To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me

WINNER of 2024 Indiana Authors Awards: Poetry Book Award.

Twenty-five years in the making, with some poems dating as far back as forty years, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, is George Kalamaras’s chronicle of his Greek ancestry-literary, artistic, and familial. This book retells the lives of some of Kalamaras’s favorite Greek poets and artists, most often with his characteristic Surrealist outpouring and accretion of imagery, interlacing his inquiry with myth and the metaphor of the infamous Trojan Horse.

He embraces pillars of Greek Letters, such as Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, and George Seferis-three poets who helped form the backbone of Kalamaras’s poetics forty years ago. Yet he moves beyond these well-known Nobel Laureates and Lenin Prize recipients. He delves into a plethora of modern and contemporary Greek poets who he has studied during decades of poetic apprenticeship, most of whom are little-known in the United States. Many of these figures are at the forefront of the Greek avant-garde, questioning (implicitly or explicitly) Greece’s two military dictatorships in the last century.

This abundant collection of poems takes us on a 300-page journey not only of Kalamaras’s literary and artistic forebears but also of his familial roots from Zakynthos, Pharaklatha, and Solaki-places in Greece from which three of his four grandparents emigrated during the early part of the last century. Imbuing this collection is Kalamaras’s ongoing poetic project of ＂seeing one in the other.＂ He affirms the value of ＂an archeology of Being,＂ a project in which he continues to chronicle the world around him, attempting to unearth the value of poets who have come before him, affirming the living presence of the ＂dead.＂ Poet George Vafopoulos says in one of the book’s opening epigraphs, here now I stand before all the Greek poets. George Kalamaras similarly takes this ＂stand,＂ and in the process embraces his literary, cultural, and familial history, taking us on an odyssey to unexpected places both inward and outward.