Bøker av Yannis Ritsos

Greek poet Yannis Ritsos' remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, composed in 1979, with linocut responses by artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio, created in 2020; each line and image an essential observation of a moment, a personal archive of time past, present and future.

Second Edition - 2018In this amazing collection, Manolis introduces us to the life work of Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. This translated collection paints the poetry of a man's life and as such it captures the great magnitude of that life lived. From the sea-soaked childhood through the impatient adventures of a naïve summer youth and shattered innocence. The reader can follow the poet, Ritsos, through the heartache of life to experience the shifting of his voice into a maturity that is cynical and painful but edged with truth. And all is enveloped in the metaphor of nature, upon the backdrop of a Greece, painted in white and pastel and gold, tastes and textures exotic and foreign but beautiful and real.Ritsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written.Ritsos writes about life and in this collection, spanning so many years, the reader is gifted with the true sense of a life experienced. One is able to see a poet play with form and style to reflect an abundance of shifting moods and experiences, each poem telling its own story but also echoing the larger story of life. Each poem is a snapshot of a place in time, of a moment in a life, of a story being told. The reader is invited to browse through a truly amazing anthology of observations, both personal and public. This collection reflects a depth and vastness that must be savoured and digested, revisited and reviewed.- Cathi Shaw

The first half of the book is devoted to the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and includes several of his longer poems in their entirety. In the second half are selections of mainly shorter by poems by the other five poets, although it includes Gatsos' long poem "Amorgos".

1991 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year--Choice. "Friar and Mysiades deserve much credit for providing, in one volume, the first full-range sampling of this fecund, variegated, and highly original poet in English."--The New Republic

The last poems of this major Greek poet are tinged with sadness and loss, but they also hum with vitality and an odd note of hope.

Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that have an irresistible potency.