SOURCE: A review of What I Love, in Library Journal, Vol. 111, No. 12, July, 1986, p. 88.

In the following review, the critic praises Elytis's What I Love.

This selection, covering the years 1943 to 1978, will please readers already familiar with Greece's 1979 Nobel Laureate and serve as a good introduction to those reading him for the first time. Elytis has said that Paradise and Hell are made of the same materials and that "only the perception of the order of the materials" differs, an idea illuminated here. If we perceive the moon as "hemorrhaged" or believe that "the beautiful can't happen twice," we have perceived wrongly. To perceive rightly, we must look at "the shells," "the leaves," and "the stars" in the right way. Elytis thus takes us back beyond the Latin word ars to its Greek root harmos—that is, to the weaver's loom, where, in the warp of reality, we...