Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
The political dimension is unmistakable in “It Blows Over the Crossroads of the World.” Official ceremony, patriotic language, wealth, and military display confront the hunger and exhaustion of ordinary people. Wind moves through the poem, crossing the divisions that society tries to maintain. Particularly memorable is the old woman who covers the Unknown Soldier with a shawl. The gesture quietly restores a human body to a public monument: somebody might be cold; somebody might need care. Livaditis repeatedly tests the grand language of nations against such immediate needs. An abstraction answers to a mother, a hungry child, a wounded person.
The poem grows into a grotesque and forceful confrontation when the dead rise and march toward the powerful. Those already killed cannot conveniently be killed again. Its concluding insistence on peace is direct, collective, and openly partisan in its sympathy for working people. Some readers will find this public voice more emphatic than the later miniatures, but its presence broadens the book. It establishes the scale of the hopes against which disappointment must be understood. Livaditis’s loneliness is not always the loneliness of a solitary temperament. It can also be the loneliness of someone who once imagined a shared future and has survived its collapse.
Yet these poems resist any comfortable division between innocent sufferers and wholly corrupt others. In “Poem,” a hungry former prisoner steals food and eats it in shame. The voice examining revolutionary commitment must also confront bodily need, weakness, and compromised conduct. The speaker does not stand safely above the human failures he describes. Elsewhere, jealousy, vanity, cruelty, and cowardice enter the confessional voice. These admissions give the compassion its difficulty and its strength. Livaditis does not require people to become admirable before he takes their suffering seriously. He also refuses to pretend that suffering automatically makes them good.
“Biography” demonstrates how much he can accomplish with ordinary experience. A person intends to change his life. There is still time; he is still young; circumstances provide reasons to postpone the decisive step. Emotion briefly breaks through, then sleep intervenes, memory fades, and the years pass. The poem’s power lies in its quiet compression. No elaborate symbolic explanation is necessary. Most readers will recognize the frightening distance between imagining a different life and beginning one. Livaditis can make that distance visible within a few lines, leaving us with the uncomfortable sense that a whole existence has slipped through a familiar evening.
