Books by Anthony Hirst

Collected poems written between 1963 and 2020, most of them published here for the first time.

The Greek Bible and the services of the Orthodox Church have proved a rich source of language for many poets of modern Greece, and perhaps for none more than for Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseas Elytis, whose overlapping careers span the period 1876-1996. A blurring of the boundaries between Orthodoxy and ¿Greekness¿ (hellênikotêta, which all three poets celebrate) has often led critics to assume from the Christian borrowings in the poetry the Christian allegiance of the poets. Through detailed analyses of selected poems, focusing on their relation to Biblical and liturgical source texts, this book questions whether the work of these poets is compatible with Christianity at all. It asks whether a Christ who is assimilated, along with the Virgin Mary, into the ancient Greek pantheon, or presented as a symbol of Beauty, or as object of the erotic desire of the women of the Gospels is still within the realm of Orthodoxy. Above all it asks whether, when the poetic ego appropriates to itself words which in their original context belong to Christ or Jehovah, there is any room left for the divine, or whether the poet has not in fact elbowed God off the stage altogether.

Offers a portrait of an extraordinary city as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants and by outsiders, from the time of its foundation in the 4th century BC up to the 20th century. As the capital of a Hellenistic kingdom, then as a major city in the Roman, Byzantine and Arab empires, Alexandria was renowned as an intellectual city.