Yannis Ritsos was a prolific poet, who spent many years in prison or under house arrest because of his communist beliefs and opposition to Greece’s right-wing regimes.Monochordsis a strange book amongst his work: 336 one-line poems written in a single month in 1979. I have a copy of the text already, but when several poems are presented on the page it’s difficult to allow them the mental space and room for understanding.

This beautiful new edition corrects that: each page consists of a single poem accompanied by a small linocut from artist Chiara Ambrosio. She already knew the poems, indeed they had been a companion to her ‘for over a decade’, but when the pandemic and lockdown shut down, she set herself the task (‘I felt compelled,’ she says) to make an image for each monochord, one a day, reading and responding to the text, seeking ‘out resonances…