The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The -autobiographical- elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.

"Open Papers" is the primary statement on his art by Odysseas Elytis, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature, and a sweeping exploration of the mind and mythic imagination of one of the most original, visionary and compelling poets of this century.

Olga Broumas has chosen poems from the full range of Odysseas Elytis's Nobel Prize-winning poetry, including his early work when he was associated with the Surrealists, to the entirety of his long poem The Little Mariner, as well as a previously unavailable selection of his last poems, written shortly before his death in 1996. Elytis himself offers the best description of his work: If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds...