Greek to Me

In his exciting new book of poems and retrospective reflection, West Coast poet and devout philhellene Joe Safdie engages compellingly with various Hellenic myths, and by doing so offers the reader a fresh and creative way of approaching Greek antiquity. Though most characters in the poems evidently are Hellenic, the style of the book is conversational and its idiom quintessentially American, recalling the poets of the New York School and the countercultural movement. I find this fascinating. Safdie naturally masters the uniquely poetic art of interweaving disparate realities. Greek to Me blends and blurs historical timelines, geographies and cultures into an innovative brew joining together fragments of the two outer edges of Western civilization: the US of today and Greece of old.

Joe Safdie’s ninth book was The Secular Divine, a hybrid chapbook of poems with an essay on heresy (Spuyten Duyvil, 01/01/2022). That essay gave its name to a collection of other essays on literary matters, Poetry and Heresy, forthcoming this year from MadHat Press (the essay ＂ Musing about the Muses＂ is also in that volume). His talks on the muses and William Blake can be found on the website of the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred in London, and his talk on Charles Olson and Brooks Adams for the American Literature Association can be found in Spoke IX and on YouTube. Other poems, essays, and reviews are in Jacket, Jacket2, spoke, Rain Taxi, Caesura, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. With his wife Sara and his cat Cody, he lives among the trees in Portland, Oregon.