Tag: poem

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

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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

Nuances: Reviewed by AI

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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.

Marginal: A Review by AI

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Excerpt

At the Margins of Existence: Love, Exile and Mortality in Marginal

        This seasonal structure is fundamental. Autumn and winter repeatedly signify ageing, loneliness and approaching death; spring signals erotic renewal, resurrection and possibility. This poet’s universe therefore remains tragic without becoming nihilistic. The later sequence “Longing,” consisting of fourteen numbered poems, concentrates these concerns into a more intimate and meditative form. Its recurring invitation “Come, sit next to me” changes the relationship between the poet and the addressee. The voice becomes conversational, almost testamentary. The speaker wishes to remember love, political dreams, failures, friends, unnamed victims, forgotten workers, soldiers and the people whose history exists outside its official narrative. Here the connection with The Incidentals becomes explicit. One poem recalls the revolution that was never begun and the world that was never changed, then sings for those “incidentals” who never raised banners or became heroes. Another goes further and demands that these anonymous people finally be made heroic, because they lived so that others could receive glory.

        This is perhaps one of the most important developments in Aligizakis’s recent poetry. The marginal and the incidental become related categories. Both designate those excluded from the centre of historical narration. Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied. Stylistically, Marginal moves between short lyrical poems and expansive free-verse meditations. Aligizakis often relies on accumulation rather than conventional narrative development. Image follows image through associative logic: flower, flesh, sunbeam, mythological figure, household object, political allusion, death, memory. Punctuation is frequently minimized, creating long currents of thought in which perception seems to precede grammatical organization. At its strongest, this technique creates remarkable fluidity. The poems appear to move as memory itself moves—suddenly, irrationally, sensually. A flower may open onto childhood; a body onto mythology; a window onto mortality; an abandoned house onto the mystery of origin.

       “Pilgrimage” is among the volume’s finest examples. The speaker returns to the family home, not simply as a visitor but as someone searching for the place where his existence began. Four walls, rocks, wind, the location of the childhood crib and the orientation of the door become coordinates of personal mythology. The house is a finite space placed inside infinity. Biography becomes metaphysics. This exploration continues in “Wisdom of the Nude,” where the abandoned family home becomes associated with an abandoned body, and absence itself becomes a form of knowledge. Such poems reveal Aligizakis at his most compelling: personal memory is neither memoir nor nostalgia but material for ontological inquiry. The volume is not without excess. Aligizakis frequently returns to the same constellation of images—flowers, irises, Eros, death, light, statues, female beauty, loneliness, ancient Greek mythology—and some poems state philosophically what their imagery has already conveyed more effectively. Erotic rhetoric can likewise become so insistent that individual images lose some of their uniqueness. Yet repetition in Marginal also functions almost musically. These motifs return like themes in a long composition, altered slightly by age, memory and context. And repetition is appropriate to a book about ageing.

       The older consciousness does not simply advance. It circles. It revisits. It asks again. It remembers differently. The final movement of Longing therefore offers an appropriate culmination. The lovers sit together at dawn and look toward the first rays of light. Their love becomes “blessing,” “endurance,” and “eternity,” and the concluding vision imagines them giving birth metaphorically to a new generation of immortals. This is not naïve immortality. Aligizakis knows too much about death for that. The immortality envisioned by Marginal is the human refusal to let death possess the whole meaning of life.

       We die, but we have loved. We disappear, but someone remembers our voice.     The homeland changes, but the landscape survives in language. The house becomes empty, but the first cry of the child remains somewhere between its walls. The lover vanishes, but her shadow continues to occupy the arms of memory. The immigrant may remain marginal, yet the very margin from which he speaks allows him to see what those standing comfortably at the centre often cannot. And perhaps this is the central achievement of Marginal. Manolis Aligizakis transforms marginality from a condition of deprivation into a privileged poetic perspective. From the edge, the structures of the centre become visible. From exile, homeland can be questioned. From old age, youth can be understood differently. From loneliness, love acquires its full weight. From the proximity of death, the body becomes luminous. Marginal is therefore a book of boundaries, but also of their transgression. Its poetry continually inhabits the narrow strip between the temporary and the eternal. And in that uncertain territory, among flowers, bodies, memories, myths, empty rooms and returning light, the poet finds what poetry has always sought: not an escape from mortality, but a language capable of standing before it.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3747032#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771715987

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a catalog that moves from ancient Greek shores to Canadian prairie schools to a Moscow hotel hallway — and somehow it all holds together.

Mara: vequinox brings it together across poetry translations, novels, and short fiction — territory we'll cover through modern Greek verse, prose excerpts, and the themes of love, memory, and identity that run underneath all of it.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices Across the Greek Tradition

Mara: This segment is about what it means to translate a literary tradition — to carry voices like Cavafy, Ritsos, Engonopoulos, and others across languages without losing what makes them cut.

Pip: And Cavafy cuts immediately. The setup in "The City" is a man planning his escape — new land, new sea, fresh start — and then the poem turns on him completely.

Mara: The turn is the whole poem. "New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas. The city will follow you. You will return to the same streets. You will age in the same neighbourhoods, and in these same houses, you will turn gray."

Pip: So the upshot is that geography is not the problem. The self is the problem — and it travels with you, luggage you cannot check.

Mara: Engonopoulos makes a different kind of claim in "Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems." His "Angry Poem About the Occupation" turns elegy into defiance — workers dropping their tools, fists raised, a martyred figure walking the earth pale-lipped but beloved.

Mara: Ritsos appears across multiple volumes here. "Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume II" gives us a boatman striding into a harbor at dawn, the sun rising like a woman's wet hair curled around cranes — sensory and grounded. "Volume V" and "Volume VI" are quieter, more unsettled.

Pip: "Kariotakis-Polydouri, The Tragic Love Story" brings the biographical weight — two poets whose lives ended badly, rendered here in verse about a woman at a piano, butterflies leaving through a window.

Mara: "Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems," "Katerina Anghelaki Rooke – Selected Poems," "Hours of the Stars," and "Troglodytes" fill out the range — from Livaditis's compressed night imagery to Anghelaki Rooke's half-words and olive tree shapes. "Neo-Hellene Poets" and "Orange" and "Mythography" sit alongside them as further evidence of how wide this tradition runs.

Pip: From classical echoes to prairie roads — the fiction covers different ground entirely.

Prose Across Borders and Generations

Mara: The fiction here spans continents and registers — from a child's first bus ride in wartime Canada to a Moscow reunion to a painter's Arctic trek — and the question running through all of it is how people find their footing in unfamiliar places.

Pip: "Water in the Wilderness" opens that question gently. A woman named Tyne has been living on hospital food, and her friend Moe has kept a phone call from her on purpose.

Mara: The reason matters: "Moe smiled. 'Morley is awake and asking for you.' Tyne let her breath out on a deep sigh, sat back and covered her face with her hands. 'Thank you, God, thank you,' she whispered, then shot out of her chair and ran to get her coat."

Pip: Relief as a physical event — breath, hands, running. The excerpt earns it without explaining it.

Mara: "The Qliphoth" operates in a completely different register — adult, raw, interior. "In Turbulent Times" follows Ian, a man trailing a woman named Nora through a coastal Irish hotel, his knees literally trembling at the bar. "Redemption" gives us a young man leaving home for Vancouver, his father crying openly at the table.

Pip: "Wellspring of Love" brings back Rachael, older now, stuck on a dusty highway while her cousin heads west — and "Water in the Wilderness" shows us Rachael younger, boarding that bus for the first time, shuddering at its size.

Mara: "Jazz with Ella" lands its protagonist in a Moscow hotel corridor and delivers the line "We are your family" to a woman who was certain she had no family there. "Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada" documents a real exhibition at Parliament — a painting one hundred and fifty-two feet long, twenty years in the making.

Pip: "Small Change" puts a boy in a Pennsylvania classroom trying to locate his immortal soul while Sister Assunta slaps a pointer against her palm. "Prairie Roots" is lunch-hour softball and girls comparing notes in the willows. "Wheat Ears" and "Cloe and Alexandra" round out the set — one a memory of Cretan youth, the other a poem built around a denial: it wasn't me in that yellow cab, it wasn't snowing, I have no hair.

Mara: What ties them together is the texture of ordinary life under pressure — the meals, the car keys, the Scotch ordered twice.

Pip: And underneath the prose, there's a question the poetry keeps asking too — about where you belong and what you carry.

The Self That Cannot Escape Itself

Mara: Love, memory, and identity keep circling the same problem across these works: the past is not behind you, it is inside you, and it shapes every attempt to move forward.

Pip: Cavafy says it flat out. "As you have wasted your life here, in this small corner, you wasted it in the whole world." There is no smaller indictment.

Mara: Ritsos in "Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V" reaches for the same idea differently — a man who keeps a small mirror in his pocket because it's the one fixed point when everything else shifts without warning.

Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri" holds memory as tenderness — butterflies always flying out through the window. "Mythography" turns inward to still water and a fir tree asking the night for wisdom. "Introspection" names it directly: practicing a religion on the longing for the past.

Pip: "Orange" answers that longing with the wind's reply — your sunshine hides in your heart. "Hours of the Stars" writes love onto the mountain tops of memory. "Katerina Anghelaki Rooke" and "Troglodytes" close the circle — half-words left behind, and a young poet begging the Muses to free him from his own imposed fears.

Mara: The pattern holds: escape is not the remedy. The work is staying present to what you carry.

Pip: A city that follows you, a mirror in your pocket, a bus you board for the first time — it's all the same question dressed differently.

Mara: Where you are, and what you brought with you. More from this site next time.

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Human Struggle

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has spent a career writing about people the world files under "miscellaneous" — and vequinox has been keeping up.

Mara: That's the thread running through this episode: Greek poetry and its modern resonances, love and faith tested in quiet rooms, conflict and exile, and a critical look at what it means to write about ordinary lives with extraordinary attention.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry itself — ancient voices, contemporary weight.

Greek Voices, Modern Weight

Mara: The question here is what Greek poetry actually does when it moves through the modern world — whether it stays monument or becomes something you can touch.

Pip: George Seferis, translated and presented here, sets the coordinates early. The poem positions us collectively: "We are all like the Dead Sea, many fathoms lower than the surface of the Aegean."

Mara: That image does real work. The Dead Sea passage isn't elegy for a place — it's a diagnosis of emotional deadness, where "heart and thought congeal in salt." Seferis is naming a condition, not a geography.

Pip: Yannis Ritsos in Romiosini measures anguish against a wild mallow's knot and courage in the eyes of a shoeless child holding a flag — that's not metaphor reaching for effect, it's metaphor doing the only honest work available. Titos Patrikios in Selected Poems and Antony Fostieris in Selected Poems carry the same weight: fathers known too late, moons that swell and shatter. Constantine Cavafy's satrapy asks what you trade when you stop reaching for the laurels.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos and Wheat Ears round out the range — from cosmopolitan irony to daffodils insisting on blooming through leaden, death-filled days. And Ugga lands the quietest claim of all: "for the light to change, we must feel the loss of darkness in transactions." Entropy and Triptych both circle that same idea — transformation costs something, and the cost is felt in the body, in the chapel, in the shared candle.

Pip: From the weight of history to the weight of a single room — the next territory is love and what it asks of people.

Love, Faith, And What They Ask

Mara: The posts here sit with intimacy in its most pressured forms — a wedding interrupted by illness, a love that cannot quite complete itself, desire that circles back to anxiety.

Pip: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment. A priest steadies a congregation while a man named Padraig recovers in the sacristy, and when he's asked if Mass was said for him, he says: "I did, Padraig. And the wedding? It went very well. Ah, that's good." Then he lowers his eyes and says he never could have done it.

Mara: What that exchange captures is faith as practical care — the priest stepping in, the doctor promising to apologize to the family, Padraig asking not about himself but about the couple. Dignity held together by people covering for each other.

Pip: Hear Me Out turns the register entirely. It's a meditation on that missing one percent — the fraction that stops the words "I love you" from completing themselves. "You'll remain like Sisyphus to go up and down the mountain with the weight of love on your back, forever searching to unload it." That's not self-pity; it's a structural description of a particular kind of loneliness.

Mara: Water in the Wilderness moves through a different kind of relief — someone waking, someone running for her coat, a child on her first bus ride being told to watch for deer. Small mercies assembling into something that holds. Cloe and Alexandra brings a fairy-tale sharpness: a hunter shoots an arrow at a princess because he feared she would pierce his heart first — obedience and self-protection dressed as accident.

Pip: And then The Qliphoth arrives, which is a different temperature entirely — raw physical intimacy followed immediately by the anxiety that trails it, the replay of warnings she tries to suppress. Control claimed and then quietly questioned.

Mara: Redemption sits underneath all of these — two characters debating whether inherited belief can ever be honestly evaluated, whether tradition is a gift or a constraint. The same question the other posts are living out in different registers.

Pip: From what we inherit to what we survive — conflict and exile are next.

Conflict, Exile, And What Remains

Mara: This segment asks what displacement actually looks like from inside — not as history but as the specific texture of a life interrupted.

Pip: The Circle opens it with a phone call from Los Angeles to Baghdad. Hakim learns his uncle has two tumors — liver, pancreas — and the novel renders the weight of that news through a detail: he walks to the balcony and looks at the clouds covering Los Angeles, "in the same way that they cover his heart."

Mara: Distance is the condition. Straits and Turns gives us Mike, humiliated by a small workplace error, walking home with his head down — and then laughing at himself with his family. Marginal's caricature figure arrives "hiding the packaged freedom silently in his pockets," and the speaker finds redemption not in confronting him but in bending to smell a jasmine flower on a dusty sidewalk.

Pip: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Rendition press further into rootlessness — the gypsy standing "like a fresh branch of a not pruned, ageless, fruitless tree," alone on a black mule, trying to discover who he is. Rendition puts innocent blood and irony on the same menu board.

Mara: Which brings us to the question of what poetry does with all of this — and one critic has a precise answer.

Writing The Incidental Into Permanence

Mara: The Incidentals gets a full critical reading here, and the central claim is ethical as much as literary.

Pip: The reviewer, Balázs F. Attila, puts it plainly: "The moment the poet writes about Gladys, Mathew, Stefan, Benjamin, Galanos, or the nameless postman, he abolishes their insignificance."

Mara: The upshot is that poetry here functions as counter-archive. The postman who carries everyone else's news while waiting for a letter that never comes — that figure is rescued from anonymity by the act of being named in a poem. The net, the rope, the shoe: objects that become the whole shape of a life.

Pip: The review also notes that Hades and Thanatos move through gas stations and Canadian immigration offices — mythology as living language, not museum display. That's the formal argument for why the Greek poetry segment and this one belong in the same episode.

Mara: And the question the review leaves open is the one that makes it stick: how long is the rope on which we ourselves live?

Pip: Dead Seas, jasmine flowers on dusty sidewalks, a postman waiting for a letter — the scale keeps shifting but the question stays the same.

Mara: Whether the rope is long enough, and whether we've noticed we're on one.

Pip: More to come.

The Incidentals (review)

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Dignity of Lives Deemed Incidental

The postman in Mail moves from house to house carrying news of marriages, births, and children living far away. For everyone else, he is the bearer of messages, while tears run down his face because he too waits for a letter that never arrives.

Here lies one of Aligizakis’s strongest poetic gifts: his ability to create an entire human destiny from a few concrete gestures.

He does not write psychological portraits in the conventional sense. Of many of his characters we know almost nothing. We are given an occupation, a gesture, a memory, an object.

The rest is accomplished by metaphor. The net becomes a trap. The rope becomes a life.

Bookkeeping becomes an account with death.

The felling of a tree becomes an image of our own disappearance. The letter becomes a metaphor for absence. The shoe becomes the sign that, for a little while longer, we may still walk upon the earth.

This poetic world is at once archaic and contemporary. Hades and Thanatos move naturally through gas stations, diners, hospitals, stock-market screens, garages, and Canadian immigration offices. For Aligizakis, Greek mythology is not museum material but a still-living language through which human finitude can be expressed.

The immigrant is therefore a particularly significant figure. In Immigrant, the protagonist leaves his homeland to begin a new life on the other side of the planet. He promises his youth and productive years to the new country in exchange for security—but the poem’s ruthless conclusion suggests that in doing so he has, in a sense, sold himself “for a few dollars more.”

This experience carries particular resonance in the work of a poet whose own biography has been shaped by emigration. Yet Aligizakis does not write autobiographical complaint. Migration becomes another model of the human condition: we all make exchanges with the world. We give time for money, freedom for security, dreams for predictability. The only question is whether we are aware of the contract we have signed.

The Incidentals is not a comfortable book. Nor does it wish to be.

It is often rough, grotesque, ironic, sometimes sarcastic. It refuses to beautify the body, old age, labour, or death. Aligizakis occasionally uses brutal language to awaken the reader from precisely the complacency he wishes to attack.

Yet beneath this harshness lies an unusual humanism.

Because if these people were truly incidental, no poems would be written about them.

Poetry itself refutes the title.

The moment the poet writes about Gladys, Mathew, Stefan, Benjamin, Galanos, or the nameless postman, he abolishes their insignificance. He lifts them out of the anonymous mass of time. Society may have counted them as numbers, but poetry gives them names, faces, stories, and deaths.

This is perhaps the most beautiful ethical gesture of the volume. Poetry cannot defeat death.

But it can defeat oblivion—if only for the duration of a poem.

Manolis Aligizakis’s The Incidentals is therefore far more than a collection of poems about ordinary people. It is at once a modern dance of death, a social diagnosis, a sequence of philosophical parables, and an ironic catalogue of human existence. The volume asks how many people live out their lives without ever daring to move away from the stake to which an invisible rope has tied them.

And it asks an even more difficult question: how long is the rope on which we ourselves live?

The poet cannot answer that question for us.

Perhaps this is precisely the point at which the stories of the  „incidentals” cease to be the stories of others. And ours begins.

Balázs F. Attila

poet, writer, editor

https://draft2digital.com/book/3745812#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763637

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Fiction

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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.

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Love Stories

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

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

The Voices of Modern Greek Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, Desire, and the Distance Between

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction's Turbulent Families and Contested Histories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Rural Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog, if libraries had this much range — Greek exile poetry, Canadian prairie childhoods, Soviet-era blackmail, and a taxi ride you would not want to be on.

Mara: vequinox has been posting across all of that territory, and today we're moving through three areas: modern Greek poetry collections, literary and crime fiction, and the theme of identity, memory, and exile. Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Verse, Exile, and the Long Tradition

Pip: The question underneath all these poetry posts is what it means to translate and collect Greek verse — not just linguistically, but as an act of cultural preservation, pulling work from Ritsos, Seferis, and others into a form that travels.

Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volume sets the tone early. From "The Exile Diaries," dated the fourth of December: "Moon, take off your shoes / I can't sleep on my back / if I'll turn to my side I'll hurt. / The door is open / I can't leave."

Pip: That last line does a lot of work. The door is open and he still can't leave — which is exile's specific cruelty: the constraint isn't always a lock, it's something internal, something the body carries.

Mara: George Seferis's collected poems push into similar territory with "The Sentence to Oblivion," and Tasos Livaditis, whose volume was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, writes of being "completely dishonest like this world that it belongs to you only when you promise it to someone." Titos Patrikios in his selected poems warns readers to "protect yourselves from the poets who steal verses from graves of the unknown."

Pip: There are also original collections here — Entropy, Ugga, Medusa, Troglodytes, Hours of the Stars — each posting a single poem as a window into the full book. Hours of the Stars centers on Ionia, lost in 1922, where "man tried to create the face of god and at last he created his own thoughtful face." The Neo-Hellene anthology rounds out the range, gathering voices across the modern Greek tradition into one place.

Mara: That breadth — from Ritsos's internment diary to an anthology spanning the whole tradition — is the argument these posts make together. The fiction excerpts are making their own kind of argument, and it runs across a very different set of landscapes.

Novels at the Edge — Fiction and Crime Excerpts

Pip: What connects this stretch of fiction posts is that nearly every excerpt drops you into a moment of pressure — someone is hiding something, someone is about to find out, and the social fabric is visibly straining at the seam.

Mara: Wellspring of Love opens in a hospital corridor. Tyne has just entered her aunt Millie's room and the excerpt lands here: "Tyne was conscious of two disturbing thoughts, the first that Dr. Dunston had seldom greeted her in any other way than with his usual cheery, 'Hi, sis.' Her second thought was that the woman in the bed, frail and ashen-faced, was hardly recognizable as her beloved aunt."

Pip: Two small observations, and suddenly the reader knows the diagnosis is bad and the relationship is complicated. That's efficient fiction — the weight is in what goes unsaid.

Mara: Jazz with Ella works the pressure from a completely different angle. Pavel, Vera, and Shukshin have cornered a Soviet bureaucrat named Pyotr — they have photographs of him with the police chief's wife, and they need forged documents. Pyotr sputters through a tantrum, and then Vera simply asks, "May I pour you another drink?" The coercion is wrapped in perfect politeness.

Pip: Nothing says "you have no leverage here" quite like being offered a refreshment mid-extortion.

Mara: In the Quiet After Slaughter takes a coming-of-age angle — two teenage brothers drawn into a scheme involving a mysterious receiver on a hill called Pork Chop, with a cast of characters that includes a man with a wart that "looked like a ladybug" above one eye. The Qliphoth is denser, set in a flat littered with occult paperbacks and failed technology, a woman piecing together who her missing lodger has become. Savages and Beasts puts a boy named Anton in possession of a dead priest's diary, paralyzed by what he should do with it.

Pip: He Rode Tall goes quieter — a maritime engineer named Joel, decades of city noise behind him, sitting on a horse in a pasture and feeling his heart come back online. In Turbulent Times is a social novel, a dinner table of doctors and their partners trading sharp observations about a young woman Clifford delivered as an infant under difficult conditions. The Unquiet Land sets its pressure in Ireland, where Mother Ross tells Padraig that "forgiveness is a rare commodity in Ireland — Irishmen never forgive and never forget." Redemption and Straits and Turns close the set — one a quiet departure from a Cretan village, the other a Vancouver taxi ride with a passenger whose presence is described with the kind of sensory detail that makes you grateful for fresh air.

Mara: What holds these excerpts together is that each one catches a character at a threshold — a decision, a revelation, or a departure. That threshold question carries straight into the next set of posts.

Where You Come From, Who You Are

Pip: The identity and memory posts are asking a version of the same question across very different geographies: what does a person carry when the place they came from is gone, or far, or changed beyond recognition?

Mara: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy opens at the largest possible scale: "before we existed the Earth lived, before it spread its plains it was alive with its knowledge and wisdom." It's a cosmological frame for belonging — rootedness as something older than any single person's story.

Pip: Which makes the smaller, more personal accounts feel like they're answering that opening from the ground level.

Mara: Prairie Roots does exactly that — a childhood memoir of Saskatchewan winters, threshing season, geese in formation, paths worn single-file through snowdrifts toward a school facing a rising sun with no warmth in it. Red in Black brings it into the present tense, a poem about wilted supermarket vegetables and rotten tomatoes that pivots sharply to a man shot by a police officer. And Introspection's poem "Delta" traces a speaker who walked to the far ends of the world arguing for elegance and freedom, and was called a lunatic for it.

Mara: The thread running through all of it is that identity under pressure — exile, displacement, the refusal to forget — keeps finding its way back into the work, whether the form is a Greek lyric or a prairie memoir.

Pip: Exile poetry, coercive Soviet bureaucrats, a boy with a priest's diary, and a cosmological origin story for belonging — it's a wide orbit.

Mara: The site keeps returning to what people carry across distance and time. There's more of that to come.