Poetry. POEMS (1945-1971), now in its eigth edition in Greece, contains the nine volumes Miltos Sachtouris wrote during the most productive period of his poetic career. The collection chronicles the writer's reaction to three decades of intense social and political upheavel in a nation experiencing the successive horrors of occupation, civil war, and military dictatorship. Sachtouris' world is one of primary colors, blindingly bright and slightly surreal; images--of broken glass, of howling dogs, of bloody gauze and people who fly--recur like totems throughout his work, binding the poems together into a tight unity. Sachtouris' verses build upon one another to an extraordinary degree, creating a kind of cumulative madness, a paralogical perspective that comes at the world--or flies from it--always at an angle, never straight on. "Sachtouris belongs to the postwar generaton of poets who had seen the whitewashed walls of Greece suddenly splattered red, and all his poetry has been colored by this terror"--Kimon Friar. "Sachtouris beckons us to touch his traumas and wounds and to ponder on his future. Nevertheless, he forbids us to think of ways to cure him or to ungracefully or extortionately explain his plights, since he believes that this matter does not fall under his competency"--Vangelis Hatzivasileiou.

Miltos Sachtouris (1919- 2005) was born in Athens. Sachtouris studied law, but abandoned legal practice early in order to devote himself to writing. Sachtouris received the Second National Poetry Award in 1962 for "Ta Stigmata," the First National Poetry Award in 1987, the Order of the Phoenix in 1995, and the Grand State Literature Prize in 2003 for his collected works.