Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

If poetry is a way of thinking — think about — Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke who “filters her passion through a delicate irony and a calm humanism”.  Born in 1939 in Athens, she is easily recycled as Aphrodite, as her poems glide over the campfires of unreason, fleshing out uncertainty, “the endless black longitude of pain”, cleansing human love through song.

“What is saved is only
the silence of a leaf,
the body grows dark
together with the day”

Anghelaki-Rooke was awarded the National Prize for Poetry in 1985. Her work includes: The Body Is the Victory and the Defeat of Dreams, Beings and Things of Their Own, From Purple Into Night, Translating Into Love Life’s End, In the Heaven of Nothing Was Less Than Nothing, and The Scattered Papers of Penelope.

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke lives in Athens.