Telos

An exciting selection of work by the important contemporary Greek poet Stamatis Polenakis presented by acclaimed American poet and translator A. E. Stallings

Telos offers a wide-ranging selection of poems by Stamatis Polenakis, one of the most distinctive Greek poets writing today. Polenakis is a poet rich in T. S. Eliot’s “historical sense”—aware of the “pastness of the past” but also its presence. Contemporary Greece, especially a Greece wracked by the economic crisis and austerity measures of 2009–2019, is glimpsed darkly in these poems through the glass of twentieth-century European history, literature, and film, as well as Homeric myth jolted awake by anachronism. Polenakis has said that his work involves “the idea of revolution, both continuous and glorious in its failure,” but his pessimism and irony are leavened with beauty and modulated by a faith in poetry.

The translator, A. E. Stallings, herself an accomplished poet, has worked closely with Polenakis to bring his work to life in English, accurately conveying his plainspoken but allusive vernacular in English poems that work on their own terms. The result is an ideal combination of poet and translator. The book also features an introduction by Stallings that provides important context about Polenakis and the historical events that have influenced him.