Eros, Eros, Eros

Book excerpt: Olga Broumas has chosen poems from the full range of Odysseas Elytis's Nobel Prize-winning poetry, including his early work when he was associated with the Surrealists, to the entirety of his long poem The Little Mariner, as well as a previously unavailable selection of his last poems, written shortly before his death in 1996. Elytis himself offers the best description of his work: If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros, eros.