My Life on the Ragged Paths of Pan

My Life on the Ragged Paths of Pan
Selected Poems and Translations by Thanasis Maskaleris

by Thanasis Maskaleris
Price: $ 20
ISBN: 9780927379854

Visit the book’s web page at Amazon.com

Read the Review at HuffPost Books

My Life on the Ragged Paths of Pan: Selected Poems and Translations by Thanasis Maskaleris is a unique book. It contains 40 original poems written by the author, divided into the early and late periods of his long career as a poet. The book also contains 25 poems, translated by Maskaleris, from 11 of Greece’s greatest poets: Elytis, Embirikos, Engonopoulos, Gatsos, Karelli, Kavafis, Kazantzakis, Ritsos, Sikelianos, Varnalis, and Vrettakos. In the book’s Preface, the author writes:

“I always strove, as a poet, to capture/express a feeling alive in me; or an idea/social concern. Landscapes that filled me with their beauty, and human beings that touched my heart are often at the center of my poems. My poetry sought to capture and revivify essential moments of my life—moments of beauty and humanity …”

Like the journey home to Ithaka, this is a book to be enjoyed slowly, savoring its freshness, beauty, and wisdom.


Praise for My Life On The Ragged Paths of Pan

Thanasis Maskaleris brings us illuminating messages from many worlds — the ancient world and our modern one, the timeless Greek world and the ever-changing “West”, the spirit and the flesh, the airy world of books and ideas, and the solid world of earth and sea, rocks and trees, women and men.

Michael Pastore

If we could hear Pan’s pipes today, they would sound like this—insistent, a warning, a promise, and a call to action. Read the poems, abandon yourself to their vitality, and see if you don’t want to follow.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin

He is the poet who sings to his fellow travelers: “Our lives are an exploration for freedom— a Greek song chanted in the seas of the world.” Thanasis Maskaleris’s new Selected Poems brings together the fruits of a rich and long poetic life. Here are the songs of a wanderer, emigré, expatriot on a wounded earth whose journey, like that of Odysseus, brings him home.

Joanna Biggar

Poet Thanasis Maskaleris has never failed to incite pan-sensual lyricism in his remarkable paeans to the Earth. Like his mentors, the Arcadian God Pan, and the Cretan genius, Nikos Kazantzakis, Maskaleris’ subtle literary style, his elocution in a Dionysian glance, soars in the full reverie of a life deeply and incisively lived. His poetic conveyances are instinctive with resonance. Every reader will surely fall swoon to a life that heeds no rules, is governed only by the artistic joy that comes from fully embracing our ephemeral and enigmatic status in the sentient realm.

Michael Charles Tobias