Tag: Poetry

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Social Struggle

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the ancient and the urgent share the same page — Cavafy and civil war, hobos and murder investigations, all in the same week.

Mara: vequinox has been busy across a wide range of territory — modern Greek poetry, political conflict and social upheaval, and narrative fiction with some sharply drawn characters at the center of it all. Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, Ancient and Modern

Pip: The poetry posts here span centuries of Greek sensibility — from Cavafy's cool historical ironies to contemporary voices wrestling with longing, identity, and the weight of the body itself.

Mara: The Cavafy post sets the tone. Translating the poem "In 200 B.C.," it ends with a pivot that reframes the whole Macedonian campaign: "And from this marvellous Panhellenic campaign, the victorious, the splendorous, the most famous, glorified, as no other has been glorified, the incomparable: we were born."

Pip: So the Spartans sitting it out becomes almost beside the point — the world that emerged from their absence is the real subject.

Mara: Exactly the move Cavafy makes. The Yannis Ritsos posts — two of them, from Volume VI — work very differently, in tight, surreal domestic images: a severed antler left by a mirror, an owl made of sheet metal perched quietly on a roof.

Pip: Ritsos does a lot with a very cold room.

Mara: The Livaditis post, "For Maria," takes grief further: "as I stretched my arm to find your hand, it was as if I stole bread from the hands of the hungry." The Titos Patrikios piece, "Obstacles," turns inward — the speaker raising walls not to repel but to test how far endurance can reach. Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Stowaway in a Dream" and the Kariotakis-Polydouri post, "Lost," both circle longing and absence. The Fostieris, Livaditis, Introspection, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Medusa, and Neo-Hellene Anthology posts fill out a week's worth of translated voices, each one landing a different emotional register.

Pip: A lot of that longing has a political undercurrent — which is where the next segment lives.

Conflict, Division, and the Cost of Conviction

Pip: Several posts this week place characters inside political fracture — moments where ideology hardens into something people are willing to die, or kill, for.

Mara: The novel excerpt from Redemption captures it in texture rather than argument. Two characters are hunting near an olive grove when the mood shifts: "Hermes bent down and reached for the fluttering bird; he could see the huge pain in its eyes. Suddenly, the strange shudder overtook his body again, like when he was aboard the ship."

Pip: A man who can shoot without hesitating suddenly can't. That's doing a lot of quiet work.

Mara: The Unquiet Land goes louder — a pub argument about Irish partition, Lloyd George, Carson, and Sinn Fein, where Flynn Casey and Jim Patterson talk themselves toward the edge of civil war. The Troglodytes poem frames the same pattern more abstractly: institutional power dressed in sanctity, "Four Golden Gates to Heaven still stand firm while dividing into castes, races, and creeds." Ugga compresses it to almost nothing — half the planet on the line of fire, white doves, international agreements, and a dead avatar. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy asks where conviction actually leads: "Strike Chimera mercilessly, life is just a dream."

Pip: From a pub in Ireland to a collapsed avatar in seventeen lines — the scale changes, the problem doesn't. Which brings us to the fiction, where the conflict gets personal.

Character Under Pressure

Pip: The fiction excerpts this week are less about plot than about the moment a character's interior life collides with what the world expects of them.

Mara: Small Change is the clearest example. Rico comes home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than cross the street. When Marianna finds him, she asks what's wrong, and the excerpt gives us this: "He goes to the piano bench and opens it. He takes out the papers he has worked on and holds them up to her. Suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy."

Pip: A kid showing someone his work in the dark — that's the whole thing, right there.

Mara: What the excerpt does well is hold the reader inside Rico's hesitation without explaining it. Poodie James works a different register entirely — a public hearing where Engine Fred defends a hobo against a bully's insinuation. He tells the council: "It is so not because he risked his life to save someone. It is so because under circumstances that would defeat most of us, he lives his life with independence, dignity and joy."

Pip: A defense of dignity delivered at a lectern, which is somehow more moving than it has any right to be.

Mara: Savages and Beasts stays procedural — RCMP officers questioning a caretaker and a Cretan cook about a murder, a missing kitchen knife surfacing as the key detail. Fury of the Wind puts Sarah in the middle of a crowd enjoying her distress, with Will Andrews forcing his way through to help her. Swamped follows Eteo walking English Bay, his thoughts moving between a drilling project, his parents in Crete, and Vietnamese fishers working nets in the shallows — immigration and displacement held in a single afternoon walk. And Cloe and Alexandra delivers the sharpest scene of the week: Antigony standing before six judges, hearing none of their words, then offering them her severed breast and announcing her name.

Pip: Antigony gets the last word, which feels right.

Mara: What ties the week together is that question of endurance — whether it's Cavafy's Alexandrians, Flynn Casey's republicans, or Rico in the dark with his papers.

Pip: Everyone's deciding how much of themselves to show, and to whom. More of that next time.

Podcast Episode: Love, Loss, And Reckoning

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Pip: If you've ever wondered what it looks like when one publisher holds together Greek modernism, Irish wakes, cruise ship romances, and Kabbalistic horror in the same week — well, here we are.

Mara: This episode covers work curated by vequinox across three territories: poems of desire and grief, prose wrestling with spiritual and moral conflict, and fiction that moves through travel, loss, and homecoming.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Desire, grief, and the alchemy of souls

Mara: The poems gathered here keep returning to the same question: what do we carry inside us, and what does it cost to carry it?

Pip: "Entropy" sets the stakes plainly. The poem reads: "motionless, we, the descendants of ignorance, move the voices, the names, the history of waves aren't coming from the outside they are the love of a heart that faces the miracle the alchemy of souls that turns the earth around as the anchor of hopelessness floats between the inexistence and infinity."

Mara: So the upshot is that movement and stillness coexist — we are paralyzed and yet carried forward by something internal, not external. The poem locates history and love inside the body, not in the world.

Pip: "Orange" distills that into two lines that hit harder for their brevity — wilted carnations, two empty bowls, two empty glasses, and then: "life full of desires. Thirst, so much thirst and not a single fountain." "HEAR ME OUT" answers with hunger of a different register, erotic and urgent, mapping a lover's body like uncharted territory.

Mara: "Wheat Ears" pushes back against the pessimism — pundits declare nothing can be done, and the poem's answer is to stand in the plaza holding hands. "Red in Black" frames love as structural, roots and wings at once. "Titos Patrikios" goes darker: a soul that gets used to being whipped and begins to ask for it.

Pip: The Cavafy piece — "Constantine Cavafy" — is the quietest and maybe the most devastating: a mirror that rejoices at having held a beautiful face for five minutes.

Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri" gives grief a voice that has gone voiceless: "No voice reaches here anymore from all the powerful things I had." The Ritsos volumes carry that forward — "The Victor" shows a man raised on shoulders in the sunshine while silently crying, and "After the Fire" asks whether surviving a battle is the same as winning it.

Pip: And "Introspection" closes the arc with a Nietzschean prophet who sees the new race of humanity before his eyes, even with his eyes closed — which is either visionary or a very convenient excuse for not looking.

Mara: From the interior life of the poem, we move to something more embattled — faith, institution, and the places where they fail each other.

When belief meets power and the wild

Pip: The posts here put spiritual authority under pressure — from mystical horror to the quiet collapse of a priest who cannot speak the love he is supposed to embody.

Mara: "The Qliphoth" opens in full disorientation. Lucas is strapped to something between a chair and a launch pad, voices layering over each other: "His inner ear is roaring with an echoplex of distant detuned voices, drowning in mutual overlap — Westway music room / dub reverb / his father roaring at the nurses / mother bawling out dumb classrooms in her sleep."

Pip: What that passage is doing is collapsing private trauma and collective noise into one body — the skull becomes, as the text puts it, a flickering moviedrome. Transcendence and violation arrive in the same image.

Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" works the same tension from the opposite direction — not visionary excess but institutional silence. A Brother tells a priest directly: "I do not want your judgments and I do not need your approval. I want your trust and your love." The priest cannot answer. He walks into the forest for three days.

Pip: Three days in the wilderness to avoid a conversation about feelings. The Church has always had a gift for dramatic avoidance.

Mara: "Ugga" compresses the institutional question to its most extreme form — a figure called the Great Homo Digitalis consolidates all scientific discovery and convinces every religion to submit to one universal church, positioning himself as the Antichrist. It's a single dense paragraph, but it reframes everything around it.

Pip: And then "Ken Kirkby" steps entirely outside institution — into the Arctic tundra, where Inuksuit are described as a language of stone, and an eight-inch tree takes hundreds of years to grow.

Mara: The sacred there is horizontal and practical: a stone on a stone means the fishing is good here. No hierarchy, no doctrine — just accumulated knowledge readable by anyone who knows how to look.

Pip: From stones in the tundra to people in motion — arrivals, departures, and the ground between.

Journeys, thresholds, and the weight of return

Pip: The fiction here is preoccupied with thresholds — the moment before entering a room, the moment after a death, the crossing that changes what home means.

Mara: "The Unquiet Land" opens at a graveside. Clifford Hamilton steps forward to eulogize Finn MacLir: "I have the duty and the honour of saying a few words about the man lying in death before us." The grave already holds Finn's wife, Roisin, dead since 1892. Finn's name will be added later. The scene is precise about that gap.

Pip: A quiet, solemn wake for a man renowned for his parties — the gap between the life lived and the life being mourned is doing a lot of work in a single sentence.

Mara: "Small Change" moves to a younger threshold. Rico returns home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than crossing the street to the party. When his aunt Marianna finds him, he holds up papers — something he's worked on — and "suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy." The stakes are intimate but the weight is real.

Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" puts a piano player named Buddy on a cruise ship, where falling for a passenger is called Man Overboard — so named, the text notes, because a despondent waiter once jumped after being rebuffed. Buddy writes on a coaster: "Her eyes look inside my head and see everything," and underlines the last word.

Mara: "Jazz with Ella" ends a journey rather than beginning one — Jennifer returns from a trip through Russia and Montreal, and when she finally passes through the arrivals gate she almost doesn't recognize her estranged husband waiting with flowers. "Despite herself, a full, warm feeling dispelled the black cloud, if only for a moment."

Pip: "Fury of the Wind" places Sarah at a rural fair in Nimkush, where no one speaks to her except a man named Pong struggling with a table, and a stranger at the bleachers. She is new to the district and it shows.

Mara: "Redemption" finds its threshold over a dinner table — Hermes, his father, and a quiet negotiation about guns and permits that turns into a pleasant evening. "Straits and Turns" gives us Mike, a Greek immigrant in Canada, writing in Hellenic on paper torn from a hand-wipe roll, on an old manual typewriter a friend gave him for free.

Pip: He writes: "Both of us were born close to different seas, mine was the blue Mediterranean and yours the grey Pacific Ocean, yet we bleed the same red blood." A novel about arriving, written on whatever's at hand.

Mara: "Wellspring of Love" closes the set at speed — Tyne is pulled over doing fifteen over the limit, rushing to a hospitalized aunt, and the officer lets her go with a look of compassion she almost misses.

Pip: Small mercies at the edge of crisis. That's most of what travel turns out to be.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the question of what we carry across thresholds — grief, desire, faith, language, the memory of a face in a mirror.

Pip: And whether the anchor of hopelessness floats or sinks. More of that, next time.

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more unusual literary archives on the internet — translations, original poetry, fiction spanning centuries and continents, all landing on the same site like it's nothing.

Mara: vequinox is behind all of it, and today we're covering the range: modern Greek poetry in translation, a wide stretch of literary fiction and drama, and poems that sit at the intersection of love and loss.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices From Modern Greek Poetry

Mara: The question this cluster of posts raises is what modern Greek poetry is actually doing — what it reaches for, and what it refuses to let go of. The anchor here is Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Unexpected Development."

Pip: She sets it up plainly: "It was when words overflowed / images flew like wild birds / that refused to feed on words / even if they were hungry for them."

Mara: That tension — images that won't submit to language even when they need it — runs through the whole collection. Anghelaki Rooke is mapping a kind of loss that precedes grief.

Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder geometric line in his selected poems: a snake eating its tail, beginning collapsing into end, the body always absent. Tasos Livaditis, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, closes his poem "Coincidences" on the line "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth" — which is either profound or a very elegant shrug.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos writes about Georg Trakl — a poet who "never agreed with them" and whose only longing, once he understood what it meant to be alive, was to escape. Yannis Ritsos, the Neo-Hellene Poets anthology, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Ugga, and Troglodytes all appear here too, each finding a different pressure point between the lyric and the world pressing in on it.

Pip: Fiction carries some of that same weight — let's go there.

Literary Fiction And Drama Across Time And Place

Mara: What this range of fiction shares is an interest in pressure — the moment a situation tips, when a character can no longer hold the ordinary shape of their life. Straits and Turns is the anchor, and it earns it.

Pip: The excerpt follows a couple and their dog Elvis through a cancer diagnosis and a slow, careful goodbye. The prose doesn't reach for drama; it just watches. "Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs."

Mara: What that sentence does is hold clinical language right next to love, and the gap between them is where the whole excerpt lives. The decision not to pursue chemotherapy, the daily medication ritual, the final day when Elvis doesn't touch his food — it's a portrait of grief that arrives before the loss does.

Pip: Jazz with Ella moves in a completely different register — Cold War tension, a border crossing, a woman watching a man she's trying to protect navigate an interrogation line. The stakes are geopolitical, but the writing keeps its eye on the human pulse of the scene.

Mara: Fury of the Wind is quieter — a community fair, a husband and wife negotiating small social obligations, the ordinary friction of a marriage visible in a single exchange about who covers the preserves booth.

Pip: Redemption takes a young man named Hermes Dragakis back to his village with a diploma and a scholarship to Canada, and the scene where the mayor tries to understand what an economist actually does is somehow both funny and genuinely moving.

Mara: In Turbulent Times goes somewhere more intimate — an Irish drama of paternity, secrecy, and a woman who tells a man quietly, "You let me down, but I forgive you."

Pip: Wellspring of Love watches a woman named Tyne move through her sleeping children at night — each child rendered in a sentence, the accumulated tenderness of a parent who has already known loss. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a monk named Rordan in early medieval Ireland, furious that the Church buries medical knowledge while people die of infected throats. He's not wrong, which makes it worse.

Mara: Arrows delivers its moment in a single blackout — a priest counting the dead, touching foreheads, finding one name missing. Savages and Beasts opens on a murder inside a residential institution and the slow, formal way the news spreads through the building. In the Quiet After Slaughter follows a bush pilot whose final chapter is written in retrospect, quietly. The Unquiet Land gives us Caitlin and Michael on a clifftop after something has broken, and Caitlin describing a dream of the sea gone still and black "the way the world will look when it's ended and we've all gone."

Pip: Poodie James puts a police chief in a room full of political pressure, defending a hobo from a sabotage charge with nothing but logic and a flat refusal to perform certainty he doesn't have. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Marginal round out the theme — the first a lyric sequence of departure and transformation, the second a short, still poem about absence that ends on silence mimicking footsteps. And Ubermensch contributes a poem called "Funeral" — a poet buried while the hawk watches and the wine flows and someone begs for two bits at the edge of the scene.

Mara: The emotional through-line from fiction into poetry is loss — anticipated, survived, or simply witnessed. That's where the next segment lives.

Poems Of Love And Loss

Mara: The question here is what poetry does with grief that prose can't — how it compresses the experience until the image does the work the argument refuses to do. Yannis Ritsos anchors it.

Pip: The poem is called "The Dead House," and Ritsos doesn't soften it: "Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood."

Mara: What that gets the reader is abandonment rendered as a physical law — the house bleeds no matter who tries to clean it, and eventually everyone stops trying, including the people who live there.

Pip: Antony Fostieris in his selected poems makes the same point through pure geometry — the circular trap where every beginning joins the end. Tasos Livaditis, the Griffin longlisted volume, closes on "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth." And Troglodytes frames the young poet standing against bigotry, recording grace — which is its own kind of elegy for what keeps getting buried.

Mara: Grief and witness, across every form the site carries.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the elegies — is about things that refuse to be cleaned up. Blood in the marble. A dog that won't eat. A monk who can't make the Church listen.

Mara: Persistence against forgetting. That's the thread. More of it next time.

Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems

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The Unexpected
in Tasos Livaditis’ Poetry


Tasos Livaditis was a man and a poet who knew how to be likable. Not only because he was handsome both in his youth and later on in his senior years, not because he was the center of attention in various gatherings of his days, but also because of his poetry.
But why was it so?
His creative life could be easily divided into three periods, first being the period of beliefs, second the period of the crisis and third the period of recovery and in all three periods Tasos Livaditis was a very likable man to everyone he met, dealt with, associated with, made friends with, shared his hours in exile with. And Livaditis was a likeable man also because of his goals. During the first period, his goal was the struggle, something that spoke on behalf of everyone and also talked of a better future. In the second period, he tried to conceal the crisis he faced and kept away from his poetry by turning his attention to the people around him. During the third period of his creative life, his most important, if you like, he’s the poet everyone liked because of his ability to select the unexpected. Evident in the first book of this period, when he dealt with the issue of defeat, he encountered:
He kneeled and laid his forehead on the floor. It was
a difficult time. When he got up, his embarrassed face
that we all knew well had stayed there on the planks like
a useless inverted helmet.
The same man returned home without face —
like God
That like God and the face on the planks are the unexpected images that put this poet apart from others. Tasos Livaditis could minimize his importance, to lessen the size of his stature, to present himself as haunted, as prey, as one who is punished; he never liked the pompous and unnecessary verbalisms:

For years, I’ve prepared myself for that big moment
the miracle of the century, on the other hand
you must admit I’m one of a kind in my field.
But, God, what happened, who betrayed me, where
they find all the proof? The procedure was quick.
The district attorney, to the point, “Are you him?”
he asked me, “him,” I answered
is there any worse charge?
~ Kostas Kouloufakos

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562930

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763831

Podcast Episode: Love, Land, and Greek Verse

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the kind of site where you can move from a Cretan Renaissance epic to a teenager breaking his ankle during an accidental wrestling match with an older girl — and somehow both feel like they belong.

Mara: vequinox has been putting out a steady run of posts that touch on modern Greek poetry, the textures of desire and longing, rural and domestic life, and the weight of historical conflict. Let's start with the poetry.

Voices from the Greek Tradition

Pip: What this cluster of posts is doing is presenting modern Greek poetry as a living tradition — not a museum piece, but a body of work that moves between sensuality, political witness, and lyric restraint.

Mara: The post titled "Wheat Ears" anchors that range cleanly. The poem opens on a heat wave and builds toward pure physical longing: "come close to me, I beg you / let me touch your skin / the day is fiery / and unbearable like / the body's conflagration."

Pip: That last word — conflagration — does a lot of work. The body isn't just warm; it's an event. The poem earns that escalation.

Mara: The anthology post, "Neo-Hellene Poets," shows the other register entirely — a poem called "Kiss" that ends, "My soul that never learned to kiss / then knows immaculate ecstasy." Longing held at a distance, not consummated.

Pip: And then Yannis Ritsos, in "Poems Volume VI," goes somewhere stranger — a fox in a chicken pen, old men lying on yard tiles, a thin woman threading a ring of smoke as "the only one who believed him." Ritsos makes the surreal feel like documentary.

Mara: The Constantine Cavafy post gives you the political register — a poem about Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra, Jewish monarchs who are "equal to the Seleucids in every way," the irony landing quietly in that final line.

Pip: Cavafy's irony is so dry it practically needs a humidity warning.

Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri, The Tragic Love Story" contributes a poem called "Modesty" — interior beauty as something fragile and untouchable, "a rose that balances on its own flame." Titos Patrikios, in his "Selected Poems," cuts even shorter: the speaker says experience earns him the right to go crazy, but he won't, because that would be a concession. And "Impulses" closes the range with imagistic compression — grief and erosion rendered through silver clouds and a carved heart.

Mara: All of it maps a tradition that moves fluidly between the erotic, the civic, and the elegiac — which is exactly the territory the next segment enters from a different angle.

The Body Remembers

Pip: Desire in this group of posts is rarely clean — it arrives tangled with anxiety, absence, and the particular ache of things that almost happened or already ended.

Mara: The excerpt from "Small Change" puts you directly inside a charged, disorienting encounter. The narrator, a boy, wrestles an older girl on a deserted street; they fall, and the prose captures the collision of arousal and confusion precisely: "her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg."

Pip: The body keeps score — and here the score is a broken ankle and a girl sprinting away down the street.

Mara: What the passage gets right is the simultaneity: wonder and pain and panic arriving in the same breath, no clean separation between them.

Pip: The poem "Message," from the "Medusa" post, is the compressed version of that same dynamic — someone sending a text three times, editing it, not knowing the person they're reaching for has already fallen asleep holding someone else's laughter.

Mara: "HEAR ME OUT" works in the same emotional space but from further along the timeline — a speaker alone in winter, pulling out fleece bed-sheets from a former shared life. The post reads: "Last night I went to bed in those fleece sheets after a long time I discovered something of our smell has remained in the fabric."

Pip: Scent as the last archive. That detail is doing real work.

Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" takes a longer route to the same territory — Rordan and Ula, a medieval Irish monk and a Native woman, building toward love through shared song, each afraid to speak first. The restraint there mirrors the Kariotakis poems from the previous segment.

Mara: "Cloe and Alexandra" asks where poets go at night and answers in images — bloodied hands, a bandage over the heart, a swan writing its last verse. And "Wellspring of Love" grounds desire in the domestic and the anxious — a woman gardening before a prairie storm, worrying about the people she loves, trusting a child to be responsible.

Pip: From wrestling matches to fleece sheets to medieval monks — desire here keeps finding new containers. What the rural posts do is give those containers a landscape.

Land, Kin, and the Work of Staying

Pip: This segment is about what it costs and what it means to be rooted somewhere — a farm, a country hospital, a village, a horse arena — and what happens when those roots are tested or handed on.

Mara: The "Still Waters" excerpt sets the tone. A nurse named Tyne is being walked through an unfinished country hospital, and the exchange lands a quiet irony: when she questions the windows in the operating room, the doctor grins and says, "An air-conditioned operating room, of course." The passage ends on her honest uncertainty — "it would certainly take some getting used to."

Pip: A surgical suite with opening windows in a prairie winter. Rustic is one word for it.

Mara: "Fury of the Wind" gives you the farm side of that same world — a Scottish family's homestead passed through three generations, a daughter-in-law who has "become a regular country girl" with garden produce and homemade bread, planning for the fall fair months in advance. The continuity there is deliberate and warm.

Mara: "He Rode Tall" moves into the horse arena — a competition scene where a young rider named Tanya finishes Reserve World Champion, and the emotional peak is the older horseman Joel leaning over to whisper two words: "She's yours." The filly, the title, the whole arc handed forward.

Pip: That handoff is the whole story in two words.

Mara: "The Circle" widens the geography — phone calls coordinating airport pickups, a sick uncle in Iraq who can't speak freely over the phone, families dispersed but still pulling toward each other. The domestic instinct travels.

Mara: "Ken Kirkby, A Painter's Quest for Canada" takes rootedness into the Arctic — Kirkby describing the tundra as a place of simultaneous sensory deprivation and overload, where "the prairies by comparison are claustrophobic." "Straits and Turns" grounds things differently, in the very specific worry of a pet's health — a dog named Elvis, bladder stones, a second veterinary opinion. And "The Unquiet Land" puts a young Irish farmhand in front of a girl who hires him partly because his uncle is known to her family, the connection between land and kin made literal in a handshake over yellow-man candy.

Pip: Roots and conflict are harder to separate than the segment headings suggest — which is exactly where the next posts go.

History as Wound and Ceremony

Pip: The posts here are about conflict that has been institutionalized — turned into parade, into poem, into the long aftermath of war — and what it means to live inside that.

Mara: "In Turbulent Times" opens on the Twelfth of July in Belfast — the Orange parades, the bunting, the elaborate banners. The post quotes the poet Louis MacNeice on "the voodoo of the Orange bands / Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster." A Protestant character named Robert Hanlon, married to a Catholic, simply leaves the city every year to escape it.

Pip: An iron net drawn through a province, and the most honest response is to go find a quiet field.

Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" puts you in a different kind of threat — a Yukon bar, a one-eyed man with a machete, a protagonist who talks his way out by claiming to be someone useful. The violence is immediate and physical, not ceremonial.

Mara: "Hours of the Stars" pulls back to the lyric register — a poem that opens "After the death of authority / we waited for the king's celebrations / messengers of the lost war." The weight of collective defeat carried in the body, wrapped "like an ivy." "Erotokritos" reaches further back still — the scholarly post traces the Cretan Renaissance epic to refugees fleeing the Ottoman fall of Crete, a poem preserved and carried by people in flight. And "Wheat Ears" contributes a poem called "Visitor" — an unknown soldier who arrives in a small town, touches one woman's life, and is found dead in the street the next morning, his name never spoken.

Pip: History here keeps finding the same shape: ceremony over wounds that haven't closed.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the insistence that the personal and the historical are the same material — a broken ankle and a battle, a fleece sheet and a refugee poem.

Pip: Next time, presumably, more of the same — which is to say, more of everything.

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the way some people breathe — steadily, in verse and prose, across centuries of Greek tradition and continents of lived experience, and apparently without pause.

Mara: That range is exactly what this episode covers. vequinox brings us poetry rooted in the Modern Greek tradition, fiction set in the rhythms of family and rural life, and prose that tracks what happens when people collide with systems, borders, and each other.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices Out of the Greek Tradition

Mara: The Modern Greek poetry segment raises a real question: what does it mean to translate and present a tradition this deep — from ancient myth to twentieth-century masters — and keep it alive on the page?

Pip: The excerpt from Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy puts that question in mythic terms. The setup is a figure who outlasts every riddler sent to challenge her: "all the mouths which uttered the riddles were swallowed by the hungry Hades and she walked over their bodies."

Mara: So survival here is the answer to every riddle. The Sphinx-like figure doesn't solve the questions — she simply endures them, which is its own kind of mastery.

Pip: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — work in that same register of weight and endurance. Volume VI's "The Sick Man" watches darkness move toward naked figures and statues until it "lights the whole house" and transforms ordinary objects into something luminous. Volume V gives us a messenger announcing victory amid thousands of deaths, the king returning with "a wound between his eyes" through which death itself could see.

Mara: Introspection closes on a similar note of earned return — "from which I have come and to which I'll ultimately arrive at my destined hour." And the anthology Neo-Hellene Poets anchors that continuity in something smaller: a poplar tree that once answered laughter and now answers only tears.

Pip: Antony Fostieris offers the most compressed version of this whole project — a poem that defines a poem as simply "rhythmically contemplating emotion." Three words doing the work of a manifesto.

Mara: Opera Bufa, Nikos Engonopoulos, Orange, Entropy, Medusa, Yannis Ritsos Volume II, Tasos Livaditis, Cloe and Alexandra, Troglodytes, Wheat Ears — all of them circle the same territory: desire, mortality, the weight of history pressing into the present moment.

Pip: Which is also, it turns out, the territory of the fiction — just told in longer sentences.

Seasons, Soil, and the People Who Stay

Mara: The fiction gathered here under family and rural life isn't nostalgic so much as precise — these posts ask what it costs to belong somewhere, and what it feels like when belonging is about to change.

Pip: Still Waters sets that up in a single anxious domestic moment. Tyne has just accepted a marriage proposal, and the evening should be simple joy — but the excerpt catches her mid-hesitation: "I'm tired, that's all. Tomorrow, I'll be fine. Just let me go to bed now, and I'll be fresh as a daisy to take Cam to church tomorrow."

Mara: The gap between what she says and what she feels is where the whole novel lives. She watches her father take Cam's arm through the doorway and thinks "no more worries" — but the narration keeps undercutting her.

Pip: He Rode Tall trades domestic interiors for the arena. Joel and Tanya are in the finals, twenty horses, thousands watching, and the warm-up pen is almost meditative — he doesn't want nerves to make him overwork his horse before the performance even starts.

Mara: Swamped goes further back — two boys in a Cretan summer, watering tomato rows by hand, stealing a watermelon from a neighboring field, counting swims at the end of each day. Anthony selects the ripest melon by the sound it makes when tapped.

Pip: Prairie Roots does the same work in a Canadian winter register — stubble turned over, fences repaired, straw hauled to the barn, the first snow arriving before every chore is finished.

Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the stakes entirely. The rural quiet is gone — the scene is an airport, a man named Volodya terrified at a security line, his companions forming a quiet circle around him. The question "what are they looking for" carries a completely different weight here than it does in a tomato field.

Pip: And then there's Wheat Ears, which compresses all of this into a short poem about a person who keeps urging change while never leaving the recliner.

Mara: The tension between staying and moving runs through every one of these — which is also what the next set of posts is made of.

When the System Pushes Back

Mara: The fiction in this segment puts characters directly against institutions, communities, and the small frictions that reveal larger fault lines — the question is how people hold themselves together when the pressure is social and the rules keep shifting.

Pip: In Turbulent Times sets that up through what isn't said. Caitlin learns that Connie has stayed behind at the cottage after Robert left, and Michael never mentioned it. The scene plays out in careful domestic choreography: "If Caitlin had had any suspicions about Michael and Connie Hanlon, remembering how Connie had come on to him in the square in Corrymore on Tuesday, she did not show them."

Mara: The restraint is the point. The whole excerpt is about watching and not speaking, suspecting and not asking — the farmhouse kitchen as a pressure vessel.

Pip: Small Change runs a different kind of social friction — street-level, adolescent, transactional. A kid who gets straight A's in a neighborhood of C-minuses rents out a Stilson wrench to Paulie, the local legend, for a buck an hour or any fraction thereof.

Mara: The negotiation is sharp and funny, but the stakes are real — belonging in that world means knowing how to do business without losing standing on either side.

Pip: Straits and Turns moves that immigrant-workplace dynamic into a Vancouver factory, where Mike writes a poem on folded toilet paper while waiting for Luigi to finish his shift tasks, and the Italian-Greek solidarity is summarized in a single phrase: "una fatcha una ratsa."

Mara: The Qliphoth takes the friction into something stranger — Lucas, trapped in what reads like a nightmare transit terminal, punches an iron pillar to test whether the world is real, and the guards and bystanders laugh in unison while a security conference crackles around him.

Pip: All four of these are about the same thing: what a person does when the system looks back and doesn't recognize them.

Mara: From mythic riddles to tomato fields to airport security lines — the thread connecting all of it is people trying to locate themselves inside something larger.

Pip: And the poetry keeps asking whether language is the map or the territory. Next time, we'll see where that question leads.

Podcast Episode: Voices Of Loss And Memory

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog for the Mediterranean soul — except the catalog keeps writing back.

Mara: Today we're in the territory of Greek and Mediterranean poetry, translations that carry grief and habit and beauty across languages, and fiction excerpts that range from colonial frontiers to Cold War escapes. vequinox is behind all of it.

Pip: A lot of ground, a lot of voices. Let's start with the poetry.

Translations, Memory, and the Weight of Greek Verse

Mara: The anchor here is the work of translation — bringing Greek poets like Tasos Livaditis, Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Constantine Cavafy, and others into English, and what gets carried across and what gets left in the original silence.

Pip: Livaditis sets the terms pretty early. The poem "November Wind" opens with a door being closed and a reckoning beginning, and then it lands this: "I think music is the grief of those who never found the time to love."

Mara: That line does a lot of work. It takes the whole poem's accumulation of lost letters, absent friends, and unanswered words and names the feeling underneath — not sorrow exactly, but grief as an art form practiced by people who ran out of time.

Pip: Ritsos shows up twice, and both poems are about absence made physical. "Emptiness" is a house stripped bare where the mirror refuses to reflect the void, and the nails left in the wall after pictures fall still catch the last light — still expecting something to hang on them. "The Sick Man" is quieter, a man returning from some interior collapse, speaking in a detached voice while making a gesture of strange tenderness with an imaginary handkerchief.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "The Goddess Habit" works a different register entirely. The poem personifies routine as a protective deity, and it earns its ending: "Yes, goddess Habit, I believe in you and I serve you. You too, stay loyal to me until I get tired of you." That's a prayer and a negotiation at the same time.

Pip: Cavafy appears twice, and both poems are portraits of performance. "Leader from Western Libya" is a quietly devastating sketch of a man who learns to dress and speak Greek to impress Alexandria, and ends up so terrified of making a grammatical error that he says almost nothing — all those unspoken words piling up inside him. The later Cavafy piece, "Days of 1909, 1910, and 1911," is a young blacksmith's elegy: beautiful, unrecorded, wasted.

Mara: Titos Patrikios's "Final Defeat" is brief and brutal — a man who stuttered wanted to say something, and the speaker was always in a hurry. Antony Fostieris's "Five Painters" turns that inward: an aging artist who has just finished his most important work sits quietly at a restaurant corner, contemplating the thorny crown of the critics, while his companions talk about nothing.

Pip: The remaining poems spread the emotional range. "Impulses" holds a mastectomy at its center — the word repeated twice at the close, once as descriptor, once as fact. "Hours of the Stars" moves through water and myrtle and skylarks with a ceremonial lightness. "Introspection" names its destination plainly: the word "arts" appearing like a destination on the climb toward a destined Ithaca.

Mara: "Wheat Ears" and "Entropy" and "The Incidentals" and "Ugga" fill out the edges — a man reading the morning paper's catalog of violence before going to war again with his coffee pot, a coal seller sweating through summer to sell winter, primeval souls climbing from pages of books, and the twentieth century's art movements battling while Dali embraces Lorca timidly.

Pip: All of it circles the same question: what survives the passing of time, and who gets remembered. The fiction asks something similar, just with more people in the room.

Voices Across Frontiers: The Fiction Excerpts

Mara: The fiction segment covers a wide range of settings and genres, but the posts share a preoccupation with people navigating systems — political, social, colonial — that are larger and less trustworthy than they appear.

Pip: "Arrows" is the sharpest example. Friar Salvador is caught in a military council where the power dynamics are shifting in real time, and the excerpt ends with a sentence that earns its weight: "Not one day among the Spaniards, and already I smelled unshed blood."

Mara: The tension in that scene is precise — Infante's insubordination is theatrical, Losada's tolerance of it is suspicious, and Salvador reads the whole room correctly while being unable to do anything about it. The approval that follows Infante's suggestion to interrogate the caciques is described as mockery rather than respect.

Pip: "Jazz with Ella" has a completely different energy — a group smuggling a Soviet musician out of the USSR, the airplane cabin full of people pretending not to know each other, and Jennifer barely containing her relief while picturing Volodya hearing live gospel music for the first time in Vancouver. It's one of the warmer excerpts here.

Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" is quieter tension — Tyne waking up and walking into a kitchen where Moe and Ken are already dressed and waiting, and the whole scene turns on whether she can read their faces before she sits down. The line "Have you heard anything?" comes out as little more than a whisper.

Pip: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" is the most expansive excerpt — a Celtic woman named Ula, sold to a convent for six chickens and a pig, who has ended up among Indigenous people in what reads as early North America, and is slowly being reached by a monk named Rordan through the shared medium of song. The detail about the children calling him Mountain Thrush for his happy laugh is the kind of thing that earns a reader's trust.

Mara: "Redemption" follows a young man named Hermes preparing for a meeting with a university dean, coached by his aunt to find out the conditions before agreeing to anything, because nobody offers something without expecting something in return. "Poodie James" puts a lawyer for the Great Northern Railway in front of a civic hearing about hobos, and the exchange between the committee chair and the railway counsel is drily procedural — the shortest speech ever heard from a lawyer.

Pip: "Wellspring of Love" is a quieter domestic register — a girl named Rachael sitting by a stream, overhearing herself described as running with someone fast, and trying to figure out who she could ask about it without causing more trouble than the question is worth.

Mara: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" is a biographical excerpt tracking how Kirkby's Arctic paintings became nationally recognized, and how the Inukshuk eventually became the symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — a consequence that started with a single ministerial meeting and a well-timed exhibition in Spain.

Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" closes on a man who spots someone he may or may not recognize — a face with a distinctive mark — returning to a place that once meant something. He could verify it, but he chooses not to. "I preferred to believe it was him," the narrator says, "because it's what I did. It's who I had become."

Mara: "Straits and Turns" is a travel piece set in Madrid, a narrator exchanging an imperceptible kiss with a Minoan-featured stranger across a restaurant, and "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" is a scroll and a water well and a horse riding toward a country of castles that threaten the wide open skies. "Red in Black" ends the range — a love poem about texting instead of writing a letter, and being called a student of the old school, and sending a kiss from the other side of the planet.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry and the fiction both — is about the gap between what people mean to say and what actually gets said.

Mara: The stuttering man in Patrikios, the unspoken words piling up in Cavafy's Libyan prince, Salvador reading the room and leaving afraid. The gap is the subject.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is waiting in the archive.

Mara: There's always more.

The Unquiet Land

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excerpt

The bottle had been opened but little drunk from it. “As you can see, I haven’t been overindulging.” He pulled the cork out of the neck, poured two glasses and handed one to Caitlin.
“Thank you, Padraig.” As Caitlin placed the glass of wine on the table beside her, she noticed an old, soiled envelope. “This is addressed to my father,” she said, turning to look at Padraig.
“Yes, your father gave it to me when I left Corrymore to go to university.”
“You’ve kept it all this time?” Caitlin idly picked up the envelope.
“Yes. Seven years I’ve had it. You can read the letter if you wish.”
“No, not if it’s personal.”
“No, it is nothing private or secret that you have no right to read. It is addressed to your father after all, not to me.” Padraig took the envelope from Caitlin, removed the letter from inside and unfolded it. “It makes for rather disturbing reading though.”
Intrigued, Caitlin accepted the letter from Padraig and started to read with difficulty the untidy scrawl in which the letter was written. It was dated “Kyle of Lochalsh, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, 11th March, 1902.” Caitlin turned to the last of the letter’s several pages; it was signed by Dr. Hamish Graham.
Dear Mr MacLir,
Thank you for your letter of 2nd ult. I apologise for my tardy reply but my practice has been busy of late, as is not unusual at this time of year. You requested any information I might have concerning the boy Padraig, over and above what little I was able to communicate to you during our brief meeting in November. You tell me that you have formally adopted Padraig as your son, so I can appreciate your desire to learn more about the laddie. However, until the month of July, 1899, we knew very little, not even his surname which he refused to divulge for fear, I believe, of being returned to the care of his uncle from which he and his mother had been so cruelly expelled. That part of Padraig’s unhappy history you are already familiar with.
What transpired in the month of July following Padraig’s arrival in Kyle was a disturbing court case in which a farm labourer from a community twelve statute miles from Plockton, a man of well-established bad character, was tried and convicted to hang for the brutal rape and strangulation of a vagrant woman who had been given permission to sleep in the hay in a barn belonging to this man’s employer. At the rapist’s trial, about which I read in several newspapers, both local and national, it was revealed that the woman’s father, the Rev. Magnus MacArtan,

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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excerpt

“I mean no disrespect, whatsoever,” Ken said. “I know the symbol well.
But that is the wall.”
Albert exchanged a few words with Leon and then nodded. The painting
would go on that wall. Then Ken and Leon tackled the problem of
hanging the massive painting on a marble wall. The maintenance staff
concluded they would have to drill into the ceiling beams and suspend
the painting from thin stainless steel wires.
They hung the painting after business hours. Ken invited the media.
He had the panels delivered to the lobby where he bolted them together.
Salvador and his staff came along to help. Many members of the young
professionals group also arrived on the scene. The media asked how much
the painting had sold for. “No comment,” Ken said.
“Was it a lot of money?”
“No comment.”
“How did you contact Mr. Reichmann?”
“No comment.”
“You’re an artist,” one of them said. “How do you know how to do
all these other things? Artists don’t know how to be entrepreneurs. Who
helps you?”
“That’s a big question,” Ken said. “It’s a spiritual matter. I don’t wish
to discuss it.”
“What do you mean it’s a spiritual matter?”
“Just that. I get my knowledge, inspiration, and advice from a higher
authority and beyond that, I don’t want to discuss it. But, I will say one
thing – my advisor is Mr. Albert Reichmann.”
“Yes,” Albert said, when a reporter asked. “I am honoured to be Mr.
Kirkby’s advisor. He is doing wonderful work.”
Those few words gave Ken the credibility he’d been looking for. He had
achieved what his father had always had – the power to command respect
and attention wherever he went.
Later that night, when he was one of the last to leave, he paused to look
at the painting that he had envisioned hanging in that space so many
times. It looked exactly as he had imagined. It was in perfect proportion
to the immense lobby. It wasn’t until one walked closer to it that one felt
the full impact of its size.
His greatest debt was to Salvador, who had arranged the meeting, but
when he told him that he wanted to give him several paintings, he refused.
Ken painted several canvases regardless and delivered them to his home.
Before getting back to the task of Isumataq, Ken returned to the Arctic.
Keith Sharp, the burly Englishman, had moved to a parcel of land near
Rankin Inlet and extended an invitation. Ken included Michael as well as
Avril the photographer, and Roberto and Egidio, the filmmakers, in his
entourage; in mid-July, the somewhat motley crew – loaded down with…

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Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II

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Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

DEVIL WITH THE CANDLE STICK

“One day you will remember of me”, he said “but you won’t
be able to cry;”
what did he mean and what was the meaning of words?
Women stood at the crossroad, dark faced, holding the
half open pomegranate
like thousand faces of nothing. The prostitute, returning
home, went to the kitchen and warmed the food and I,
hell, failed between two evening songs.
When Rosa had a john she used to place a carton on
the corner so the memory of her father wouldn’t see her;
someone, with an axe, came out in the night and started
striking blindly.
The whole city was panicking, searches, interrogations,
occasionally someone would come, kneel before the icons
and confess to everything
since the beginning of the world — thus perhaps seeking
a purpose or two lines in the newspaper and a small
rose at the edge of the road;
the stupid child would go by and pick the rose, he’d look
at it and then as if
he understood something he’d leave it in its place and only
the gambler could guess that movement such as those that
save you.
Thus one by one they all got lost and I was the only survivor
playing, at the critical moment, with the fringes
of the tablecloth.
I truly wonder why all these since one can be lost with
a lot less things.
I remember one who’s hunger pushed him to desire a street
organ, which he sat down and ate, there, at the corner
only spitting out the crutch of the soldier, and the fat ugly
woman had revealed her big breasts over the balcony
“don’t feel sorry for me” she said “I’m very clever” and
she was staring at the end of the road;
then we sat on the grass of the dark cemetery and helped
the dead child.

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