AS WE are walking along the road below Lykavittos in Athens, two women with baskets approach us. In the baskets they have toy chickens, made of rough cotton wool. ‘Thelis poulaki?’ they ask — ‘Do you want a little bird?’ Then they burst into giggles that sound like faulty plumbing — ‘poulaki’is a synonym for ‘penis’.
RETURNING to England after two years in Greece was a return to language and to rain. The soft English language is natural to a rainy country; the gifts of moistness, scents rising from the ground after a rain shower, the vegetating clouds of a rainy sky, are to be found abroad in the soft, moist vowels of English people.
Fair Prospects is British poet Glyn Hughes’s sagacious and affectionate journal of his first visit to Greece in 1973 during the turbulent period that witnessed the swan song of the dictatorship and its final collapse on July 23, 1974. By September, Hughes and his wife Roya visit Sifnos where they stay with their friend Ariadne Xenakis. This is the last of three excerpts from Fair Prospects which was published in July by Victor Gollancz, London.
