JEFFREY CARSON THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ODYSSEUS ELYTIS   [ home ]  [ Poems 74-96 ]  [ mail him ]  The first collection in any language -including Greek- of the complete poetry of Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis. June, Poetry 6 x 9¼, 528 pp. 0-8018-4924-1 $49.95 Johns Hopkins University Press - Baltimore&London -1997 THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ODYSSEUS ELYTIS Odysseus Elytis translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris with an introduction by Jeffrey Carson In awarding Odysseus Elytis the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy declared that he had been selected "for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness." Elytis was largely unknown outside his native Greece before winning literature's highest honor and much of his work has not been widely available in English.  The Collected Poems is the first collection in any language, including Greek, of Elytis complete poetry, a body of work marked by a profound love of hope, freedom, beauty, and Greek tradition. Twenty years in preparation, this volume includes his early poems, influenced in equal pans by surrealism and the landscape and climate of Greece and the Aegean Sea; his long, epic poem connecting Greece's -and his own- Second World War experience to the myth of the eternal Greek hero, Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign; his most ambitious work, The Axion Esti, which the Swedish Academy praised as "one of 20th-century literature's most concentrated and ritually faceted poems"; and his mature poetry, from Maria Nephele, a poem in two voices, to his last collection, West of Sorrow, written the summer before his death in 1996 at age 84. Throughout his long career as a poet, Elytis remained true to his vision of a poetry that addresses the power of language and links Greece's two thousand years of myth and history with the social and psychological demands of the modern age. Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and profound optimism, Elytis's poems employ surreal imagery and a remarkable variety of forms to capture the natural, sun-soaked beauty of Greece and to give voice to the contemporary Greek-and to a more universally human-consciousness. CRITICS Advance praise for The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis: "Jeffrey Carson-a poet himself with a kindred sensibility to Elytis's-has admirably succeeded in bringing across the Greek poet's lyrical voice and the richness of his diction." Dorothy M-T. Gregory, The Ionian University, Corfu.   Praise for the work of Odysseus Elytis: "Elytis crafts powerful and sparkling lyrics, sometimes bitter, often full of wonder and celebration." Christian Science monitor   "A poet of large achievement. . . His work . . has a kind of passionate optimism about the possibilities of his small Aegean world." New York Review of Books   "Poetry which is lyrical, optimistic and which exults in the possibilities of language." Times Literary Supplement  ABOUT ODYSSEUS ELYTIS Odysseus Elytis-one of the most highly regarded poets in the second half of the 20th century-was born Odysseus Adepoudhelis on Crete in 1911. His first collection of poems, Orientations, was published in 1939 in Greece. He served as a second lieutenant in the Greek army during World War II, and achieved international recognition for his poetry after the war. He traveled widely, preferring self imposed exile to life in Greece under the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He continued to write and publish poetry until his death in 1996.