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Like
most poets whose work began so far back, my earlier poems are
more obviously formal than later ones. It took me a long while
to ‘grow up’ as a poet, but since that happened, and
gratifyingly often before it happened, what tends to characterize
my poems is momentum, a kind of momentum in which the experience
of the poem is very present even though its material and/or subject
may be memory. An earlier poet saw the poem as ‘a slice
of life seen through a temperament’. That seems right, if
one adds that surprisingly often there is a mysterious element
in the perception.
From
the Foreword by Mike Doyle |
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I
doubt very much if Ritsos believed even for an instant that the
archaic struggle of man against the forces that subdue him would
end in freedom from illusory attachments and entanglements. On
the contrary, what he skillfully presents in his work are mediating
symbols, incarnating out of the depths of his awareness–diligently
crafting a literary isthmus to the heart of his personal truth.
Ritsos's life, wrought with imposed detentions, health limitations,
and personal tragedies, bears witness to this attitude that paradoxically,
is best understood as something yet to be experienced... a future
homecoming of sorts. His is the poetry of waiting, and yearning,
and finally projecting the heroic Eros of the Greek psyche: the
dominant imperative of an unfettered existence at the zero point
of man's subjectivity.
Ilya
Tourtidis |
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