Tag: lust

Podcast Episode: Poetry, Memory, And Exile

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis's site this week is running at full capacity — Greek myth, prairie crows, frozen train bells, and at least one dolphin swimming through time.

Mara: vequinox has been publishing across a wide range, and today we're moving through modern Greek poetry and translation, prose excerpts from fiction and memoir, and writing that puts landscape and labor front and center.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, Ancient Echoes

Mara: The question running through this cluster of posts is what Greek poetry — ancient myth, modern grief, translated voices — actually does to a reader when it lands in English.

Pip: The post on Vernal Equinox sets the stakes quietly. The speaker imagines a reunion at a plaza statue, and the whole poem turns on readiness: "holding a book in my left hand and a carnation in the other just in case you come looking to stir my emotions just in case you come yearning for kisses like that cold October morning we separated."

Mara: So the upshot is that the poem holds two timelines at once — the separation and the imagined return — and the carnation is both hopeful and defensive. That tension is the whole poem.

Pip: The Cloe and Alexandra post does something similar with closure. The speaker locks up the poems, demands back a kiss key, notes the museum is closed on Fridays — and a dolphin earring, hung on the ear eons ago, drowns in tears never shed. Grief rendered as bureaucratic inventory.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis translation frames mortality differently. The prose poem called Daily Use ends: "I opened the door and followed my path. And at night, at dinner, in horror, I listened as they narrated their stories, which, in a way, silenced the dark, remote outside — there, where we had lived."

Pip: Livaditis makes the ordinary genuinely unsettling. The host hides, the doorbell rings, and survival looks a lot like just keeping your balance against the table.

Mara: Yannis Ritsos, in the Volume V post, works the same territory through objects — an ashtray, a hanger, cologne in a barber shop — and a woman who scratches a mandarin and then simply vanishes. Memory fails to anchor things to places.

Pip: And then the Entropy post asks what to do with Odysseus now — "conscious of a tribe that commits suicide as it stands and listens to the echo of oars on the horizon." Which is a question that does not have a comfortable answer.

Mara: Titos Patrikios, in the Crossroads post, puts the same fracture into a friendship: paths that once ran together now "rise like wild horses," and the speaker grieves a common tongue lost forever. The Hours of the Stars post goes the other direction — sensory, almost ecstatic, nymphs singing by water springs, the Zodiac aroused, Hypnos laid to sleep in open palms.

Pip: Constantine Cavafy's post gives us a king declaring Alexandria the center of the Panhellenic world in every word and every art — confident, a little absurd, entirely convincing. Nostos and Algos asks why the gardenia sighed and the clock went silent, and gets no answer, which is the answer.

Mara: Antony Fostieris frames emotion as infrastructure — "the wire that reaches the heart of the void" — and armies moving through heavenly spaces. Nikos Engonopoulos assembles Ottoman benefactors, Italian collaborators, sixteenth-century French poets, and the monk who discovered gunpowder into one gloriously unruly stanza. Medusa drops the mythological register entirely for a citizen on a couch, beer belly out, fingers on an Enter button, boom.

Pip: And the POETS Day post on Oscar Wilde rounds out the week's range — from ancient Ithaca to Victorian wit in one scroll.

Mara: What holds all of it together is translation as an act of preservation — and the prose excerpts this week make a similar argument about memory and form.

Prose, Memory, And The Self On The Page

Pip: This segment is about what prose does when it gets personal — memoir shading into fiction, characters discovering themselves through other people, and the question of whether a self can be written into existence.

Mara: The Gospel of Silence puts it directly. The narrator, finding his footing in a dormitory school, writes to survive: "I tried fitting words together so they might express me, preserve me. My young literature teacher read and evaluated my writings in her apartment; the situation was at once embarrassing and liberating. It was as though the boundaries between text and life had blurred."

Pip: So literature stops being curriculum and becomes something you live inside. That's the real claim of the excerpt — not that writing is therapeutic, but that it's constitutive.

Mara: In Turbulent Times works the same boundary between role and person, but through attraction. Nora and Ian circle each other across a bar counter, and a colleague delivers the verdict plainly: "Heart, soul, and body, she's all yours." Ian catches the words "some time again" and holds them like something precious.

Pip: Redemption follows Hermes through immigrant life in Canada, where the local warmth surprises him — people talk to you on buses without caring who you are or what you're wearing, and he writes home with such enthusiasm he asks Magda whether she could see herself living there with him.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men takes the widest geographic and cultural scope — Norse settlers, Mandan storytelling, a winter cave, a monk who hates carved figures and endures the cold only under protest. The community holds together through craft and story rather than doctrine.

Pip: Ken Kirkby, Warrior Painter offers a different kind of self-construction — the artist deploying a Rain Man ruse to deflect unwanted attention, then losing his cover, and concluding that what's missing from most self-assessment is a sense of humor.

Mara: And the Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative makes the philosophical case underneath all of it: the human mind creates ex nihilo, just as God did, and the new worlds built by science and technology carry their own kind of truth — though whether that truth can replace ontological truth remains, as the excerpt puts it, "highly debatable."

Pip: From the self preserved in a school dormitory to the world created from nothing — the scale shifts, but the argument stays the same. Which is also, in a way, what the landscape writing is doing.

Work, Ground, And What Stays

Pip: This segment is about labor in physical places — what bodies do in cold yards and prairie woodlots, and what that work leaves behind.

Mara: Straits and Turns anchors the segment in a rail yard on a freezing night. The bell won't sound because the air pipe has frozen, and the crew works through it: "Darkness had covered the yard like a shroud, and poetic images came into Mike's mind, which he promised himself that he'd write some time later."

Pip: He files the poetry away for later and keeps washing the engines. That's the whole economy of the scene — work first, meaning later, maybe.

Mara: Prairie Roots puts the same energy into springtime crow-nest raiding on a farm — organized, purposeful, and genuinely joyful. The excerpt notes that low wet spots meant rubber boots, and stopping to hunt tadpoles, and "all these things added to the joy of being young and alive."

Pip: Ugga compresses the same ground into verse: "someone squares three stones, two down, one up, to steady it" — and inside that act, the first Mason is born, the first window to the future.

Mara: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy frames the craftsman as someone who cannot help making the wrong thing beautifully — crowns for palaces that no longer exist, always missing a name. And The Long Road follows a worm across brown leaves, brainless yet wise enough to crawl on his skin and declare the rules of life.

Pip: From frozen bell to fat worm — the ground keeps producing its own argument.

Mara: The thread across all of it is preservation — words that keep a self intact, translations that carry a voice across languages, labor that leaves something behind even when the bell won't ring.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else the ground turns up.

Still Waters

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Excerpt

The car, a 1953 Cadillac convertible, stood in front of the Tournquists’
house. Red and shiny, it had gleaming white wall tires. Tyne
had not seen it there on any of her previous visits.
As Cam drew his Buick alongside, she said, “Your parents must
have visitors.”
“I don’t think so, honey. There’s no car here except what belongs
to the family.”
“Oh, did they get a new ….” She stopped, realization dawning. “Oh
no, Cam, it can’t be … not mine.” Stunned, she remained seated until
he came around to open her door.
“I’ll let them tell you.” Cam helped her out, and led her up the
front steps. At the top, she put her hand on the wrought iron rail and
turned to look back. “Oh, my goodness,” she murmured.
The car was indeed hers, Arthur Tournquist informed her a few
minutes later.
“But, I can’t let you … really, it’s too much ….”
“Tyne, will you please stop mumbling and accept our gift graciously?”
Arthur smiled at her, but Tyne sensed his impatience.
What did one do in a situation like this? She didn’t want to refuse a
gift. On the other hand, this gift was much too extravagant, the most
she had hoped for being a second-hand older model something. She
had no idea what she had expected, because she knew little about
cars. But this … even if she was to be their daughter-in-law, she could
not accept a gift like this.
And that’s just the point, she thought. If Cam and I were already
married, it might be a different matter. They could have waited …
they should have waited.
She thought about Moe and the humble little television set from
her future in-laws. She would give anything to be able to trade places
with Moe right now, or at least be able to trade gifts. Since that was
impossible, she craved the next best thing – to call Aunt Millie and
ask her advice.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763068

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a site where Greek modernism, prairie crime fiction, and erotic lyric poetry share the same address — which is either an act of radical curation or a very ambitious filing system.

Mara: vequinox is behind all of it — translations, original poems, fiction excerpts, and critical reviews — and today we're moving through Greek poetry and myth, literary fiction and crime, and the territory of love, loss, and desire. Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Poetry, Myth, and the Weight of Small Images

Pip: The question this cluster of work keeps pressing is what a short poem can actually hold — whether compression is a limitation or its own kind of argument.

Mara: The AI review of Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume I, sets this up directly. Looking at the poem "Doxology," it finds that "the compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury."

Pip: So the short poem isn't a reduced version of something larger — it's a form that keeps meaning genuinely open rather than resolving it into comfort.

Mara: That's exactly the review's claim. The man resembling a dusty, leafless tree, the sun that has burned him remaining beyond burning — the review argues the restraint lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and solar power stay visible rather than collapse into consolation. "Memory" and "Winter is Approaching" work the same way, using domestic objects — a father's silence, a repurposed hat, a stored collar — to carry psychological weight without fixing their meaning.

Pip: Objects that survive their original use and acquire something stranger. That's also what Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume VI does with "Transmutation" — chairs rearranged after a funeral, a lit match that suddenly reflects back at you.

Mara: The Katerina Anghelaki Rooke selection gives Penelope a voice that does something similar — holding absence as a discipline. The Kariotakis-Polydouri tragic love story frames escape as transformation into "golden dust in the air." Cavafy's "Ithaca" makes the journey itself the point, not the destination.

Pip: And George Seferis folds political urgency right into elegy — "Sensual Elpinor" cuts between a grieving woman and a radio bulletin about war, with cyclamens and pine needles running through both.

Mara: Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems takes that further — beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, a severed head floating downstream with closed eyelids. Nikos Engonopoulos frames the poet-figure Belisarius as someone called upon in crisis and then forgotten. Nostos and Algos, Introspection, Second Advent of Zeus, Entropy, and Ugga all extend this — myth as a structure for thinking about origin, exile, and what gets inherited.

Pip: And then An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative steps back to ask what the faculty behind all this image-making actually is — Aristotle couldn't define it, Kant got close but missed it.

Mara: The Nuances review ties it together: the collection's most persuasive poems are those where "a particular object or scene" carries the argument — a doll with a missing arm, a rusted bicycle, a coffee cup. The Qliphoth takes a different angle, using letters and occult ritual to approach the same threshold between perception and the inexplicable.

Pip: From poems about what objects remember, let's move to fiction about what people do when their world falls apart.

Literary Fiction and the Pressure of Ordinary Lives

Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to a specific kind of crisis — the moment when an ordered life suddenly has no floor under it.

Mara: Jazz with Ella sets up a different register first: a group of travelers on a cultural tour, conversation about Cold War exchanges, Russian language lessons, the texture of being young and curious in a politically charged world. One character explains, "Learning by talking is the best way. That's why I didn't pack my Ozhegov."

Pip: Easy and social on the surface — but the other fiction excerpts don't stay there.

Mara: Straits and Turns goes somewhere much darker. A man's marriage ends in a single morning, and the excerpt traces exactly how a structured identity — a CIA agent's code, his protocol — becomes the mechanism of his destruction rather than his rescue. Poodie James works at a quieter pitch: a police lieutenant weighing whether to run for mayor after a death reshapes a small town's politics. Fury of the Wind grounds itself in the Canadian prairies, in schoolhouse registers and farming families and the slow inheritance of values across generations. The Unquiet Land puts economic pressure at the center — fishermen who can't sell their catch, fishmongers charging prices the catch can't justify. Ken Kirkby, Warrior Painter brings in a nonfiction register: a painter who discovers his missing work displayed in a stranger's home, sold by a gallery that never paid him.

Pip: Which is, in its way, the same structural collapse — an arrangement that was supposed to hold, and didn't. Now for the work that lives closest to the body.

Love, Loss, and What the Body Carries Forward

Mara: This segment's question is what desire and loss actually do to a person — whether they diminish or, strangely, clarify.

Pip: Straits and Turns makes the stakes immediate. The collapse of a marriage doesn't just unsettle a man — it dismantles the entire system of meaning he'd built around himself. Loss here isn't elegiac; it's structural failure.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Penelope offers something harder to categorize. She says of forgetting: "my only reward is that I finally understand what's human presence what's absence or how the ego functions in such desolation." That's not consolation — it's knowledge purchased at cost.

Pip: And then Triptych and Second Advent of Zeus come at desire from the body outward — touch and arousal as their own form of location, a way of knowing where you are.

Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri frames escape from grief as dissolution — becoming golden dust, entering an unfamiliar land where darkness doesn't exist. Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems shows the cost of that dissolution: beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, silence where song used to be. George Seferis holds the elegiac and the erotic together — a woman who has lost her light, the blind man still singing.

Pip: What stays with me is how consistently the site treats compression as a form of honesty — the short poem, the telling object, the moment of collapse that says more than the explanation would.

Mara: And how the same pressure shows up across every register — lyric, fiction, elegy. Next time, we'll see what else is accumulating on the site.

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume I: A Review by AI

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Excerpt

The pressure of the small poem

In Notes on the Margins of Time, the short poem does not merely reduce the scale of the longer lyric. It changes the reader’s experience of implication. “Doxology” concentrates its action into the relation between a damaged human figure and the sun he praises (93). The man resembles a dusty, leafless tree; the sun that has burned him remains beyond burning. The compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury. The English is strongest in its refusal to explain which response should dominate.

       The repeated tree establishes the man’s exposure before the final contrast arrives. The poem’s restraint matters more than any single ornamental effect. Its language lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and the sun’s power remain visible. A more elaborately lyrical translation could easily turn that asymmetry into consolation. Here, the starkness permits a harder reading: praise does not prove that suffering has been reconciled with justice. It shows a human response whose dignity and difficulty cannot be separated.

      “Hour of Song,” printed on the same page, similarly finds expression at a moment of deprivation rather than abundance. Wine and fruit are present when singing is forgotten; separation supplies the occasion on which song becomes necessary. The poem reverses the expectation that fullness generates art and loss merely silences it. Its short lines make that reversal almost ceremonially plain. Manolis’s uncluttered diction allows the relation between the two moments to remain the main event. The poem needs no explanation of why people sing; its arrangement of circumstances performs the explanation.

        Elsewhere, the domestic image carries a more troubling psychological charge. In “Memory,” a father returns without greeting his family, while the others remain absorbed in their own relations (98). The child’s perception is organized by the father’s silence, the window, the storm, and the cross-shaped mark disclosed by lightning. What might have remained a minor household omission becomes a retrospective scene of separation. The poem is not simply remembering an event. It is showing how an event acquires meaning when remembered, and how the child’s image persists beyond the occasion that produced it.

This is an important test of English syntax. The delayed and repeated references to the father create a hesitation appropriate to recollection, yet some constructions are cumbersome enough to slow comprehension unnecessarily. The reader can distinguish that grammatical friction from the productive uncertainty of the image itself. What the window-cross signifies may remain open; who has failed to notice a greeting should be clear. The distinction matters because the poem’s emotional force depends on ordinary actions being apprehensible before their meanings become strange.

       “Winter is Approaching” offers another powerful transformation of the domestic (97). A former hat becomes a place for chickens’ eggs, while a father’s stored collar helps define the coming cold. These objects have survived their original occasions of use, acquiring new functions or retaining an unsettling remnant of an old one. The trees’ association with mothballs brings seasonal change into the atmosphere of storage and inheritance. Such images demonstrate why Ritsos’s objects should not be reduced to emblems with fixed meanings. Their force comes from displaced use, touch, and memory.

        The English miniatures are often successful precisely because they preserve this practical identity of things. A hat remains a hat even while it becomes a nest; a collar remains a piece of clothing even while it carries paternal distance. The material object is not discarded once the metaphor has been understood. Manolis’s plain nouns help maintain the double attention that these poems require. The reader must see both what an object is and what a particular history has made it capable of suggesting.

(If you like poetry of this kind, you may find more about this great poet in the following links)

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562834

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763076

Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Violin for the One-Arm Man

4
Therefore I sit and contemplate: what man has that is
truly his
since my life assumes its importance when I narrate it
to someone like daylight that is important to the blind
who, at least, need to be seen
thus I sleep in peace knowing that someone else risks
on my behalf,
the one they know, only that each morning, just not
to betray myself,
I have to gather the broken pieces of the nightmare
and Uncle Elias,
very old, powdered with talc, since he lived humbly,
returned each Christmas and spent his evenings
making birds, not real ones, just to make sure they
wouldn’t lift up the house again;
in fact, one night I retried, and I swore with such
empathy that the few cloths I had placed in the room
almost dried up, yet
just that, and the bed, Judas the Iscariot, betrays me
to them every morning
I therefore preferred to walk aimlessly, a true delight
to my kind of people,
and then I truly found myself close to my life, like
the very sick who love the next fellow and who
stand absentmindedly under the trees or wear old
pyjamas or die fast like honeymoons
and Mr. Such and Such was very joyous when he made
money though that didn’t stop him from slapping
me two or three times a day
so that my poor mother’s milk went bad and we had
to exhume her so other seasons wouldn’t be in danger;
Besides, how can I learn new tricks at my age? In fact
I’d like to stop here for a moment as it happens in old
transcribed glorious documents or like the drunkard
who stands in front of the icons for a while before he
goes to spend the funeral money on drinks and
then the expulsions from parish to parish, short affairs
with the handrails, mysterious way of wearing
the same hat all the time
and this woman at the end of the road, so forgotten
that her steps are heard from inside all the fairy tales;
then there is always a sorrow for ourselves in all
our illusions
like our true residence that lasts as long as a song.

(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this beautiful book of translations in the following links)

https://draft2digital.com/book/4051627

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

Straits and Turns

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Excerpt

Necrophilia

…“I’m going out. I’ll be back in two hours. I don’t want to find you
here when I get back,” she said in a stern voice and left.
He sank into his armchair in a world that had collapsed around
him. His wife didn’t want to see him again. Where could he go? His
life was a big question mark. His life was so arranged and well set up
until this morning. His life of order and security has suddenly become
chaos and disarray, a gigantic open mouth ready to swallow him. His
orderly life has turned into a disorderly one. How could he live now?
How could he face his co-workers on Monday? Could he talk to someone?
Did he have anyone to talk to?
A quick thought flashed through his mind, and he felt shivers
travelling through his whole body. He walked upstairs to their bedroom.
Everything seemed to be in place. Then why does his life feel
upside down? He stepped into the closet. His clothes hung orderly in
it. On the top shelf, he groped for the box. He took it down. Went to
the bathroom. He placed the box on the counter. He opened the box:
he looked at his service revolver. He hadn’t cleaned it in a while. Like
a zombie, he loaded his pistol with ammunition. He stared at himself
in the mirror. The code. Yes, he remembered the code they all followed,
their protocol. That dark thought ran through his mind again, and this
time it didn’t make him shiver at all. He felt peaceful. He felt better. The
code was what he had followed all his life. A code, a protocol, the secure
way of a CIA agent. It’s the same code he had to follow to the bitter end.
When everything goes into disarray, and everything becomes nothing
but chaos, the code must come into place. Tears flowed down his cheeks
as he stared at his face and then faced the pistol in his hand. Suddenly,
a euphoric sense of well-being overtook him as if someone was protecting
him. He felt strong, good, and comfortable. Heroic. He smiled at
himself. He winked at himself. What would she think when she found
him? Would she cry? Would she laugh at him exiting this way? His
eyes filled with tears, and somehow, he felt an inexplicable warmth,
as if in a different state of mind, in that dimension that various books
described. He put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and, following
the example of so many others before him, Bradley pulled the trigger.

(If this excerpt spoke to you, you can find more about this book in the following links)

https://draft2digital.com/book/4250839#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763866

Nuances: Reviewed by AI

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Excerpt

 The strengths of Nuances lie in its imaginative range, its ethical seriousness, and its refusal to divorce lyric beauty from social reality. Aligizakis writes with a notably visual imagination. His poems are saturated with colour—red, white, azure, pewter, gold, black—and with tactile materials such as stone, flesh, wind, water, cloth, metal, and wood. His diction frequently reaches toward the elevated, incorporating mythological, religious, philosophical, and erotic vocabularies. This can create a heightened, ceremonial tone well suited to the collection’s central concerns.

         At times, however, the density of the language can work against precision. Some poems accumulate images so quickly that their syntactic or emotional centre becomes difficult to locate. Certain abstractions—“meaning,” “glory,” “freedom,” “opulence,” “greatness,” “void,” “dream”—recur frequently, and their force is strongest when grounded by the concrete material world that the book handles so well. The collection’s most effective poems are often those that allow a particular object or scene to carry the argument: a doll with a missing arm, a rusted bicycle, a flowerpot, a park bench, a syringe, a tank, a food court, or a coffee cup.

        This is not a weakness so much as a productive tension within the poet’s poetics. Nuances want to make large claims, but it is most persuasive when those claims emerge from a small, exact image. Its best work reveals how philosophical inquiry can remain rooted in the body and in ordinary experience. The collection’s frequent shifts between sublime imagery and everyday detail are not accidental. They express a central conviction: human beings do not encounter death, love, violence, religion, or freedom in abstract space. They encounter them in rooms, streets, kitchens, workplaces, hospitals, public squares, and landscapes.

         Nuances, therefore, are best understood as a collection of ethical lyricism. It asks readers to attend to the shades of feeling and responsibility that are often lost in public language, ideological certainty, or personal habit. Its poems are willing to be sensuous, rhetorical, mournful, comic, politically alert, and metaphysically restless. At its strongest, the book demonstrates that nuance is not a retreat from moral seriousness. It is a way of seeing more clearly: of recognizing that every claim to beauty contains a history, every gesture of love includes vulnerability, and every act of violence leaves behind a world which language must struggle to describe.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1897430515

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Human Longing

On By vequinoxIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where exile, desire, and the weight of history all show up before breakfast — and somehow that's a normal Tuesday.

Mara: vequinox has been posting across a wide range of work lately — modern Greek poetry translations, fiction excerpts, and a philosophical essay on what imagination actually does. That's the territory we're covering today.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry, which is where most of the weight lives.

Voices Out of Exile and Time

Mara: The thread running through these poetry posts is displacement — from homes, from language, from time itself. The question is what survives when all of that is stripped away.

Pip: George Seferis opens the answer with something almost architectural. The setup is a poem called "A House Near the Sea," and it earns its length.

Mara: The poem earns it. Here is the spine of it: "Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them."

Pip: That line does a lot of quiet work. The house isn't a metaphor for loss — it is the loss, with feelings of its own.

Mara: And the Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume VI — push that further into the political. Volume IV's "Without Counterweight" puts it plainly: "All the flags are torn to the whole length of time and there isn't one on a balcony to lower half mast."

Pip: Flags, torn. Nobody lowering anything. That's not elegy — that's indictment.

Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in Poems Volume II — longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize — turns inward. The observation that cuts is this: "each person keeps the key to their prison in their pocket and pretends to have forgotten it."

Pip: So the exile isn't always political. Sometimes it's the one you've arranged for yourself.

Mara: Antony Fostieris, in Selected Poems, takes that further into paradox — "In my future time, I'm already dead, fresh and dead in my darkness." Alive and dead simultaneously, in glassy cities that sink into clouds.

Pip: Hours of the Stars and the Neo-Hellene Anthology pull in the other direction — toward light, toward a "solemn and beautiful stranger" welcomed until exhaustion, toward wild lilies and the nectar of April lips.

Mara: Entropy frames the whole range: "between the minimal and infinity." Second Advent of Zeus traces selfhood back to its cellular origin, and Titos Patrikios distills community into six lines — seed, acorn, oak, path, forest.

Pip: From houses that resent you to forests that remember you. That's quite a range for one tradition.

Mara: The fiction posts ask a different version of the same question — what does a self do under pressure? Let's go there.

Fiction at the Edge of Endurance

Pip: The fiction excerpts here aren't comfort reads. They're interested in what people do when the situation is genuinely impossible — and how quietly that can happen.

Mara: Straits and Turns opens with a CIA agent named Bradley arriving home after a long flight, his life running on institutional routine, two years from retirement. Then: "he smelled the strong alcohol odour all over the…" — and the excerpt cuts.

Pip: The ellipsis is doing real work there. Everything before it is procedural calm, and then the floor drops.

Mara: Water in the Wilderness takes a different register entirely — warmer, more fragile. A boy named Bobby with missing fingers, escorting an elderly woman through a hospital door with his shoulders erect and head held high. The damage is visible; the dignity is louder.

Pip: And then Redemption lands its immigrant quietly in a three-by-four-meter room with paint peeling off the walls, trying to order food from a menu he cannot read. The stakes are enormous and nobody is shouting.

Mara: Gospel of Silence is the one that swings hardest. The narrator describes choosing "the rebellious Christ" over "the hermits' Christ who resigned himself to everything" — and then his father beats him with a wooden ruler until it shatters.

Pip: He endures it without a sound. That detail is the whole book in one sentence.

Mara: In Turbulent Times catches a family holiday collapsing in slow motion — a son counting down the minutes before he leaves, his mother's voice going "shrill, like the high-pitched squeal of scraped metal." The Qliphoth goes stranger, into an occult archive kept by a psychiatric patient who has memorized forbidden lore.

Pip: Poodie James brings a dead mayor, a woman who doesn't cry, and piano music that might be Chopin. Nostos and Algos asks the plainest question of all: if love is there and you won't give it, "why are you still breathing?"

Mara: Across all of it, the body under pressure — institutional, familial, historical, self-imposed — is the constant. The desire to escape, and the question of what you carry when you do, runs right into the next theme.

The Body That Desires and the Body That Endures

Pip: Red in Black is reviewed here, and the review makes a distinction that matters: the strongest poems are the ones where the beloved isn't just observed.

Mara: The review puts it directly: "The poem's lyric force comes from mutuality." When touch and transcendence are shared gestures rather than one person's projection, the erotic becomes something more durable.

Pip: What this means in practice is that desire without mutuality is just description — and description alone doesn't hold a poem up.

Mara: Red and black move through the collection as moral categories, not just colors — passion and industrial damage, the body that wants and the body that gets worn down. Wheat Ears lands the same collision differently: a phone call from someone already buried, their laughter roaring through the wire.

Pip: Hear Me Out takes it into the digital — "I started falling in love with you, without even knowing you." Same ache, different medium, same unanswerable questions about what's real.

Mara: Which is also, quietly, a question about imagination — what the mind constructs when the body isn't there. That's exactly where the essay goes next.

What the Imagination Actually Does

Pip: An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative takes on a question that's been wrong since Aristotle — what truth means when you're talking about poetry.

Mara: The essay argues that Europeans have reduced truth to correspondence with empirical fact, and that this is a fundamental error. It goes back to the Greek word Aletheia, drawing on Heidegger: "Aletheia is understood as unconcealment, the state of being disclosed."

Pip: So the upshot is that a poem isn't lying when it doesn't match the facts — it's doing something the facts can't do, which is disclose what's otherwise hidden.

Mara: The essay is careful to say this isn't a call to revive ancient Greek philosophy wholesale. The point is that the dominant model of truth has narrowed what we allow imagination to count as real — and poetry pays the price.

Pip: Every poem in this episode is, in some sense, an argument for that claim.

Mara: Houses that grow resentful, bodies that endure, love that arrives by wire — and underneath all of it, a theory of what imagination is actually for.

Pip: Same questions, next episode. The site keeps publishing.

Red in Black

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

George Seferis – Collected Poems

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Thrush

A
House Near the Sea

The houses I had they took from me. It happened
that the times were unpropitious: war, destruction, exile
sometimes the hunter meets the migratory birds
sometimes he doesn’t. Hunting
was good in my time, lots of people felt the shot
the others roam around or go mad in the shelters.
Don’t talk to me about the nightingale, nor the skylark
nor about the little wagtail
inscribing numbers with its tail in the light;
I don’t know many things about houses
I know they have their own race, nothing more.
New at first, like babies
playing in the orchards with the tassels of the sun,
they embroider the colored window shutters
and the shining doors over the day;
when the architect finishes they change,
they shrink or smile or even become resentful
with those who stayed behind, with those who went away
with others who would return if they could
or those who vanished now that the world
has turned into an immense hotel.
I don’t know many things about houses,
I remember their joy and their sorrow
sometimes, when I stop
even when
sometimes, near the sea, in empty rooms
with an iron bed with nothing of my own
looking at the evening spider, I contemplate
that someone is getting ready to come that they dress him up
in white and black cloths with plenty of colorful jewels
and around him venerable ladies
with gray hair and dark lace shawls talk softly
that he gets ready to come and say goodbye to me;
or a woman with quivering eyelashes and slim waist
returning from southern ports,
Smyrna, Rhodes, Syracuse, Alexandria,
from cities closed like warm window shutters
with perfume made of gold fruits and herbs
that she climbs the stairs without seeing
those who slept under the stairs.
Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you
empty them.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4279077#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096TTS37J