Guide to Greece - by George Kalogeris (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the tradition of second-century writer Pausanias, George Kalogeris offers a series of meditative poems on his Greek heritage, both through the intimate lens of his upbringing and the vast historical view of the country's great literature and philosophy. Kalogeris's Guide to Greece is a warm and personal collection that ambitiously ties the diaspora of Greek people and ideas into a single literary experience. The struggles of a displaced, working-class family, in turn, give rise to musings on Antigone and Odysseus. Ancient Greek heroes inspire considerations of modern-day greats, such as billionaire Aristotle Onassis and baseball player Harry Agganis. Mirroring the familiar yet mythic call of the Aegean Sea, these poems at once evoke vivid childhood memories and provide new explorations of time-honored epics.

Review Quotes

At once boisterous, ironic, and tender, George Kalogeris's verse steeps us in a Greece where the ancient and modern link arms in one long song. The poems fall on the ear and rest in the heart through a mastery that blends the rituals of life and art together with consummate ease.--Michael Putnam

George Kalogeris's excellent poems show him to be a part of that amazing efflorescence of modern Greek poets from Cavafy onward, but he is ours, too, contemporary and American. Taken together his poems are a demonstration of an attitude toward life and letters that is attractive, engaging, and impressively humane.--David Slavitt

In Guide to Greece, George Kalogeris brilliantly encapsulates millennia of Hellenic tradition in masterful verse. His voice is the timeless voice of the learned poet enabling the narrative of heritage with splendid erudition and disarming sensitivity. In Kalogeris's inspired poetics Pausanias's Description of Greece becomes the gateway to the universality of Greek myth in all its power to express the diachronic human experience.--Stamatia Dova

In this great book George Kalogeris's powerful charged explorative iambic pentameter instrument follows Pausanias's footsteps to the sacred sites of¬ the Peloponnesus and finds in their broken sculptures and art, their altars and the things inscribed on their walls, records of their pasts, their rituals, their customs, their ceremonial expressions of their communal desperate needs. And in other poems in the book his powerful writing seeks out and finds how our sites are sacred too, our rituals, customs, the way we talk to each other, our paintings, our poems, ceremonial occasions, expressions too of our own desperate needs, so like those in the ancient places. His mother, whose parentage is from Sparta, having to cook a certain dish in a certain prescribed ritual way. A song, and a word in a song, is half-remembered, half-forgotten. In a Boston institution for the blind, an autistic deaf-blind child making a ritual, one cupped hand over the other in a certain way, to supplicate for water for her desperate need.--David Ferry

About the Author

George Kalogeris is associate professor of English Literature and Classics in Translation and is co-director of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston. His previous books include Camus: Carnets, a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, and Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation. He lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.