The poems of Yannis Ritsos lack the compliance of subjugation and the often wounded indulgence of a narcissistic persona. What they do exhibit however, is the very authentic human endeavour of striving, reaching... imagining, and somehow, against all odds, assimilating the dissonance of an encountered self in the midst of upheaval... and in what he had to intuit as a metaphoric fall from grace despite his religious denouncements. This desire for a unitary reality is the value I see, feel, and admire in his work. Ritsos was a poet who lived in chaotic but exciting times, and like Odysseus, was fated by the gods to take the scenic way home

The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize it's more important for me than the Nobel". His poetry was banned at times in Greece for its left wing content. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953). Ritsos mainly wrote poems with political content, "serving communism with his art" as modern philologists describe.

Yannis Ritsos' profile page

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences at the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years. He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels and a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works. Various articles, poems and short stories in Greek as well as in English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Australia and Greece. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening and traveling. In 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC with the goal of publishing literary books.

Manolis Aligizakis' profile page

We should be grateful to Manolis for hauling this horn o' plenty to Canada. He doggedly traces the manifold styles and voices of the remarkable Ritsos, who is at times like Rilke, in his sweeping metaphors and comprehension of the human heart; at times Lorca, with his visionary surrealism: hand mirrors, shadows, statues descending their plinths; and at times Kay Ryan, with lyrics so fragile that they might crumble if touched. Yet Ritsos is always Ritsos. He suffered much personal and public violence, in the autocratic Greece of the 20th century, but his poems resist judgment. They flower with the force of humility and pathos. We readers are his brothers and children and comrades, under the hot sun which is and is not a god, beside the "endless sea." Love trumps Death. Every object is awake. "Every hour is our hour."

John Wall Barger author of Pain-Proof Men