Diaries of Exile

Called 'the greatest poet of our age' by Louis Aragon, Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is thoroughly entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland, Greece. Nowhere is this more apparent that in Diary of Exile, a series of diaries-in-poetry written by Ritsos between 1948 and 1950, during Greece's Civil War, while a political prisoner on the island of Limnos and later at the infamous camp on the desert island Makronisos. The poems offer glimpses into the quiet violence of prison life and the struggle to maintain humanity through language.