Dr. Dunston sat on a corner of the bed, and the surgeon pulled a chair around to face Tyne. “I’m sorry, but there’s no easy way to say this. Your aunt has bowel cancer.” Tyne gasped, and he reached out a hand instinctively but did not touch her. “We did a bowel resection but there’s metastasis – quite a lot, I’m afraid. Radiation may help, but you have to know, it’s a long shot.” Tyne felt her whole body sag in the chair. The room began to spin, and she knew that if she had been standing up, she would have fainted. Drawing in a calming breath she raised her head and looked from Peter Osborne to Grant Dunston and back again. “How long?” she whispered. “A few months at the most. I’m so sorry, Tyne.” “Thank you,” she whispered. She glanced at Dr. Dunston again. “Thank you both. You’ve done your best and been very kind. I’ll be all right. I’ll wait here for Auntie, then I’ll have to go tell my parents.” Dr. Dunston stood up. “Would you like me to do that, Tyne?” She shook her head in the negative. “Thanks, but no. We’ll be okay.” She managed a smile as she saw them both out.
Poetry as a Return to Origins and a Form of Resistance
BY Attila Balazs
The poetry of Manolis Aligizakis is born to a fundamental tension: the desire to return to one’s origins and the need to transcend the limits imposed upon the human being by time, body, and death. Above all, the volume Introspection expresses a consciousness that refuses to accept existence as a simple succession of events. Every experience must be transformed into a sign, every image elevated to the level of symbol, and every fleeting moment rescued by and through the word.
The poet does not observe the world from a distance. He experiences it with an almost painful intensity, through every fibre of his being. Nature, childhood memories, love, desire, suffering, homeland, history, mythology, and death meet within a poetic space where the boundaries between the concrete and the abstract disappear. The body becomes at times an altar, at other times a lamp, a wound, a vessel of the pneuma, or a place of revelation. Earth, sea, wind, and plants acquire ritual functions. Dill and mint perform a liturgy, crickets sing hymns, and rose petals preserve the traces of a life the poet attempts to defend against oblivion.
This is not a poetry of tranquil contemplation, but of confrontation. The lyrical self continually stands before a precipice, a threshold, or a question without an answer. He summons his destiny, examines it, defies it, and attempts to create it himself. The repetition of formulas such as “and I said,” “I baptized my life,” “I fought,” “I examined,” “I reigned,” and “I glorified” gives the poems an incantatory structure. The poetic voice seems to utter a succession of confessions, oaths, and pronouncements before an invisible tribunal.
In the first cycle of the volume, the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet are not merely titles. They constitute the stages of a spiritual journey. Alpha is the beginning, the first cry, the summoning of destiny, and the confrontation with the father’s death. Omega is the return, the completion of the circle, and the rediscovery of the original soil. Between these two points unfolds the entire drama of consciousness: childhood, maturation, love, revolt, nostalgia, the struggle against injustice, the search for truth, and preparation for death.
The alphabet thus becomes a map of existence. Each letter marks a threshold, a new stage of knowledge, and another manifestation of the self. The poet himself affirms this symbolic order by placing “signposts” between the alpha of the child’s first cry and the omega of mature knowledge. In this universe, the human being does not advance in a straight line, but travels in a circle. The end is always connected to the beginning, and death contains the promise of another birth.
Greek mythology provides the privileged language of this journey. Medusa, Hades, Kore, Eros, Nemesis, the Elysian Fields, Rhadamanthus, and the oracles do not appear as mere cultural ornaments. They are living forces of consciousness. Medusa can transform mortal time into the eternal stillness of the statue. Hades represents both death and entry into another form of existence. Eros defeats time and offers man either the illusion or the revelation of immortality. Kore unites virginity, fertility, and the cyclical return to life.
Incarnated Endlessness The infinite incarnated and I took my place in time the abyss is my history each truth is an inevitable illusion a prelude of life from something not created and unapproachable I am what I am not the unreachable depth in the words what wasn’t said won’t be ever said there is a failure in each poem something beyond itself sank and vanished years ago like a flower pneuma turns toward the light the chaos of unborn words impenetrable by the mind a pathfinder of silence I float between the beginning and the end listening to the void eternity sits heavy on me moment that saunters on the ephemeral out of my window timeless memory I march with what I don’t comprehend.
Helen and her lover frequented a hotel at the outskirts of the city, one of those cheap, neighborhood hotels with the ancient, tired beds, the old mirrors ravaged by dampness the basins, side tables, overused napkins things touched by thousands before you, people who perhaps might have died and while they might rot in the soil and rain these things still retain on them the impersonal vague memory of their passing; ephemeral couples, gamblers, drunkards, nuts, ambitious and lonely who cried all night long. For this reason things have their fate, noiseless and yes merciless and for this something deeper exists in every life: the life of others. Helen and her lover would rent a room they’d undress and try desperately to meet; however, their hands were blind because of their eagerness. Finally, after having sex they’d meet again, remaining silent for a long time, listening to the faraway city buzz, vaguely discerned, as if tuning their organs: for which performance though? A city among thousands of other cities on earth with houses, roads, monuments the passing musicians, cemeteries, the crazies the ones who run after bread and others who run after their dreams with those who keep silent, those who postpone, those who betray…
…“She won’t give me any, the bitch is still angry we didn’t take her out drinking, and she won’t give me any money, you know what a bitch she is…” “Look,” Costa faced them both, “if I don’t get my money in two minutes, I’ll call the cops, and you’ll end up in the drunk tank for the night,” he threatened them, which brought an epiphany to the Indian. “I have no money, but I could give you some frozen salmon…take it to your family,” he suggested. Costa evaluated the situation quickly and realized that some frozen salmon would be better than nothing and better than getting the cops involved and spending an hour before he’d get out of this mess. On the other hand, half of the fare belonged to the owner of the car; if he could get enough frozen fish to make the six bucks, that would not be a bad settlement. The Indian staggered to his house while Costa kept the white man for security, short of and after five minutes of agony, while the driver felt the Indian could have fallen asleep and never mind the frozen salmon, he discerned him coming from the back of the house, and he held a plastic ice cream bucket full of frozen reddish salmon. It could be two kilos of fish. Costa quickly estimated that the fish was more than the ten-dollar fare, which he considered paid. He took the ice cream container and placed it in the trunk. He got inside the car and talked to the dispatcher… “79 South Seven…” is the zone where he ended up. “Roger 79,” the rough voice of the man in the cubicle said. Costa’s night shift was over around five the next morning, and after he filled out the papers for his shift, he put the money collected in the proper envelope and deposited it with the girl behind the desk of the blacktop taxis. He went home. He placed the ice cream bucket with the frozen salmon in the freezer and promised to recount the story to his wife when morning came.
Pip: Hellenic Canadian Literature — where the Aegean meets the prairies, and somehow both feel equally haunted.
Mara: This episode draws on work published by vequinox, covering translations of modern Greek poetry, original lyric and reflective verse, and a wide range of fiction and memoir excerpts. There is a lot of ground here.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry translations — Seferis, Ritsos, Cavafy, and the rest of the canon.
Hours and Glare — Modern Greek Poetry in Translation
Mara: The thread running through these translations is what poetry does with time — forgetting, presence, the moment you fail to inhabit. The Seferis poem, "Hours of the Stars," opens on that directly.
Pip: The lines land hard: "We're dying! Our gods are dying / the hours carry our breasts confused / by the sin of forgetfulness."
Mara: That phrase — the sin of forgetfulness — is the hinge. Memory becomes a moral obligation, not just a feeling. The myrrh-carrying women are asked to sprinkle it over silence and graves.
Pip: Ritsos answers that silence differently. Volume II asks why you question your moments while standing outside them. Volume VI goes further — "Army Camp" catalogs the small objects falling from prisoners' pockets: coins, scissors, a nail clipper, a hidden cigarette. The inventory is the elegy.
Mara: Cavafy's "The First Step" argues that reaching even the bottom rung of poetry's ladder is "a step beyond the ordinary" — citizenship in the city of ideas, hard-won and rare. Engonopoulos dismantles myth entirely in "Pandora's Box," concluding the box never existed. Titos Patrikios fixes on a single August moment, a woman appearing at a window, "two triangular pieces of sunshine on her calico underarms."
Pip: The anthology "Neo-Hellene Poets" and Tasos Livaditis carry that same weight — presence dissolving into season, grief counted out in leftover plates. Antony Fostieris closes it with a cracked statue bowing in silence, resembling, as the poem says, "our tyrannized souls."
Mara: That image of the soul under pressure connects directly to what the original lyric work is doing.
The Poem as Body and Labor — Lyric and Reflective Verse
Pip: These are original poems, not translations, and the question they keep circling is what it costs to make something — whether the material is language, iron, or a life.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" puts it plainly. The collection's "Limping Man" ends: "Good Lord, were you drunk / when you fathered him? / Good Lord, have mercy on us, / don't drink again!"
Pip: The comedy there is actually theological — a direct address to a God who made something imperfect and beautiful, and the poem holds both without resolving them.
Mara: "Rendition" treats the act of writing as bodily — a rib cage shaking a dormant god, a pen wedged in three fingers, "stigmata line / morphs on the white plain." "The Incidentals" grounds that in craft labor: a blacksmith working metal, himself tethered to the anvil like a donkey on a chain.
Pip: "HEAR ME OUT" strips the metaphor entirely — loss described in the plainest prose-poetry, a finger held in a palm for security, music left on an iPod. "Introspection," "Troglodytes," and "Nuances" each find a different register: ancient roots and asphodels, a young poet summoning primeval wisdom, a hand touched on a country road while Bocelli plays.
Mara: From the interior life of the poem, the fiction and memoir excerpts move outward — into landscape, history, and the body in cold weather.
Landscape, Loss, and the Long Drive — Fiction and Memoir
Pip: The fiction excerpts share a geography of difficult terrain — physical, emotional, or both — and characters who are trying to get somewhere they are not sure they can reach.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" sets the tone. Caitlin stands outside a cottage, staring toward her father's grave, and the farewell scene is rendered in three distinct voices: "Nora: May God have mercy on your soul, Daddy. Caitlin: May the good earth receive you kindly, Father. Mother Ross: Goodbye, old friend. I shall miss you terribly."
Pip: Three women, three registers of grief, one fresh mound of earth. The landscape absorbs the body — that inseparateness of man and land is exactly what Caitlin is being converted to.
Mara: "Prairie Roots" places that same body in Canadian winter. Children arrive at school frostbitten from open sleds; the teacher has them rub snow on frozen flesh to slow the thaw. The father drives two miles home in an open sled and the children decide they would rather walk.
Pip: Cold as an argument for autonomy — that is a very specific Canadian logic.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" runs on a similar tension: Tyne and Arthur driving toward Medicine Hat in early-morning silence, looking for someone the police have already failed to find. Arthur's hesitation about the district, Tyne's quiet smile — she has already been there.
Pip: "Jazz with Ella" takes that discomfort somewhere warmer and stranger — Leningrad, a restaurant with a pineapple centerpiece no one is allowed to eat, a band in lime green suits playing a barely recognizable Satin Doll.
Mara: "Poodie James" works the other side of that dynamic: a reporter named Pease, a man named Fred setting strict terms before he will talk, and a used-car lot overlooking the Columbia River running blue in autumn. "Swamped" moves into financial territory — a broker named Eteo managing a share offering and a question he did not expect from his supervisor.
Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" gives us Ed's garage, a Dodge Car Club with exactly twelve members by constitutional mandate, and consequences for returning the car without a full tank that the narrator describes as unrestrained. "Fury of the Wind" closes the set with a small-town power struggle — farm couples, a school principal in the back row, a vicar advising a vote.
Mara: Landscapes that shape people, and people who push back against the shape.
Pip: What stays with me is how consistently the work returns to thresholds — a grave, a window, a garage door, the bottom rung of a ladder.
Mara: And the question of what you carry across them: coins in a pocket, a finger held for security, wheat ears spread on water.
Pip: Next time, we find out what else is waiting on the other side.
Army Camp The whistle, the yell, the crawl, the thud, the reverse-flowing water, the smoke, the stone, the saw a fallen tree among the dead. When the guards undressed them, you could hear falling out of their pockets one by one, the coins, used to make phone calls, the little scissors, the nail clipper, the small mirror and the long hairpiece of the balding man, snow white with straw, pieces of glass, and thorns and a half-smoked cigarette hidden behind his ear.
History! What unchecked information did it retain what erroneous gossip passed to us! A lot of bad luck and plots ah, Cleo, surely recorded everything she heard. It seems she didn’t care to sense what truth was and what wasn’t? A whole life of study and attention and research allows us today to discover, to claim that everything about Pandora and her box are tales unworthy of mentioning. Neither Pandora nor the gods put anything in that box nor did its opening let the gifts escape (they didn’t exist) Pretentious lies (cheap lies) made us believe that something was in Pandora’s box! And if we act like morons naïve men (I first) I’m in a position today to confirm that a box belonging to Pandora never existed.
The First Step One day, the young poet Evmenis complained to Theokritos. “I have been writing for two years, and I have only composed one idyll. It is my only completed work. Alas, I see that the ladder of Poetry is high, very high; unfortunately I will never be able to rise from where I stand at the bottom rung.” Theokritos said, “These words are inappropriate and blasphemous. And even though you are on the first step, you must be proud and happy. That you have reached this far is not a little. What you have accomplished is a great glory. For even this first step is a step beyond the ordinary. To have arrived where you stand now, you must be in your own right a citizen of the city of ideas. And it is hard and rare to be naturalized in that city. In her agora, you find Lawmakers that no arriviste can dupe. That you have reached this place is not a small thing. You have accomplished a glory.”
Hills Hills undulating euphoria lungs like butterflies extend and collapse as country road fills with eyes wondering at immense beauty a song rippling air of the car your favored Boccelli tune and you touch my hand as if to reaffirm your contention being here this forever moment at this stretch of the road while a grateful sunshine complements your lips with diamonds
Hellenic Canadian Literature 