["Belfry"] passes through three movements: the first ambiguous and ephemeral, the second moving toward the concrete (a transition movement), and the third highly concrete and palpably immediate. "Belfry" is a work which, like Romiosíni, celebrates those who have fallen in the struggle for freedom; it is both a paean to the oppressed and a call to arms…. [The] poet speaks for the first time in many years in specific terms of the bitterness of his people, of the specters of the CIA, the B-52s and the Hilton beside the hovering headless Winged Victory and the lesson of Ché.

One hopes that "Belfry" can be considered a landmark of Ritsos's recent poetry. In much of his latest work he has launched his reader into a metaphysical realm of apparently solid obstacles occupying a fantasy landscape. His poems have appeared as incomplete statements sometimes without a clear object...