Constantine Kavafy

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Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

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The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biography

Michael Nott

11 August 2025

 

The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.

Lost and Found: Children’s Poet Kaneko Misuzu

Kaneko Misuzu: Rediscovering the Life and Work of Japan’s Poet for Children

Yazaki Setsuo 

March 10, 2021

Yazaki Setsuo remembers the fateful encounter he had with the writing of children’s poet Kaneko Misuzu and the long search that helped to bring her work back into the light after it had been forgotten for half a century.

A Fateful Encounter

The beginnings of serious Japanese writing for children date back to the early decades of the twentieth century. The fashion for writing dōyō, poetry and nursery rhymes that could be enjoyed by children and adults alike, is often dated to the publication of Akai tori (Red Bird), a children’s magazine, in July 1918. One young woman in particular shot across the scene at the height of the movement, producing numerous verses that earned her the praise of the poet Saijō Yaso as “the brightest star among all the young writers of poetry for children.” That woman was Kaneko Misuzu.

Navel Moon by Raúl Gómez Jattin

 

Navel Moon

By Raúl Gómez Jattin

Raúl Gómez Jattin / Ombligo de luna

I sketch your outline from the lighthouse down to the city walls

Your iron eyes are glow hallucinated

Sea skips over stones and my soul’s got it wrong

Sun sinks into water and water is pure fire

You’re almost like a dream   Almost a stone in time’s swaying

A tender archetype solid in these dim days

your way of soothing my tears

Letting loose your body against mine   Mad

like a foal in prairie fire

Spilling your words on my knowledge 

like a poison to heal absence

Recalling things used and forgotten

with a bright wondrous flight

It’s getting late my love   Sea brings storms

A pale moon recalls your naval

And a few clouds light and slow like your hands

drink thirstily   Like when I die up against your mouth

Raúl Gómez Jattin / A probable Constantine Cavafy at 19

 

A PROBABLE CONSTANTINE CAVAFY AT 19

by Raúl Gómez Jattin

Tonight he will attend three dangerous ceremonies
Love between men
Smoking marijuana
and writing poems

Tomorrow he will get up past noon
His lips will be parched
His eyes red
and another sheet of enemy paper

His lips will hurt from so many kisses
His eyes will smart like burning cigarette butts
And neither will that poem express his crying

 

The Collected Poems of Li He

trans. J. D. Frodsham

(NYRB, March 2017)

POETS OF THE LATE TANG DYNASTY

January 15, 2019
by Matt Turner

Most American readers of Chinese poetry come to it through classic translations by Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Burton Watson, and a few others. With some notable exceptions, those translations have tended to focus on the poetic triumvirate of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE): Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei. The literary context in which those three Tang poets are placed—in China as well as the U.S.—is part of a long, ascendant tradition in Chinese letters, beginning to certain degree with the early anthology that Confucius assembled: the Shijing, better known in English as the Book of Odes or the Book of Songs (Pound translated it as Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius). The poems of the Shijing, which often seem little more than folk ditties, span seven centuries during the fabled Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE)—the time, according to Confucius in his Analects, when politics and society were ordered as they should be. In China, the Zhou and Tang periods are acknowledged as two golden ages, exemplars of what is best in the Chinese tradition. A trajectory of one to the other is easily assumed.

Poetics by Juan Manuel Roca

Poetics

• by Juan Manuel Roca

After writing on paper the word coyote
You must watch out that the meat-craving word
Does not take over the page,
Does not manage to hide
Behind the word jacaranda
To wait for the word hare to pass by
And then tear it apart.
In order to prevent it,
To sound the alarm
When the coyote stealthily
Prepares its ambush,
Some old masters
Who know the spells of language
Recommend tracing the word match
Rubbing it against the word stone
And lighting up the word fire
To scare it away.
There is no coyote or jackal, no hyena or jaguar,
No puma or wolf thar won’t flee
When fire converses with air.

***

• Juan Manuel Roca

Juan Manuel Roca (Medellín, Colombia, 1946) is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. He served for ten years as coordinator and then director of the "Magazín Dominical" of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá. For twenty-five years (1986-2011) he was director of the Casa Silva poetry workshop. He has received numerous awards for his work, both in Colombia and internationally. His verse collections include Lunca de ciegos, Los ladrones nocturnos, País secreto, Ciudadano de la noche, La farmacia del ángel, Las hipótesis de nadie, Testamentos, Biblia de pobres, Temporada de estatuas, Pasaporte del apátrida, and No es prudente recibir caballos de madera de parte de un griego. In 2016, he published his complete poetry, with the title Silabario del camino. He currently directs the poetry specialization of the Master's program in Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

LALT

Álvaro Mutis on Himself

 

King Juan Carlos of Spain with Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis at the 2002 Cervantes Prize ceremony. Photoshop by Andrea Comas

Álvaro Mutis on Himself

• by Álvaro Mutis

• 
  
  August, 2021

I was born in Bogotá on August 25, 1923, the feast day of Saint Louis, king of France. I cannot deny the influence of my patron saint on my devotion to monarchies. I completed early studies in Brussels, then returned to Colombia for periods that were at first vacations, and, later—as they became more and more extended—I lived on a coffee and sugar plantation that my maternal grandfather had founded. It was called “Coello” and was located in the foothills of the Central Highlands. All that I have written is destined to celebrate and perpetuate that corner of the tierra calientefrom which emanates the very substance of my dreams, my nostalgias, my terrors, and my fortunes. There is not a single line of my work that is not connected, in a secret or explicit way, to the limitless world that for me is that corner of the region of Tolima in Colombia.

The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali

 

The Voice of Sheila Chandra
by Kazim Ali
(Alice James Books, Oct. 2020)

Reviewed by AM Ringwalt

KAZIM ALI’S THE VOICE OF SHEILA CHANDRA

April 20, 2021
by AM Ringwalt

The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the latest collection of poems from the U.S.-based author Kazim Ali, concludes in question: “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer.” In a book with form blown open by subtle and sustained interrogation, the relationship between audience and performer surpasses static binary. This final question functions as a verbal haunt: who is its intended recipient? In The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the reader must comb through the text’s intersecting questions and answers—spanning three expansive poems and four hymn-like interludes. Ali is consumed by his sonic influences, so much so that his documented acts of listening generate distinct performances on the page. These poems are mediums for his listening, his embodied mortality. He writes: “To hear is to make real.”

 

John Ashbery

John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald

The Bomb

July 1, 2014

Through his translations from the French, John Ashbery joins a body of great twentieth-century American poets who have sought to trace their lineage from elsewhere, as much to undermine prevailing literary conventions as to inform us about those other traditions. In the twin prose and poetry volumes of Ashbery’s Collected French Translations, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a compelling argument can be made—that the wild diversity and vitality of innovative American poetry operates today, in large part, because of what the translator-poet found in Raymond Roussel, Arthur Rimbaud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Jacob. By influencing Ashbery so decisively throughout a seven-decade career, these Frenchmen have shaped us all.

Mark Strand / Eating Poetry

by Sergei Sarakhanov

EATING POETRY

by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. 
There is no happiness like mine. 
I have been eating poetry. 

The librarian does not believe what she sees. 
Her eyes are sad 
and she walks with her hands in her dress. 

The poems are gone. 
The light is dim. 
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. 

Their eyeballs roll, 
their blond legs burn like brush. 
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
 
She does not understand. 
When I get on my knees and lick her hand, 
she screams. 

I am a new man. 
I snarl at her and bark. 
I romp with joy in the bookish dark. 

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF MARK STRAND
Mark Strand / With Only the Stars to Guide Us
Mark Strand at John Cabot University
Mark Strand / The Art of Poetry
Mark Strand / The Everyday Enchantment of Music
Mark Strand / The Coming of Light
Mark Strand / Eating Poetry
Mark Strand / From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand / My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Mark Strand / Always

Gift by Leonard Cohen

 

Gift

by Leonard Cohen

 

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.

As the mist leaves no scar by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar

by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

 
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

 
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.

Steer your way by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way 

by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall

Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall

Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday

Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way

Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you

That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View

And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap

And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask

To the one who was never never equal to the task

Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought