George Kalamaras’ new poetry collection To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me emerges as a work of unusual profundity, a text in which ancestry and imagination entwine in ways that challenge conventional understandings of diasporic belonging. This is a book that does not seek to prove its Greekness. It simply breathes it. Kalamaras, former Indiana Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, inhabits a poetic cosmos where history, myth, memory and lived feeling pass freely through one another, forming a terrain where the present converses with the dead and the distant with the intimate. This cosmos anchors itself in resonance rather than geography, the realm of an inheritor who has never ceased listening for the echoes of those who came before him.

From its opening pages, where the poet walks through the lanes of Athens arm in arm with Odysseus Elytis, the reader is drawn into a liminal space between worlds. The scene is rendered with extraordinary awareness of physical detail and spiritual implication. Elytis’ bald head triangulates moon and sun, suggesting a hidden communion of celestial bodies mirrored in the search for the poet’s grandfather George Avgerinos, “though he has been dead forty-five years.” This encounter introduces the central condition of the book: the dead remain present, though elusive; the living approach them through mythic intermediaries; the journey of return unfolds through metamorphic transitions in place. The leap from Athens to Zakynthos is instantaneous and unsettling, reminiscent of the dream logic of Greek surrealism. A priest rises from a glass coffin with seaweed on his slippers, offering admonitions in Demotic as if drawn from an illuminated hagiographical manuscript suddenly stirred into motion. This priest, St Dan, an imaginative reframing of the figure known in Zakynthian tradition as Saint Dionysios (often referred to by his ordination name, “Daniel”), acts as guide and witness, revealing a Greece that exists as a metaphysical terrain where memory fuses with imagination.

Throughout the book, Kalamaras’ invocations of his ancestors approach ritual. His grandfather’s voice is continually summoned, even when the poet moves among the shades of Greek literary giants. The search for origins aligns with the cultivation of poetic vocation. The poet recalls kissing the back cover of Maria Nephele and repeating “Drops of light, drops of light,” as if reciting a private incantation. The gesture is tender and prophetic, for the entire book unfolds as its fulfilment. A tongue becomes an emblem of inheritance passed from grandfather to grandson in literal and symbolic forms, the body emerging as the first archive of meaning.

This bodily archive intensifies within the same poem, as the focus shifts to his great-grandmother Angeline Avgerinos labouring amid “lantern carving notches on the wall,” her body becoming the primal threshold through which the poet’s lineage enters the world. The midwife emerges first as fish and then as something older, suggesting the poet’s lineage rising from a primordial sea. It underscores the continuity Kalamaras cultivates, where family, myth and Greek literary heritage form a single, unbroken fabric.

The ancestral constellation widens further in “Leaving Greece Before I Was Born and Coming to the New World with My Grandparents Pericles Kalamaras and Stavroula Demopoulos,” where the poet’s paternal grandparents appear  as essential carriers of the migratory pulse that shapes his being. Their crossing, rendered through images of sea-ink, grape leaves and the intimate labour of touch, deepens the book’s meditation on presence and absence, allowing the diasporic self to emerge as something simultaneously inherited and continually forming.

Together these ancestral presences form a triangulated field of memory through which the poet’s identity is continually unmade and remade.

Kalamaras reveals himself in the book as a stylistic virtuoso, modelling a mode of diasporic surrealism that absorbs the imaginative architectures of Elytis, Engonopoulos and Sahtouris while transforming them into something unmistakably his own. Intertextuality becomes lived space rather than literary gesture, with poets and ancestors entering the work as presences who share its air. His imagery operates through continuous metamorphosis, allowing bodies, landscapes and memories to shift shape with ritual fluidity, as if the poems were organisms engaged in their own act of becoming. Through this fusion of corporeal detail, inheritance and visionary reach, Kalamaras cultivates a stylistic language capable of holding the entire breadth of Hellenic temporality in a single breath.

The presence of the great twentieth-century Greek poets is one of the work’s most striking features. They never appear as distant influences. They walk beside Kalamaras with the familiarity of kin. In “Lemon Seeds of Yannis Ritsos”, the poet reconstructs Ritsos with details that move from playful to tragic to revelatory. Lemon wedges, sparrows shifting into moths and the rhythmic slicing of fruit evoke Ritsos’ imagistic transformations, while references to Makronisos, bodily wounds inflicted by the junta and the burial of poems to protect them from guards restore the historical gravity beneath his images. Kalamaras honours Ritsos by entering the texture of his vision rather than merely referencing it, creating an homage that feels intimate and alive.

A similar closeness permeates “This Is Not George Seferis”, where Seferis, in the manner of Magritte, awakens inside his pipe on a hot Athens day in 1948. The poem offers one of the most perceptive portrayals of Seferis’ inner conflicts regarding identity. His perception of himself as “a rod in the retina of his left eye” captures bodily estrangement and the longing for coherence. His struggle with the vowel he both utters and cannot articulate becomes an emblem of diasporic difficulty. The title’s echo of Ceci n’est pas une pipe deepens this play of presence and withdrawal, suggesting a self always mediated through poetic framing. Kalamaras treats Seferis with deep literary sensitivity, revealing him as a vulnerable man negotiating the contradictions of history, exile and language.

Kalamaras extends this intertextual conversation with Miltos Sahtouris. In “Miltos Sahtouris, Face to the Wall”, trembling, disruption, falling consonants and windows shattering into moths evoke the turbulence of Sahtouris’ interior world. Kalamaras avoids imitation and instead enters the pulse of that turmoil, composing a poem that feels native to Sahtouris’ sensibility.

In “Zoë Karelli Freeing the Bones of the Dead”, the act of raising a mother’s skull becomes a meditation on memory’s fragility. The image is stark yet tender, reflecting Karelli’s engagement with mortality and purification.

Kalamaras’ engagement with Katerina Angelaki-Rooke further expands this lineage, his rendering of her contemplations on embodiment and metaphysical inheritance reaffirming the indispensable role female voices play in the architecture of Greek modernism.

Through such encounters he constructs a lineage in which Elytis, Ritsos, Seferis, Sahtouris, Karelli, Angelaki-Rooke, Ganas and Kavvadias appear as interlocutors rather than monuments.

Kavvadias intensifies this lineage. In “Nikos Kavvadias, Seafaring Poet, So Many Times He Becomes the Sound of the Sea”, the ocean becomes not setting but substance. Kalamaras depicts Kavvadias as one dissolved into the waves he served. The transformation of human form into the sound of tides mirrors the transformation the poet himself undergoes, becoming the reverberation of ancestral voices and the resonance of islands never seen yet deeply known.

This movement between inheritance and loss shapes the emotional architecture of the book. In the poem concerning the 1916 photograph of his great-grandmother and her children preparing to depart for the New World, the image becomes a threshold into grief older than the poet. “All the light of the Ionian Sea tempering the photo, entering my cells” conveys a connection that is physiological rather than nostalgic. Yet he stands outside the frame, unable to speak with those who turn toward the camera. They appear “waiting for me,” but he cannot cross the threshold of time to join them. The search for family remains perpetually incomplete.

This incompleteness defines the diasporic condition. A person who inherits Greece through ancestral longing must listen for what remains unsaid. Kalamaras’ world is filled with such listening. Discovery and loss coexist in constant tension. Each revelation of ancestral presence carries the awareness of absence. Encounters with poets of the past illuminate a path toward self-knowledge while concealing another. This rhythm becomes the book’s pulse.

The title To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly deepens this sense of ancestral envelopment. It evokes the Trojan Horse, yet emphasises interiority and gestation. In ancient Greek ritual imagination, sleep within a sacred precinct or temple signified dissolution and renewal, a symbolic death from which one awoke altered. Kalamaras adapts this logic. To sleep in the horse is to undergo transformation while being carried between worlds. The horse becomes a vessel of psychic migration bearing inherited identities within its dark interior.

Kalamaras’ use of imagery is one of the book’s great achievements. Surreal yet unforced, dense yet lucid, it forms a symbolic vocabulary recognisably Mediterranean and profoundly personal: seawater, ash, vowels, lanterns, bones, flint, seed, tongue, glass coffins. Through these motifs, Hellenism arises as sensibility rather than declaration. His Greece emerges through texture and memory. The poet stands among his chosen predecessors through affinity rather than geography, enacting the processes described by theorists of diaspora: the weaving of fragments into identity through the tender and difficult search for those whose voices still echo within the living.

Ultimately To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly becomes a reckoning with unseen forces shaping a life. The poems are acts of invocation through which lineage becomes a living organism moving through the poet with urgency. Kalamaras understands that the Aegean migrates into those who recognise its light without having stood upon its shores. His vision of Hellenism resists containment, dwelling in the interior chambers where ancestors gather like constellations. The work avoids the sentimental tropes diasporic Greeks sometimes adopt to satisfy Anglophone expectations and thus becomes anti-colonial, asserting imaginative sovereignty against external caricature. Each poem punctures the present with older brightness, seeking truths that flicker between languages. When the book closes, its voices continue with the persistence of tide and memory. Identity reveals itself as a murmuring, a summons, a pulse that endures beyond borders, carrying within it the radiance of origins still unfolding.