Poetry
The Target
Ο στόχος
Manolis Anagnostakis · 1970
Synopsis
Short, addressed poems: to a child, to comrades, to a city. They speak of what had been promised and what has been done, and irony serves to avoid raising the voice. Nearly half of the pieces ask what poetry can still do, and one, dated Thessaloniki, 1969, walks along a street in the city centre.
Context
The collection appeared in 1970, under the colonels, in the Dix-huit textes, a collective volume published by Kédros, which was the first act of public and joint resistance by writers to the dictatorship; the author belonged to the team that conceived it. It took its place the following year in the volume that gathered his work, and the author published no further collection of verse. One hears in it the echo of Cavafy and Karyotakis. There is no French edition of the collection.
Who it is for
About thirty pages, never published in French. The reader should know that the Greek civil war pitted the resistance left against the state from 1946 to 1949.
Prizes and reception
Published in the first joint book by writers against the dictatorship, it earned its author the name of poet of defeat, which he rejected.