Yannis Ritsos - An Evening with David Harsent

Contact: 020 7636 1577, events@gowerst.waterstones.com

Poet in the City is delighted to present the launch of a brand new translation of Yannis Ritsos by acclaimed poet David Harsent. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos’s short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: concerned with the everyday but, at the same time, freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given – the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas – have an irresistible potency.

Yannis Ritsos (1909 – 1990) is one of Greece’s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him ‘the greatest poet of our age’.

David Harsent has published nine collections of poetry, winning many awards. His most recent collection, Night (Faber, 2011), won the 2012 Griffin International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T.S. Eliot awards.

Tickets cost £9.50 (£7.50 concessions) and can be purchased in person from Waterstone's bookshop in Gower st or by phoning 020 7636 1577

Price: £9.50 / £7.50

Time: 6:30 for 7:00pm