{"product_id":"engonopoulos-nikos-acropolis-pb","title":"Engonopoulos, Nikos: Acropolis and Tram","description":"\u003cp\u003eGreen Integer, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Martin McKinsey\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 1, 2009\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985) was a painter, poet, and early convert to Surrealism. Together with Andreas Embirikos and Odysseus Elytis, he changed the course of Greek poetry in the late 1930s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBruised by the reception of his first two books, he spent the next 40 years in semi-seclusion, evolving a theater of gesture and sign in which he acted out the drama of 20th-century geopolitics. For Greece, this meant military dictatorship, foreign invasion and occupation, a brutalizing civil war, and the subsequent Cold War lockdown. On the stage of his poetry, these events appear in costumes from other times and places. His Greco-Balkan cast of characters include fantastical Albanians, Montenegran monarchs, Orthodox warrior-saints, Bulgarian woodsmen, and Smyrnian beauties.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a short lyric, he writes about “the Grand Initiates” who once...\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eby means of gestures\u003cbr\u003easked\u003cbr\u003ethat I meet them outside.\u003cbr\u003eHis poems, like the Initiates, beckon us outside to a meeting with the unfamiliar.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcropolis and Tram, his first collection in English, spans his career from the early experiments in Surrealist disassociation to the late elegies for a lost world. It also includes the long poem “Bolivar,” his covert ode to the Greek resistance, first published in 1945.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45630364385303,"sku":"9781933382371","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/61h7d4AY2fL._SL1412.jpg?v=1790281979","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/engonopoulos-nikos-acropolis-pb","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}