Books by C. P. Cavafy

This book contains 162 poems: the 154 canonical Collected Poems, presented by year and within each year's order of composition and/or first printing, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems interspersed chronologically among them. Only one of his rejected, early poems has been included, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street,' used here as a kind of overture.

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 Alexandria s 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 Nero s 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 Caf Entrance , and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in An Old Man and Of the Shop .

Partly an addendum to George Economou's versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself, in the form of versions of the master's uncompleted poems.

A new translation of a poet widely considered one of the most important of the twentieth century.