Vague promises—who made them? and what for?
Others made by us (who to?). We’re used to it.
We saw the mountains going by like overladen camels,
we saw the fawn in the moon. Mothballed ships
dirty the sunless waters with their rust. And up
on the hillside, behind the dark, vertical cypresses,
a plume of smoke held still, trying to bestow
some nonexistent meaning on us and on the world.
Ah—to think that silent beauty no longer takes us in.
Karlovasi, 7-18-87
Assistant Professor of English, specializes modern and contemporary British, Irish and world literature, with a focus on poetry. Recent articles include “Ulysses Victorianus and the Other Knowledge of Empire” (Ariel); “Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in Yeats’s ‘No Second Troy’” (Twentieth Century Literature); “Counter-Homericism in Yeats’s ‘The Wandering of Oisin’” (Yeats and Postcolonialism, 2001); and “Looking for the Barbarians” (Poetry of the Mix: Cavafy, Modernity and Transculturalism, 2000). His translations from modern Greek include Late Into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos (Field, 1995) and the novel The Courtyard by Andreas Franghias, which won the 1996 Greek National Book Award for Translation.