While the poetry of Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, and Seferis is readily available to English speakers, Greek women's poetry remains virtually unknown to non-specialists. The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding, which includes collections by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina, fills a serious gap in contemporary poetry in translation, in general, and in Greek poetry, in particular.

Drawing on the formative experience of writing under an authoritarian regime (1967-1974), women poets in the 1980s forged a poetics which unsettled and disrupted fixed meanings and gender roles. Each of the...

In this study of contemporary Greek poetry, the author investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Through responses to censorship - including those of the dictator, the Nobel Laureate poet George Seferis, and the younger generation of poets - she shows how women poets use strategies which, although initiated in response to the dictators press law, prove useful in articulating a feminist critique. In poetry by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny...