greek poetry in translation, philosophical prose on myth and imagination, and narrative fiction set against some of history's uglier political backdrops. Let's start with the poetry.

Voices Across the Greek Tradition

Pip: The through-line across these poetry collections is that they're not decorative — they're doing something urgent, whether that's Tasos Livaditis processing alienation and survival, or the broader Greek canon being made available in English translation.

Mara: Livaditis sets the tone immediately. The post for Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, and the excerpt earns that recognition. Here is the poem speaking for itself: "the deadliest sin is not to love oneself, and one day, I couldn't take it anymore, 'Do you know me?' I asked them, 'No,' they told me; thus, I took my revenge, and I was never deprived of the distant sounds."

Pip: So the revenge isn't violence — it's continued existence. Staying present, staying strange, staying in earshot of the world that rejected him. That's a quietly devastating pivot.

Mara: And the poem sustains it. Later it lands on: "I prefer to hang a watch on my vest than to hang myself; it would be as if I were trying to explain too many things." Survival as understatement.

Pip: The Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems post shows a different register — grief observed through objects and bystanders, a child bloodied by a car, curtains standing at attention. Livaditis keeps finding the peripheral witness.

Mara: Titos Patrikios – Selected Poems takes a more stoic angle. The poem "Change of Times" counsels neither self-justification nor self-condemnation — "You'll come out of this a little wiser, if you only learn to face all human things a bit more serenely." It reads almost like a letter to someone mid-crisis.

Pip: Miltos Sachtouris – Collected Poems goes somewhere darker. The "Night of the Forgotten" is a fragmented, incantatory thing — someone being called back by a voice while they lose pieces of themselves, arm, breast, eyes, until the poem turns on a single word: dawn.

Mara: Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume III pulls from the exile diaries — brief, dated entries, a swollen moon like a drowned body, broken arms in flashlight, two people sharing a broken leg under a wall. Compression as witness.

Pip: Several of the collections move between myth and the personal. Second Advent of Zeus brings Aphrodite into something almost confessional, while Neo-Hellene Poets: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry reaches further back — an orphic hymn climbing toward Apollonian light while darkness still holds the valley below.

Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri: The Tragic Love Story is the outlier in tone — elegiac, addressed to a brother, full of scattered dreams and the image of a sun-flooded city from childhood. Antony Fostieris – Selected Poems is leaner: a tree that could be a man, or the devil, shaking branches over wild bodies at night.

Pip: Übermensch, Hours of the Stars, Vespers, The Long Road, Nostos and Algos, and Entropy round out the range — from the compressed image of a colt and dolphin parading in a field of blue flags, to a morning commute where the economic index drops and the beggar count rises and you start wondering if progress is real or if we're just coasting downhill without brakes.

Mara: Entropy puts it plainly: "The river has many homelands / it flows, it doesn't think / it flows loaded with seasons and people." Movement without destination — that's the collection's argument in three lines.

Pip: Which is also, quietly, a decent description of a translation project this large.

Mara: The philosophical work here asks a related question — not where we're going, but what makes existence possible in the first place.

Myth, Being, and the Structure of Imagination

Pip: The Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative is doing something different from the poetry — it's prose philosophy working through Greek cosmogony to ask what imagination actually is and where it comes from.

Mara: It opens with ontology and moves fast into myth. The excerpt reads: "That which makes it possible for something to be is Being (ta oũsia). Thus, from the various possibilities of Being, through a process of union, the universe comes into existence, together with the natural phenomena and the elemental forces of nature embodied in the image of the Cyclopes — terrifying beings outside the ordinary order of existence."

Pip: So the Cyclopes aren't monsters in a story — they're a way of thinking about what lies outside normal categories of existence. The framework uses myth as philosophical vocabulary.

Mara: Exactly. Cronus, Nyx, Nemesis, Thanatos — each deity in the succession myth maps onto a force: Discord, Deceit, Destruction. The essay notes that "the first part of this myth makes no mention whatsoever of a creation of an anthropomorphic kind," which is its hinge — imagination precedes the human.

Pip: That's the kind of argument that makes the poetry collections feel less like a separate shelf and more like the same inquiry running in a different register. Speaking of registers — the fiction here is working in a much grittier one.

Conflict, Desire, and the Weight of History

Pip: The narrative excerpts span Irish political violence, wartime Romania, and a Greek coming-of-age story — all of them placing ordinary people inside systems that are either collapsing or crushing them.

Mara: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment. A letter read aloud describes Ireland in the early 1920s, and it doesn't soften anything: "people going about their business as if living in a bad dream and not knowing if it's going to get worse or better before they wake up. All they seem to be able to talk about is Sinn Fein, Eamon de Valera and the possibility of civil war, together with the latest outrage."

Pip: And then a man named O'Rourke leaves a party and is found shot on the road. No explanation. The letter writer just says she couldn't get over it the next day. That's the texture of political violence — it happens next to dinner parties.

Mara: In Turbulent Times is set in Belfast and Glasgow, following characters negotiating business, family pressure, and escape — someone who fled his overbearing family for Belfast, which says something about how bad Glasgow felt. The Gospel of Silence is the most harrowing: soldiers forbidden to speak at funerals, families forbidden to ask questions, coffins sealed shut.

Pip: The essay on the Transfăgărășan road — built over five years, six thousand tons of dynamite, dozens of soldiers' deaths — lands on this: "in that country even your death did not belong to you, but to the state."

Mara: Straits and Turns and Red in Black close the range — one a Greek youth story with a quick, charged encounter and the social geometry of a classroom exam, the other a poem about two triggers pulled simultaneously, a poacher and a buck, Thanatos delivered to two hearts at once.

Pip: History and desire, both arriving faster than anyone planned.

---

Mara: What holds all of this together is a persistent question about what survives — a poem, a myth, a letter, a sealed coffin.

Pip: Or a watch on a vest instead of a noose. Livaditis had a point. Next time, more from this archive.

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has built a catalog that stretches from Nobel laureates to Soviet jazz clubs to a monk worrying about a vow of celibacy in the Canadian wilderness — so, a fairly focused literary project.

Mara: vequinox covers all of that here: modern Greek poetry collections, critical reviews of those collections, and a wide range of memoir, fiction, and travel writing. Let's start with the poetry itself.

Modern Greek Poetry Collections

Pip: The collections gathered here share a preoccupation with grief that refuses to stay still — it moves, it waits, it names itself after mythological figures. The question running through all of them is what form feeling takes when language is the only container left.

Mara: The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets opens that question directly. One poem sets the tone: "I shall wait for the star again to tell it, holding back a tear that has appeared in my eyes, that like a joy I held you in my embrace warm and gleaming, my complete grief."

Pip: Complete grief — not partial, not fading. The poem doesn't resolve the loss; it holds it like something precious. That's the emotional logic the whole anthology operates on.

Mara: The Seferis and Ritsos volumes push into stranger territory. The George Seferis Collected Poems moves through ritual and silence — oil on limbs, a crippled man in a courtyard, coins falling. The two Yannis Ritsos volumes, Volume VI and Volume VII, work in long associative sequences: eggshells creaking under a blind man's feet, a statue making peace with rain, a bus nearly empty by the seashore.

Pip: Ritsos in particular seems constitutionally opposed to the tidy image.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Selected Poems names a stone Oedipus — irregular, gouged, tumbling — and licks it "to the end of my story until I understand what choice means." And Marginal closes the group with a more direct lyric longing, asking simply to sit close during cold winter nights and erase tears from eyelids.

Pip: From Nobel Prize territory to that — the range is the point. Which raises the question of how critics are actually reading this work.

Poetry Reviews And Anthologies

Mara: The reviews here do something useful: they slow down and describe what the poems are actually doing. The AI review of Yannis Ritsos Poems Volume VI focuses on how the collection handles moral witness. Here is the passage on one poem: "Whether we read them as payment, recognition, mockery, or some mixture of these, his earlier silence has acquired a social form. Ritsos needs little explanation to show how wrongdoing can make a place for itself within ordinary manners and a person's wish to avoid trouble."

Pip: So the political and the domestic are the same room. A glove on a kitchen table becomes a form of defiance; a neighbor's silence becomes complicity wearing a bouquet.

Mara: The review of Rendition takes a similar approach to Aligizakis's own poetry collection, tracing how war's damage continues long after impact — in the psyche, in intimacy, in the daily labor of staying alive. And the review of Tasos Livaditis Poems Volume II, which was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, emphasizes how Livaditis uses humor and religious imagery to keep sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone.

Pip: Grief seasoned with comedy, transcendence explained by having lost the way. That's a more interesting theology than most.

Mara: All three reviews share a method: they trust the poems to carry political and emotional weight simultaneously, without separating the two. That same refusal to separate things out runs through the fiction and memoir too.

Memoir Fiction And Travel

Pip: The prose writing spans Soviet Leningrad, the Canadian frontier, a Vancouver taxi at ten in the morning, and a Greek immigrant sitting exams — which is either a very broad canvas or proof that displacement is the one subject.

Mara: Jazz with Ella sets the tone early. A character named Volodya understands that his entire strategy for keeping his job is a stopgap: "Truly, he would never be free to play his music until he left the Soviet Union. Forever." Meanwhile, Jennifer arrives in Leningrad and sees sunshine yellow buildings and lacy ironwork on bridges — the city beautiful and crumbling at once.

Pip: The outside dazzles; the inside knows the score. That tension carries through most of these books.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men moves it to the North American wilderness — Rordan and Yamka lost in a darkening forest, a priest awake all night praying not for their survival but for the Brother's vow of celibacy. Redemption follows Hermes through Vancouver, studying, dreaming of home, watching a supervisor's faint smile as he hands in his exam paper.

Pip: A faint smile of satisfaction — that's the whole immigrant experience compressed into one supervisor's face.

Mara: Straits and Turns takes a taxi driver's-eye view: customers sleeping off a drunk in the back seat while he calculates the fare and thinks about what his parents might be eating for supper back home. He Rode Tall works in a different register entirely — a Western, Joel grooming a sorrel gelding in a barn, the smell of sweaty horses and leather as a kind of homecoming.

Mara: The lyric writing collected in Vernal Equinox, The Long Road, Hear Me Out, Marginal, and Kariotakis-Polydouri: The Tragic Love Story runs alongside the prose — poems about a new moon at zero percent, a mirror ruminating on two diverging paths, Athens giving itself to April like a lover.

Pip: And then there is Mythography, which steps back entirely — a painter's brush stopping before it completes the body, visitors seeing peels of skin, strips of cinnamon bark. An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative goes further still, tracing how the absence of sacred books and rigid dogma in ancient Greece gave rise to what it calls a distinctive and unique Imaginative — the birthplace, it argues, of the free spirit and critical thought.

Mara: Which is not a side note. It is the philosophical ground under everything else in the catalog — the reason a stone gets named Oedipus, the reason grief can be called complete.

---

Pip: So the throughline is attention — to a glove, a faint smile, a zero-percent moon, an eggshell underfoot.

Mara: And the argument that paying attention is never neutral. More of that next time.

Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Excerpt

Livaditis can carry that wish into much more startling territory. In “Poet,” a man encounters an abandoned baby, hesitates, and then takes the child home. His body develops the means to feed it. The event is impossible, but the emotional logic is exact: another person’s need calls forth a capacity he did not previously possess. Here poetic imagination becomes a form of responsibility. It does more than decorate experience with unusual images. It asks what kind of transformation might be necessary if we fully accepted the demand made upon us by another vulnerable life.

That imaginative generosity should not obscure the book’s humor. Livaditis is often funny, sometimes mischievously so, and his humor prevents the prevailing sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone. “Correspondence” exposes a writer’s vanity through a deliciously uncomfortable reversal involving a roommate and a letter. “Fame” makes recognition arrive under circumstances in which nobody would sensibly desire it. Bureaucratic procedures elsewhere become absurd performances whose logic survives only by humiliating the person subjected to them. We laugh, but the laughter often catches against something painful. The joke reveals how readily institutions, ambitions, and even literary dreams lose contact with human needs.

The religious imagery is equally resistant to solemn predictability. God, Christ, angels, resurrection, and Paradise appear repeatedly, but they do not assemble into a reassuring system. Divine figures may seem uncertain or vulnerable; miracles may answer a small embarrassment rather than a grand theological question. In “Answer,” walking on the waves receives an explanation grounded in having lost the way. The reversal brings transcendence close to ordinary bewilderment. What matters is often less the possession of divine power than the possibility that the divine might understand weakness. Livaditis’s sacred imagination is most persuasive when it bends toward the person who cannot manage.

Nor does political conviction disappear when religion is spoken. “Applied Marxism,” with its comic relationship between hidden money and approaching moonlight, lets material calculation and imaginative freedom disturb one another. The poem is too brief and playful to function as a doctrinal argument. Its interest lies in the friction between ways of valuing the world. Across the volume, economic deprivation remains tangible even when a scene becomes dreamlike. Rent, hunger, wages, worn clothing, and precarious shelter keep returning. Poems may travel beyond ordinary reality, but poverty continues to determine who waits, who serves, who commands, and who is allowed to rest.

“Horse Eyed Women” gives these concerns a larger dramatic setting. Its hotel gathers desire, loneliness, money, recollection, and violence within a temporary place of lodging. People arrive carrying lives that cannot be understood from their public appearance. The hotel clerk’s relationship with a useless key is especially suggestive: an object associated with access becomes an instrument of longing for an inaccessible past. Around the more conspicuous dramas, the maids continue their work. Their conversations and their presence near the dirty sink draw attention toward the labour that supports other people’s stories, then remains to deal with what those stories leave behind.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4051627

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763564