Unknown to most English readers, something remarkable has been happening in Greece over the last decade. While the national debt has skyrocketed to nearly twice the country’s GDP, while the population has suffered under the burden of recession and austerity, and while the fates of islands like Lesvos have become intertwined with those of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants trying desperately to reach the European mainland, Greek poetry has enjoyed a renaissance unlike anything the country has seen for nearly forty years. From the pages of magazines, to cafés, to blogs, to the very buildings’ walls, few venues and surfaces have been safe.Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, edited by Karen Van Dyck, is the first book to gather the best of that creative outpouring in all its diversity and originality.
The poems it collects are not only about political and economic crisis, street fights and migration, but also about bodies, nature, love, myth, and the particular textures of domestic life lived in times of extremity. They are written by men and women, cis poets and queer poets, Greeks and non-Greeks, in Athens, in small towns, and on the borders of nation and language alike, where influences enter in from Turkish, Bulgarian, Serbian and even Persian. Read more at www.penguin.co.uk
