Dean Kalimnios, in an analogous way to his predecessor, Stylianos Charkianakis, is a Greek poet who identifies with his ancestral homeland and its Christian Orthodox traditions, even though he was born and raised in Australia. Both poets are refractory in a global literary context that privileges the secular and the transferable because they are tied to their heritage. Despite this spiritual connection to Greek culture, they can also be read as bridging multiculturalism with world literature because, despite speaking and writing in a minority language, they have a deep appreciation for and wide knowledge of many languages, histories and cultures. The fact that Kalimnios publishes his collections of poems only in the Greek language and without translation indicates cultural pride motivates his writing, or he chooses a radical positioning, employing what E. Grosz refers to as a ‘politics of difference implying the right to define oneself, others, and the world according to one's interests’. His poetry, then, represents an act of defiance against the universalization of English because his inclusion of other languages shows he resists what Bakhtin refers to as the literary phenomenon of ‘impermeable monoglossia’. He invites readers to imagine other worlds while ‘freeing consciousness from the tyranny of its own language’. Kalimnios appears to subscribe to traditional values; however, it is difficult to work out whether he is a religious surrealist or a proud neo-Hellenic scholar who appropriates various traditions for aesthetic purposes. Whatever his reasons – political, philosophical, religious or aesthetic – his most defining feature is his celebration in the Greek language. This is evident in the way he constructs neologisms and uses elevated diction, borrowing from ‘dialects and constructions that span the whole gamut of the Greek language, from Homer to Giannis Ritsos’. His diverse knowledge of words require translation as well as interpretation since the concepts he explores are obscure, and requires a broad knowledge of Greece's long history and its diverse linguistic traditions – the Achaic, philosophic, ecclesiastic, dialectic and demotic.