The poems in this exciting little collection [Pétrinos hrónos] are not among the best of Yannis Ritsos's fifty volumes. They are, however, among the most interesting and, in terms of the poet's own sufferings, among the most apocalyptic. They give us a good look at the poet-as-exile on the island of Makronisos, a concentration camp filled with rocks, lizards, thornbushes, barbed wire and sadistic guards. Written in 1949 while Ritsos and hundreds of other leftists endured hunger, humiliation and torture, the poems delineate an inhuman world in which the victims make noble efforts to sustain their ideas and dignity and to be sustained by them…. The promise that one day "we'll construct cities of greatness" allows Ritsos and his comrades to see their horrible ordeal as a Golgotha necessary for the Resurrection.

Then there is that nostalgia for the tranquil life, interwoven in these poems like a...