Reviewed by AI

…At the same time, the collection’s erotic gaze can become rhetorically intense, even overwhelming. “Nonchalance,” “Labyrinth,” “At the Restaurant,” “At the Metro,” “Shopping,” “Heatwave,” and “Conches” frequently place the beloved body at the centre of the speaker’s imaginative world. This is consistent with the poet’s lyric practice, in which Eros is a cosmic and metaphysical force. However, the strongest poems are those that preserve the beloved as an active participant rather than only an object of description. “Music,” for example, works because touch, kiss, and the word “transcendence” are shared gestures. The poem’s lyric force comes from mutuality.

        Greek mythology is another important source of the collection’s vocabulary. Eros, Hades, Elysium, Chronos, Thanatos, and ancient figures of fate or divinity appear beside phones, buses, supermarkets, restaurants, news broadcasts, and military technology. This collision between mythic and contemporary registers is central to the book’s aesthetic. Myth allows the speaker to enlarge ordinary experience, while contemporary details prevent the mythological language from becoming merely ornamental. In “Hunters,” two men with rifles become participants in a fatal, almost mythic encounter with Thanatos. In “Hummingbird,” the speaker imagines rebirth through the primordial womb before being recalled to the immediate task of watching a bird feed.

       The book’s use of imagery is consistently painterly. Red, black, white, blue, gold, and purple recur with symbolic intensity. Red is particularly mobile: it is blood, carnation, wine, erotic heat, political violence, and the colour of the book’s title. Black appears in mourning clothes, coal dust, weaponry, night, industrial extraction, and the fear of death. Their interaction is never stable. The book’s world is not divided cleanly into passion and darkness; each colour enters the territory of the other.

       “Retired Collier” and “Bitumen” provide a powerful late pairing. The former portrays a former miner whose body and memory remain marked by coal: black lungs, tunnels, quotas, labour, old age, and the residual darkness of industrial work. “Bitumen” expands this blackness into a critique of resource extraction, multinational profit, atherosclerosis, ecological damage, and financial abstraction. The poems suggest that black is not merely a colour of death but an economic and environmental condition. It accumulates in the body, the landscape, and the language of corporate value.   

        Formally, Red in Black is composed primarily of short free-verse poems, often one per page. This presentation gives each lyric a visual autonomy and allows for sharp tonal shifts. The book’s structure is associative rather than narrative. Eros gives way to war, war to domestic observation, domestic observation to philosophical meditation, and then back again. This movement can be disorienting, but it is also meaningful. The collection insists that no experience can be safely compartmentalized. A supermarket can contain both erotic reverie and economic decay; a bus can contain marital loss and public violence; a restaurant can contain paradise while war persists elsewhere.

        At times, the collection’s density of imagery and abstraction works against precision. Words such as “eternity,” “transcendence,” “totality,” “freedom,” “meaning,” and “perfection” recur often. They are most effective when rooted in a concrete situation: Fatima’s lentils, Paul’s missing leg, the old man’s maple leaf, the driver’s glass partition, or the bread crumbs offered to sparrows. The poems gain particular force when the philosophical claim emerges from a material scene rather than preceding it.

       This tension is nevertheless integral to the poet’s work. Red in Black is ambitious because it wants lyric poetry to address both the intimate and the geopolitical, both sensual experience and public systems of violence. It refuses the false choice between erotic beauty and ethical responsibility. Its most compelling poems reveal that these domains are already connected: the body that desires is also the body that can be wounded, displaced, aged, exploited, or mourned.

       Ultimately, Red in Black is a collection of ethical contrasts. It contrasts private pleasure with public catastrophe, political rhetoric with bodily injury, industrial profit with environmental and human damage, and death with the small acts of care that keep life meaningful. Its governing colours therefore become moral as well as aesthetic categories. Red is not only passion, and black is not only despair. Both are elements of a world that must be seen clearly if poetry is to remain a language of witness.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562962#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771713208

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has apparently decided that one literary universe is not enough — so here we are, somewhere between ancient myth, Canadian snowstorms, and a ceilidh in rural Ireland.

Mara: vequinox has been busy. The posts this week span translated Greek poetry, prose fiction across several continents, and lyric meditations on exile, memory, and the natural world.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry — specifically, what it means to gather voices from across a century of modern Greek literature into one place.

Modern Greek Poetry — Voices Across a Century

Mara: The Neo-Hellene anthology brings together poets whose work ranges from sensory abundance to stark political grief, and the question the collection keeps pressing is what holds a tradition together across such different registers.

Pip: The harvest poem that opens the anthology sets the tone — here is the line: "great swarms of bees rouse from their hives to drink the vine's ethereal smells and forage on its pistils full of nectar and spread the news in buzzing eulogies."

Mara: What that gets the reader is an almost ceremonial fullness — the countryside isn't backdrop, it's participant. The bees are eulogists. The girls are part of the same procession.

Pip: And then the anthology turns, hard. A second excerpt from the same collection gives us a garden where every rose is dead in a flowerpot-coffin and the cypress is described as endless martyrdom. Spring and elegy occupying the same volume.

Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in his selected poems, works in a completely different key — spare, almost parable-like. An old man sits in the rain covering an imaginary violin with his coat, and the speaker simply says he has always heard the music.

Pip: Nikos Engonopoulos takes a more ironic angle. His Sideris, the Croatian guard who considers himself a true Hellene and brings stacks of newspapers to a house where no one can read them to him, is both comic and quietly devastating.

Mara: Titos Patrikios and Yannis Ritsos pull toward the political. Patrikios warns against glorifying voices that hide something rotten, while still insisting that showing one's wounds requires real strength. Ritsos, across both volume three and volume six, moves between diary fragments of exile and a single grain of rice incised with war banners and deserters.

Pip: Constantine Cavafy's "Finalities" lands the coldest line in the batch — the danger was never where anyone was looking.

Mara: Hours of the Stars and Antony Fostieris round out the range — one spare and devotional, the other a long, careening walk down a dark avenue where God might be cycling past on an evening stroll.

Pip: That image of the margin — the figure walking alone, slightly afraid to look back — connects directly to what the prose poetry is doing with exile and identity.

Exile, Memory, and the Marginal Voice

Mara: The central question here is what poetry can do for people who never made it into the official story — the forgotten workers, the unnamed soldiers, the immigrants who stayed at the edge.

Pip: The AI review of Marginal puts it plainly: "Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied."

Mara: What that means in practice is that marginality gets reframed — not as deprivation but, as the review argues, as a privileged vantage point. From the edge, the structures at the centre become visible.

Pip: The review also describes the book's movement as circular rather than progressive — the older consciousness revisits, asks again, remembers differently. That's a structural claim about how the poems are built, not just what they're about.

Mara: Introspection pushes this further into the psychological. Its speaker fights not just loneliness but his own identity — a vision described as multifaceted and plethoric, unable to settle against what the poem calls metallic and unbendable silence.

Pip: Entropy, Orange, and Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy each approach the same territory from a different angle — the newborn who doesn't know its origin, the speaker told to find a path in an ancestor's footsteps, the figure who existed on a feather's lightness somewhere between the exceptional and the ordinary.

Mara: Together they map a recurring concern: the self as something formed in transit, between languages, between homelands, between the living and the dead.

Pip: From lyric exile to something more novelistic — the fiction excerpts are doing their own version of this geography.

Narrative Excerpts — Lives in Motion

Mara: The fiction this week covers a wide arc — childhood in a mixed-language Romanian town, a failing engineer in maritime postings, a jazz-era romp through the Moscow Kremlin, and immigrant life in Vancouver — and the question is what kind of pressure each excerpt places on its characters.

Pip: The Gospel of Silence opens with a memory so specific it becomes universal: "Teachers were still permitted to use corporal punishment. We received hard slaps. Șerban's method was the cruelest: he grabbed the hair beside one's ear and lifted until the tuft remained in his hand."

Mara: The upshot is a childhood rendered without sentimentality — the watermill, the castle, the Romanian-Hungarian schoolyard rivalries all exist in a balance the narrator knows will not hold.

Pip: He Rode Tall takes a different kind of reckoning. Joel, the engineer, has calculated that he is functioning at roughly a quarter of his capacity, and the excerpt's quiet horror is that he knows it precisely and intends to change nothing.

Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the register entirely — light, comic, tourists navigating the Kremlin Armoury, debating whether a jewelled ladle qualifies as a pooper scooper and lining up for Lenin's tomb on its one open day.

Pip: Straits and Turns puts a Greek immigrant in Vancouver, writing his novel by a window overlooking the Lions, waiting for his girlfriend's visa situation to resolve — the geography of longing made very literal.

Mara: Swamped and The Unquiet Land close out the fiction range. One is set in the high-tension world of Vancouver brokerage, the other in an Irish ceilidh where a stiletto-tongued spinster is already certain the bride is pregnant.

Pip: The Unquiet Land's village gossip is sharper than any market analysis in Swamped — which is saying something. From human drama indoors to the weather outside.

Nature, Weather, and Myth

Mara: These poems ask how landscape becomes myth — and how myth survives when the land itself is fenced, frozen, or reduced to a watermelon slice of moon.

Pip: Mythography opens with two madrona trunks intertwined on a rocky promontory: "Two bodies interlocked bright reddish trunks firm in resolution to uphold the tree-pneuma benevolent auspice unison in the hug of the breeze."

Mara: The plain consequence is that the natural world here is never just scenery — the trees have pneuma, the bees have eulogies, the landscape holds a kind of civic or spiritual office.

Pip: Hear Me Out takes that mythic weight and scales it down to a watermelon slice of new moon — barely visible, mostly imagined, and somehow more present for it.

Mara: Rendition moves to the plains, where a rider on a mustang jumps a ravine against a dying sun, and the fences cutting across rolling fields carry the full weight of colonial enclosure. Vespers ends in the Arctic — Inukshuk's fingertips guiding a wolf's howl through a blizzard, with an arctic hare blinking beneath a dwarf willow, holding onto something the poem calls benevolent hope.

Pip: Four very different landscapes, one persistent argument: the world has its own grammar, and the poems are trying to learn it.

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Mara: From a Greek harvest to an Arctic blizzard, the through-line is a poetry that refuses to let place be passive.

Pip: And a prose that keeps asking what it costs to be somewhere you weren't born — or to be exactly where you were born and still feel like a stranger.

Mara: Next time, we'll see what else arrives from the margins.

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where Greek modernist poetry, frontier fiction, and poems about desire share the same digital neighborhood — which is either a very ambitious curatorial vision or the world's most eclectic bookshelf.

Mara: vequinox has been posting across all of that territory this week — translations of major Greek poets, a wide range of fiction excerpts, and poetry collections that sit somewhere between the surreal and the visceral. Let's start with the Greek poetry translations.

Greek Poets, Translated and Alive

Pip: The question underneath all these translations is whether a poem can survive the crossing — from modern Greek into English, from one cultural world into another, without losing whatever made it matter in the first place.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis volume, long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, gives you a direct answer in the verse itself: "and it's strange how untrue the most real things look sometimes — ah mother when you gave birth to me you should had given birth to a rock."

Pip: That line does something interesting — it frames grief as a structural flaw in the person, not a wound from outside. The rock wouldn't feel any of this. The human does, and that's the problem.

Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume V — push into similar territory from different angles. The Volume IV poem "Method of Optimism" describes a man whose face stays sunlit even as everything around him is almost black, furniture, faces, time, windows. Volume V is starker: "Come on, let's finish it, he said, continuance is boring."

Pip: Ritsos apparently had no patience for the long goodbye.

Mara: Titos Patrikios takes a different approach in his Selected Poems — the poem "Monument" builds an image of everyday inertia, "without a bang, without pleasure, with inert touch deep in your viscera," which is a very specific kind of monument to build.

Pip: The Nikos Engonopoulos collection moves through myth and desire, tracing a line from ancient phallic dances to "these black eyes that look at me." And the George Seferis Collected Poems lands somewhere more desolate — "High mountains, you can't hear us! Help! Help!" — a cry that expects no answer.

Mara: What holds all of these together is the translation work itself, carrying voices across decades and languages. That same labor of rendering inner life legible shows up differently in the fiction excerpts.

Fiction's Pressures: Family, Land, and Conflict

Pip: The fiction this week keeps returning to one question — what happens when the world outside a family is in crisis and the world inside it is already broken?

Mara: The excerpt from He Rode Tall sets the frame clearly: seventeen-year-old Joel is riding the high ridges on July 20, 1969, and the narration notes that "the Circle H was not a healthy place for this seventeen-year-old boy to be; and really, not a healthy place for anyone, and certainly not a place with a future."

Pip: That date is doing quiet work. The moon landing is happening on a radio somewhere while this kid is counting cattle and absorbing his father's cruelty. History as backdrop to a family that has no room for it.

Mara: Jazz with Ella moves the coordinates entirely — Moscow, a young woman named Jennifer discovering she has family in the Soviet Union, and a conversation that keeps circling a family accident nobody names directly. She says, "Everything about my family is to do with the accident." And then she decides to send a telegram rather than call, because withholding, as the narrator puts it, ran in the family.

Pip: Withholding as inheritance. That is a very compact way to describe a very large problem.

Mara: In Turbulent Times and The Unquiet Land both place their characters inside Irish political fractures — the latter featuring a long pub argument about partition, two nations, two parliaments, and a Council of Ireland that one character calls "two sham parliaments and a Council that can't raise a single tax." The tension is constitutional, but it's also personal.

Pip: Wellspring of Love and Water in the Wilderness share a quieter register — a nurse named Tyne appears in both, at a patient's bedside in one, tending her aunt in the other, prayer and practicality running side by side.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men takes the widest historical lens — a traveling company of Norse, Irish, and Indigenous characters crossing a continent, with a Mandan chief named Fire Maker telling stories by campfire, and a monk determined to make converts.

Pip: Poodie James and Straits and Turns close out the range — one a tense small-town confrontation between a reporter and a sweating councilman who would very much like the past to stay in the past, the other a Greek-diaspora social scene where desire and social performance are basically the same activity.

Mara: Across all of it, characters are navigating what they've inherited — land, silence, conflict, family damage. The poetry collections make that inheritance lyric rather than narrative.

Desire, Dread, and the Surreal Interior

Pip: The poetry here isn't interested in resolved emotion — it's interested in the moment before resolution, or the moment when resolution turns out to be impossible.

Mara: The Gospel of Silence opens this territory with a prose-poem voice that is unusually direct: "For a long time, I believed one stays alive by understanding everything. Now I know there are things one must simply endure, survive."

Pip: That's a significant revision to make about your own operating assumptions. And the childhood scenes that follow — ice cracking underfoot, wading into black marsh water, counting leeches as proof of having gone somewhere forbidden — all enact it physically.

Mara: Medusa frames desire as interruption — grand mythic language about "an apocalyptic prophecy" and "the parabolic myth of my oppressed life" cut through by italicized domestic voices: "Get up and help me do the dishes." The sublime and the mundane are arguing in the same stanza.

Pip: The mundane wins on points, as it usually does.

Mara: Nuances and Impulses work in shorter, more compressed registers — whispered desire in the first, dancers and an old man lost in reverie in the second. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy gives the speaker a different kind of motion: "I was a river passer, a mule rider, an engraving on the rock — mule and man, the same flesh."

Pip: Entropy, Troglodytes, and Ugga push toward something more abstract — cells dying without noticing, troglodytes dividing the first earthly ownership while fireflies drift through cave air, and a sequence of compressed philosophical fragments about thought, logos, and the concept of the infinite reduced to "tiny concept for first-grade school."

Mara: What runs through all of it is a refusal to separate the body from the idea — desire is always also dread, survival is always also endurance, and the inner life keeps finding the outer world waiting for it.

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Pip: Greek modernism, frontier families, diaspora parties, ice cracking under children's feet — it's a wide map.

Mara: What connects it is the pressure of inheritance — what gets passed down, what gets translated, what gets endured. More of that territory next time.