The adult estate, however, is simply a fallen one, with no hope and indeed hardly the memory of resurrection. Walking straight as a ramrod in his green cloakĬhildhood is not so much a time of innocence for Denegris as of vulnerability, and the ability of children to subsist in a gesture is linked, often, to illness or death. One way in which Denegris enacts presentness is in using child protagonists (sometimes himself, sometimes others), contained in a brief narrative or even a simple gesture, as in 'Equilibrium is Maintained,' which reads in its entirety: Įquilibrium is maintained thanks to the small child In Denegris, the only tense is the present, as if the real (or for that matter the imaginary) could be entrusted only to the moment, and memory, like history, was merely a fiction. Even when, on the threshhold of old age, he peers back into the past (the last volume of the selection is entitled Childhood Years), the sense he conveys is of something directly observed rather than recalled. However, whereas in Ritsos this practice becomes a Sisyphean sloughing-off of mortality, a stay against time, in Denegris it is as matter-of-fact as a reporter's dateline: I was here, I saw this. Like Ritsos, whose later and amply disillusioned poems share some of his sense of a surreally heightened yet profoundly quotidian world, Denegris dates most of his poems by day, month, and year. This harshly winnowed Selected Poems-fifty-two poems culled from seven volumes spanning nearly half a century-offers no summing up, no sense of biographical or narrative progression, but only sharply incised snapshots, as if the poet lived from poem to poem on a trestle of silence. Individual yet oddly impersonal, densely particular yet allusive, astringently clear yet gnomic, he reminds one of a man on a dangerous perch, a poet with a highwire act for whom one rhetorical misstep will bring catastrophe. In short, his is not the way of the great and daunting poets who circumvallated his time, of Seferis and Ritsos and Elytis. He is best defined by his refusals-of the buttress of myth and history, of the hope of revolutionary justice, of a lyricized, idealized landscape.

Tassos Denegris is in his late sixties, which is to say a member of a generation scarred by war, civil war, and military dictatorship. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Mackridge. Translated by Peter Thompson, Roderick Beaton, Michael Green, Peter Colaclides, and David Ricks. Review Essay Recent Translations from Shoestring Press In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The First Death by Dimitris Lyacos