George Seferis’s Complete Poems reissued as a Carcanet Classic. George Seferis is the great Greek poet of the twentieth century, a classic among classics. The formal and thematic versatility of his work, its decisively modern inflections, call Eliot’s poems to mind: fastidious and expansive in equal measure.

Like Eliot’s deep-rooted Modernism, Seferis’s never loses touch with the stones and inscriptions of the past. He writes for his and our time, poetically and politically alert: culture can free us or, misapplied, can trammel us. Aptly described as ‘the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages’, Seferis was for Peter Levi `one of the greatest writers in this century in any language.

. . From Seferis it was possible to learn.

. . what seriousness about poetry is.’ And Archibald MacLeish wrote, ‘if any contemporary poet can be said to be essential, Seferis is that poet, and this’ – referring to an earlier edition of this book – ‘is the true body of his work’.