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🇬🇷 Greece /Culture & Society

“He leaned toward her ear and said, ‘My warmth’”

From Kathimerini · () Greek

Translated from Greek and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • A review examines Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou’s poetry collection “Songs of the South,” published by Antipodes.
  • The collection combines intimate, fragmented accounts of life with images of wild nature, loss, loneliness and companionship.
  • The reviewer compares the poems, tentatively, with the work of Raymond Carver and William Carlos Williams.

“I didn’t make money, I didn’t fall in love, I didn’t live long. A few years ago I became a father. Now I am raising my son, but I have nothing to offer him.” Those lines open Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou’s first poem, “I Did Not Come from the Forests,” in his finely designed collection “Songs of the South,” published by Antipodes.

I didn’t make money, I didn’t fall in love, I didn’t live long. A few years ago I became a father. Now I am raising my son, but I have nothing to offer him.

· Konstantinos ChatzinikolaouLines from the opening poem, “I Did Not Come from the Forests.”

The book begins with the title line and closes with another unsettling image: “When the animals come, I will surrender.” The ending feels like a Sibylline riddle, ominous but strangely liberating. The reviewer places it beside “By the Root,” a shorter poem filled with grief and solitude, in which the poet asks where a fox goes to die.

Chatzinikolaou’s poems are direct in an unexpectedly ordinary and peculiar way. They unfold like fragments of a life whose thread repeatedly tangles on its own. Their narrative quality recalls the pieces he contributed to the newspaper supplement for years, writing that carried a highly personal gaze and stimulating references to books, music, painting and fiction and documentary films.

When the animals come, I will surrender.

· Konstantinos ChatzinikolaouThe closing line of “Songs of the South.”

Nature runs wild through the collection: rain, dogs, solitary foxes, plains, blackbirds and wolves. Yet the poems are neither lyrical celebrations of nature nor conventional pastoral scenes. They bring together two voices, the poet’s and nature’s, as if the latter whispered unintelligible words through leaves, wind and an animal’s whimper. That sound also carries the memory of something lost, something that remains mysteriously present.

Where does the fox go to die?

· Konstantinos ChatzinikolaouA line from the poem “By the Root.”

Another poem, “Perhaps Sunday,” becomes an elegy for companionship and its dead ends, as well as for its moments of enchantment. During the rain, a man named Yannis opens an umbrella and embraces his wife. He bends toward her ear and says, “My warmth.” The reviewer finds in that brief exchange a beautiful tenderness, made sharper by the weather around it.

My warmth.

· Yannis, a character in “Perhaps Sunday”He says this to his wife while embracing her under an umbrella in the rain.
About this summary

Originally published by Kathimerini in Greek. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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