SOURCE: "Encounters on a Voyage," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4595, April 26, 1991, p. 24.

In the following review, Peckham discusses the themes of voyaging and seafaring found in Elytis's Idiotiki Odos.

"The first thing God made", George Seferis once observed, "was the long journey." Images of voyaging and seafaring abound in modern Greek poetry, from Solomos to Cavafy and Seferis, and they also pervade many of Odysseus Elytis's own collections. Elytis has published a critical appreciation of the writer Alexandros Papadiamantis (1976), whose masterful short stories evoke the sea and coastline of his native Skiathos, and from Elytis's early volume Prosanatolismi (1940), through to his celebrated poem To Axion Esti (1959), and his more recent Anichta Chartia (1974) and O Mikros Naftilos (1985), a preoccupation with travelling and the sea is conspicuous.

The motif of sea and navigation is manifest in Elytis's new book, Idiotiki Odos, which consists of two prose meditations on poetry...