Poems (1945-1971), now in its eighth 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—recurring like totems throughout his work, bind the poems together into a tight unity. Sachtouris's 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.
