Telos: Selected Poems
Hardcover
- Price:
- $55.00/拢45.00
- ISBN:
- Published:
- Apr 13, 2027
- Copyright:
- 2027
- Pages:
- 128
- Size:
- 5.5 x 8.5 in.
Paperback
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Telos offers a wide-ranging selection of poems by Stamatis Polenakis, one of the most distinctive Greek poets writing today. Polenakis is a poet rich in T. S. Eliot鈥檚 鈥渉istorical sense鈥濃攁ware of the 鈥減astness of the past鈥 but also its presence. Contemporary Greece, especially a Greece wracked by the economic crisis and austerity measures of 2009鈥2019, is glimpsed darkly in these poems through the glass of twentieth-century European history, literature, and film, as well as Homeric myth jolted awake by anachronism. Polenakis has said that his work involves 鈥渢he idea of revolution, both continuous and glorious in its failure,鈥 but his pessimism and irony are leavened with beauty and modulated by a faith in poetry.
The translator, A. E. Stallings, herself an accomplished poet, has worked closely with Polenakis to bring his work to life in English, accurately conveying his plainspoken but allusive vernacular in English poems that work on their own terms. The result is an ideal combination of poet and translator. The book also features an introduction by Stallings that provides important context about Polenakis and the historical events that have influenced him.