New Green Integer title: Nikos Engonopoulos, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978

Nikos Engonopoulos Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978 (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)

Green Integer is proud to announce the publication of a new collection of poetry, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978 by the renowned Green modernist poet, Nikos Engonopoulos. The book, translated by Martin McKinsey, is available from Green Integer (pay through PayPal, https://www.paypal.com/) for $13.95.

Nikos Engongoupoulos is surely one of the most curious figures in twentieth-century poetry. An ambidextrous painter-poet and early convert to surrealism, Engonopoulos joined forces with Andreas Embirikos and Odysseus Elytis in the late 1930s to change the course of Greek poetry.

Bruised by the reception of the Athens press of his first two books, Engonopoulos spent the next 40 years in semi-seclusion, evolving a theater of gesture and sign in which were acted out the drama of twentieth-century geopolitics. For Greece, this meant military dictatorship, foreign invasion and occupation, a brutalizing civil war and subsequent Cold War lockdown. On the stage of Engonopoulos's poetry these events appear in costumes from other times and places, most the former Greco-Balkan world that reached from the Rio dei Greci in Venice to the ancient city of Sinope on the Black Sea. Against these backdrops roam his cast of characters: fantastical Albanians, Montenegran monrachs, Orthodox warrior-saints, Bulgarian woodsmen and Smyrnian beauties. In a short lyric set in Paris (or Constantinople, or Venice, or all three) Engonopoulos writes about "the Grand Initiates" who once "my means of gestures / asked / that I meet them outside." His poems, like the Initiates, beckon us outside to a meeting with the unfamiliar.

Acropolis and Tram, Engonopoulos's first collection in English, spans his career from the early experiments in surrealist disassociation to the late elegies for a lost world. it also includes the long poem "Bolivar," his covert ode to the Greek resistance first published in 1945.


Exemplar of Flight

a woman undresses
amid a thunder
of rattlesnakes
she casts her eyes to the wind
likewise her nipples
she makes mothers weep
and horses whinny
clocks to stop
and skies dead
she cranks the winch of her corset
paints
the handsome boxer's reliquary
otherworldly
swears herself to love's loss

and tomorrow? tomorrow

nothing: no night is free of her hail.

Review copies are available.

Also available from Green Integer: Andreas Embiricos Amour Amour, translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos and Alan Ross. $11.95