Late into the Night
SynopsisPlot
The last poems of this 20th-century Greek master are tinged with sadness and loss, but they also, in their candidly poetic reporting of the life and world around him, hum with vitality and an odd note of hope. Ritsos felt defeated in his own health and politics, but as a poet he experienced a surge of creativity that is fascinating to follow in its chronology and exactitude.
Story
About this book
Yannis Ritsos was one of the most prominent Greek poets of the twentieth century, and Late into the Night gathers work from the final period of his life. By this stage he was contending with declining health and with political defeat, after a career shaped by military dictatorship, internal exile, and the banning of his books in Greece. These late poems register those experiences without settling into complaint.
What distinguishes this collection is its combination of sadness and energy. Ritsos continued to observe the ordinary world around him with close attention, recording small details of daily life plainly and exactly. Defeat in health and politics runs through the poems, yet they also hold a surge of creative activity and an unexpected note of hope.
Ritsos favours short, concrete lines built from what is in front of him rather than abstraction. The poems are arranged in chronological order, so the sequence itself carries information: a reader can follow how quickly he wrote and how the tone shifts across the months. It is a record of a poet still setting things down.
