The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis

Despite having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979, Odysseus Elytis--probably the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century--remained an obscure figure to the English-reading world. But with this posthumous edition (Elytis died in 1996 at the age of 84), translators Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris have given English-reading poetry lovers a chance to discover what all the fuss was about. Elytis's poems are passionate and subtle, rich with Greek history and myth, yet are also thoroughly modern in their sensibility. Any excerpt from a lifetime's worth of work is inadequate, but these lines from "Verb the Dark" give you a taste of Elytis's depth: "So then, what we called 'sky' is not; 'love' is not; 'eternal' is not. Things do not / Obey their names."