Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows
Part history of Poros island and its people - including a 19th century ancestor who served as abbot of the monastery, neighbors under the German occupation, and an Orthodox priest "who disclosed my confessions to my father" - part exploration of the inimitable Greek anima, Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows is clear-eyed, affective, occasionally wistful. Liana Sakelliou's poems, richly translated by Don Schofield, are "searching for the words / of the ancient storytellers" to expose the marrow of her island, its cypresses and lemons, its politics and icons, and its "sea / ...full of black algae / like drowned hair." This is powerful work.
-Michael Waters, author, Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025
Somewhere out of time, "silver wedges of islands rise from the sea." Liana Sakelliou has composed a hymn to one of those islands, helping us comprehend the meaning of Poros as it lives in her. These poems reveal that terroir exists not only in the land, but in human memory, in each act of attentive sensation. Here, in the face of history and geology, art often proves ephemeral, and yet it can endure. Don Schofield's gifts as a translator are on full display in Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows: he allows the overwhelming specificity of these poems to remain legible, while gently coaxing the myriad Greek voices here to sing their way through.
-Christopher Bakken, author, Driving the Beast
What good luck it is to finally have a substantial selection of Liana Sakelliou's poems available in the fine translations of Don Schofield. Sakelliou has a gift for portraiture, and in her extended lyric sequences she brings to life a range of characters, historical and familiar, whose days and nights in the land and seascapes of her beloved Greece will stay with readers for a long time to come.
-Christopher Merrill, author, Flares
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