Ei A44MA BULETI PRGA,OFTEMDRNVRST REF OOTTDE aio. 9 f 8 B ookiL, s Re c - e· i v ed Sa:~kj~~is Pa:padimPiuriou/The bI"Oth~'er" P'iano phtlogra,:·Phi iAris. GeÇorgior/ "Psi: andc /W:irnus" ditiiionsr/Thessalon:iki! 983 11âadayitoyci sal .EKrrlGGEDoatl <IEVOYNLIfLL1PAL: I ) MIE111-rll..L i l N tr. TEPlr - 4 r*KAV \itL 'AyartyroS I`. Toonuv<irrq "O Sp6peog (M~)cMug ru( 8p0pu) £K.LOTIKOLCOLKOI: AQ(N KYPl~IAIAl OELLA.1NIKi l 198 A011 NA 19)8 ' A MODERN GREEK LITERATURE ANNUAL ATHENS VOLUME TWO 1983 C ON T E T Page 2-11 A Survey of Greek American Poets 12-14 Poems in Translation (from English 44-47 to Greek) 16, Poems in Translation (from Greek 20-32 to English) 15-16 Poem in the original English 17-19 The Greek Painter N. Athineou- Coletsis 35-43 A Survey of Books (in Greek) 33, 51, Activities and News 53, 55 Passim Books Received * The Illustrations in this issue have been borrowed from various sources. The bird-illustrations are by the late Benjamin Chee Chee, a Woodland Indian painter, featured recently in The Graduate, the Univ. of Toronto Alumni Magazine. A S U RVE Y o f GREE K AMERICAN POE TS x** THE SURVEY concerns poets who are either based in New York City or live in the vi- cinity. The poets are quite different from one another, some are newly arrivals while others have lived most of their years in or around New York, some have published their books in Greece and others in New York, a couple write in traditional verse while the majority write in free verse. Yet, all of them write in Greek, on themes which touch (directly or by implication) upon both Greece and America and thus the- y can be used in a critical collage, as a kind of tribute to both nature, which fa- vors collage - tree leaves will easily fra- ternize with pop bottles and torn newsprint in a stream of water - and poetry which is a mirror of nature. From the Survey are excluded poets whom I have discussed elsewhere: Andonis Decaval- les and Nikos Spanias. "The solution of all problems is the end of this book", says Dionysis Marave- yas [CEna (One) (Athina: Dhioyenis, 1982)], in "Postscript". It would seem that the poet has decided to drop poetry (tempora- rily or for ever) either because he has found sufficient illumination or because he has stumbled upon an impenetrable dark- ness. Yet, this poem is not the final one /3/ in the book, which ends with "Halcyon Days". The ambiguity as to the poet's intentions vis-a-vis poetry remains, al- though the general title of the book, Ena, suggests only the start of a sequen- ce of poetry collections. Many of Maraveyas's poems are rather abstract and loose syllogisms in search of meanings, but there is a sharpness of vision and what one might call a roguish kind of humor and a feeling for idiomatic Greek that make this book by a still young poet remarkable. Two samples: Since our imagination, too, is in the service of sensual pleasure the seed of compromise won't be long to take root inside me. ** Anyway (here I wink at you), I take my spoils and go home. I have more things to do. One must grow happy, after all .. There are also whole poems, like "The friend's letter", "The credo of the month", "Christmas", "Tuesday at daybreak" (first part), "The bet", harmonies of defiance and acquiescence, impetuosity and reserve, that remind us of Rimbaud and other youth- ful poets that have bitten deep into the apple of wisdom.- %%%%% Makis Tzilianos who heads an experi- mental union of Greek American writers, cultivates the sonnet and thus continues /4/ a long Eptanisian tradition (Tzilianos comes from Kefalonia). His verses, so far, are contained in Empiries (Experi- ences) (1975) and Anises Fones (Uneven Voices) (1979), privately printed. In the first book, the older sonnets either were cohzposed at Kefalonia or reflect the personal and familial world of the poet which he left behind when he emigrated first to South Africa and then to North America. These poems are more lyrical and more respectful of the rules of the son- net form than the other poems in the first and those in the second collection, which are more prosaic, more concerned with so- cial issues and more negligent of the ru- les of versification. Another problem is created by the use of strange and forced compounds which Tailianos has a habit of coining. Yet, some of these "sonnets" sur- vive for their genuine feeling and breath of inspiration. "The dead nonna" (grandmo- ther), "I'll come, and a carnation...", "Africa 1960;", "The song of rain", "To the invalid woman of the 2nd World War", "Hu- man weakness", from Empiries. The poems of Anises Fones are heavily anchored in settings and events that derive from the poet's life in America and his journeys to South Africa and Greece. Two excerpts: In San Domingo I spent more than a summer day and from the Redskins I bought objects of craft, chains of silver and bowls of clay of a supposedly indigenous art. (A note informs us that San Domingo /5/ is an Indian village in New Mexico). We emigrate like birds of prey, then with sadness we turn and say to ourselves that we've hardly left from our country, a paternal voice still pulls us - a magnetic breast. Our nostalgia's clepsydra makes the choice. Panos Vozikis has taken good care of his three books of poetry which he has pu- blished privately: Liofgla (Leaves of Olive) (1981), Elliniki Yi (Greek Earth) and Kath' Odhon (On the road) (1983, 1984), all three printed in New York, the second and third in bilingual editions (translations by Ni- cos Spanias and Tassos Roussos, respective- ly; covers by Nicos Ikaris and Makis Pano- rios). The epigrams of the first book show imagination but the flashes of genius are rare. Most epigrams are facile, in some the logic is questionable, a few hit their tar- get: We say "I think" con fi rmi ng o ur un cer tai nt y. Men are like candles pledges of a brief accord. If justice takes off its boots and dresses in white let's provide ourselves with more crutches. /6/ The material in the other two collecti- ons is also uneven. Two lines promise a lot, then the effect is spoiled by a dozen indif- ferent lines. Here is one of the more intel- ligent pieces of Greek Earth: "My fate" My transatlantic schizophrenia turns to thin air upon a reef of the Ionian sea. The airplane's psyche rejects me belching me out onto the airfield right after take-off. I was made to step on the gas but not to fly, alas! Christos Tsiamis is also an immigrant Greek-American poet (who came to the U.S. in his teens) but his poetry is free of the cliches or the self-pity usually found in the poetry of immigrant poets. The gene- ral epigraph of his unpretentious book Poly- tropo (Multifarious, or Variegated) (Patra: "Ostraka", 1979), from Octavio Paz, and the epigraph of the book's first section from the Greek surrealist poet Andreas Embirikos, seem to announce a kind of poetic storm. The impression is reinforced by the first poem, "Zazz", ingeniously laid out to represent a zazz piece. An interesting experiment which approximates concrete poetry is also found at the end of the collection, two brief exclamational poems, "Two rituals" and "Death". In the second section of the book, it is refreshing to read sensual ver- ses that are passionate without being banal: "SÇunday" The cup of boiled milk in the hand that leafs the newspaper and delays time, sip by sip. The other hand is outside time in the world of being and non-beingy it stirs waves in your hair traces seas and oceans plains and mountains, vanishes inside your warm geography. The three poems of the third section, "The window of silence", are more cryptic and informed with drama, while the poems of the fourth section, "In the teeth of fire", seem to have a broader existenti- alist and social reference. In several poems of this collection, the transitions from thought to thought are rather abrupt (not an unusual element in poetry, anyrway) We would have preferred a smoother pace in the progression of these poems. On the whole, Tsiamis's concern is with the fun- ction of time, the subtle and unobtrusive transformations of things through time, the sudden contractions or expansions of experience, and such. "Sleeplessness, I" If the light is the sea, I remain at the bottom./ The waves do not reach me./ Objects, layers of skin settle down./ I hold the water's volume vertically, the light/ is in the mercy of gravity./ The waves do not carry me. /8/ The first book of poems by Manolis Polentas, O Ayios Misanthropos (The Saint- ly Misanthrope) (Athina: Iridhanos, 1983), does not offer us protoleia. The voice is mature and the poet very much aware of li- fe's contradictions. "I am small/ and yet I cannot fit/ inside my borders", is the untitled preamble of twenty-five titled poems, some of which suggest that the re- verse may be also true, that the borders allotted by nature to the human species firmly confine both the common and the un- common man: They chose ten soldiers - the best of the lot- for the great mission.