THE SELECTED POEMS OF CAVAFY

C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandrias ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as Anna Comnena and You did not understand, while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in Ides of March, The God Abandoning Antony and Neros Deadline. And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in One Night, I have gazed so much and The Cafe Entrance, and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in An Old Man and Of the Shop.