Ritsos' poetry is filled with invisible guests, wilfully invisible to one another at times, if merely inscrutable to the poet. And this partial visibility becomes more tantalizing, to the limits of the grotesque, in poems written under the pressure of dictatorship and resistance in Greece. (Among the ironies that crowd: Communism, the Abominable Snowman of Mandelstam and Milosz, has been for Ritsos the deferred Messiah!) From a landscape which has been perennially a subject for poetry since Homer, Ritsos' copious verses have assembled a landscape of their own which, if it resembles the illogical scenography of surrealist paintings, should not be termed unconditionally surreal…. [The] disjunctures in Ritsos' poems, becoming sharper and less amenable to deft interpretation over the years, were derived first from the intrinsic isolation and perplexity which Ritsos saw (oppugnant, surely, to a belief in Communism!) as man's condition. Later they were intensified by the...