Through a traveler’s poems, echoes of history and myth transform into moments of insight.

Ghost Oracle follows Douglas Burnet Smith’s travels in Greece as the ancient world and modern life collide in wild, rueful, and funny ways: Athenian subways rattle below the Acropolis, fishermen on the Aegean Sea luridly expectorate, and everywhere tourists in fanny packs accrue like dust on a lens. This subtle and sensuous lyric poetry is alive with the sounds of haunting ruins and bustling streets, the glisten of the sun-drunk sea, and the spell of history.

The classics are considered with an ear for the vernacular, for what Plato and Aristotle’s ideas mean today, and what they would make of the financial crisis, protests, and the so-called death of poetry. Dramatic monologues by the statue of Xeno (who has lost his member to the frost) and Du Fu, the eighth-century Chinese poet (during a visit to the Acropolis), confront the wonders and horrors of our world. Smith makes music of the loneliness of the traveler and the glory of the journey, music that rings as true as the fragments of Sappho and epics of Homer.