In Greek School, George Kalogeris offers a lyric record of his Greek American family and the aftermath of their flight from war-torn Europe, using the classical world as a touchstone for gaining perspective on cultural and historical pressures. Completing an informal trilogy with Kalogeris's two previous books, Guide to Greece and Winthropos, this new volume observes the marvels of childhood wonder and the mysteries of eros, as well as the painful losses that burnish the threshold of late middle age.

The title, Greek School, comes from the elementary teaching in Greek that Kalogeris and his cousins received in a three-room church school in the working-class town of Lynn, Massachusetts. Although in conversation with his earlier books, the poems in Greek School are expressive of their own distinct rhythmic explorations and emotional exigencies. The historical range encompasses the Nazi invasion of the Peloponnese, the Greek Civil War, and America in the 1960s, as Kalogeris depicts the cultural tensions and anxieties of immigrants fleeing war-torn countries. Alongside historical pieces appear poems on writers and thinkers whose work speaks to the needs of the present, including Czesław Miłosz, Simone Weil, Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Primo Levi.

Lesson by lesson, poem by poem, Kalogeris creates a lyric record of the instruction passed down from his immigrant elders, as well as his poet-guides, and from the inevitable, inexorable examples of sickness and loss encountered as one enters late middle age. Through the unexpected ring of living speech, in Greek or English, Kalogeris enacts the vibrant moments when his real life and his reading life, like the tines of a tuning fork, render him lucky enough to strike the note of wonder that sounds the poem.