[The Fourth Dimension] is the most complete gathering of Ritsos's work yet published in English….

Although Ritsos shares with a poet like Francis Ponge a concern with the universal in the minuscule and with Kazantzakis and Rilke a sure sense of the cosmos, his poems have about them the coherence of dreams. As in dreams, his images swim and evolve into their own order, and his capacity to word the "daily nightmare" is as present in his early work as in his most recent. (p. 347)

As a dramatic poet, Ritsos's lyrical talents are subsumed into what Eliot interestingly called the third voice of poetry—the one that speaks not from I to you but for them. This is the voice of the four monologues in The Fourth Dimension. Perhaps the most moving of these monologues is "Ismene." Ritsos expands on the Sophoclean story by portraying Ismene as a...