I would say, 'Cut these poems and they'll bleed, ' but they are already bleeding - a poet's evidence of world and civil wars, a military junta and dictatorship. We might call these the poem's noir, in which the poet manages to fashion a bloody and beau- tiful reflection of strange times. In this important translation, each poem is a house made of flesh, and we wander stunned by all that can happen in words. --Eleni Sikelianos

As Karen Emmerich suggests in her judicious postscript to this fine translation of an important - if inadequately acknowledged - Greek poet, Miltos Sachtouris's rather nightmarish view of the world emerges from his response to a cruel contem- porary history and his need to evoke its hidden reality. In volume after volume, this view depends on what the translator aptly identifies as a fragmentary mode of expression and a paralogical perspective, represented by repeated images made up of primary colors and apparently simple diction, both gaining increasing resonance by persistent repetition in a poetic landscape haunted by shadowy presences. --Edmund Keeley