The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems » (Original)

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was born in Athens, Greece, in 1939, and is the author of eighteen books of poetry. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She divides her time between Athens and the Greek island of Aegina.

A career-spanning collection by one of greece’s most loved and lyrical contemporary poets, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

I wasn’t weaving, I wasn’t knitting

I was writing something

erasing and being erased

under the weight of the word

—from “Penelope Says”

Drawn from the traditions of Greek myth, history, and literature, The Scattered Papers of Penelope is the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s first full retrospective collection available in English. Carried over from the Greek by an array of noted translators, including the editor, Karen Van Dyck, Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetry is bold, sensual, and brash. She reexamines Greek myth and history through the female body—the body of Penelope; the poet’s own body, scarred by illness; the bodies of stray animals. Other poems and sequences take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, prose poems about modern violence and the destruction of nature, existential musings on beings and things on their own, and lush descriptions of the domestic world on the poet’s adopted home island of Aegina.

The Scattered Papers of Penelope introduces to American readers a major global poetic voice, a winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize.