In all his vast output of verse, Yánnis Rítsos has seldom published any love poetry…. For so verbally sensuous a poet this was odd. Now, unpredictable as ever, Rítsos, nearly half a century later, has brought out a triad of long poems [Erotica]—"Small Suite in Red Major," "Naked Body," and "Carnal Word"—that constitute an exultant hallelujah to physical love. He moves from the objectivism of "he" and "she" in the first poem through the involved, yet still surreal and dislocated "you" of the second, to a full, splendid, sensuous diapason in the third. "The poems I lived on your body in silence / will ask me one day for their voices, when you have gone." They will not be disappointed…. Rítsos has, in addition to his many other achievements, now written some of the finest, most deeply felt, most vividly expressed love poetry...