Month: August 2026

Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Gay poetry, poetry, post-colonial writing, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound’ – a chapbook which gives us the first sighting of Harsent’s versions of C.P. Cavafy – published in 2025 by Dare-Gale Press, was originally published in Acumen magazine. It was commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary, for which many thanks. It has been fascinating to explore these versions and to begin the process of comparing them with other translations that are widely available.

Seamus Heaney once observed that the poems of Constantine Cavafy ‘survive translation better than most’. He thought this was because of the sheer interest of his subject matter(s) and the largely relaxed colloquialism of his voice (see Heaney’s Foreword to C.P. Cavafy: The Canon (tr. Stratis Haviaras; Hermes Publishing, 2004). In fact, over the years since his death in 1933, I’m not sure either of these aspects have necessarily proved quite so ‘easy’ to bring into effective English because of our changing sexual mores over the decades and the inevitable shifts in what a reader may register as colloquial language. In The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy, David Harsent presents a small selection of his solutions to such issues.

Alexandria in Cavafy’s time

Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863. His family spent some of the 1870s in England, but the poet had returned by 1885 and rarely left the city after that. He’s perhaps best known for the poem ‘Ithaca’ (not included in Harsent’s selection here) in which the journey to the mythical island is presented as one of exploration, enrichment and experience. Such an attitude to ‘venturing’ is one of the things Heaney must have been thinking of with his comment about the relatability of Cavafy’s subject matter, our common wish for excitement, for the thrill of the voyage. The sort of content Heaney has in mind also includes ‘homoerotic amours in exotic settings, the dooms of tyrants, the . . . destinies of sophists and drifters and soothsayers’ and all conveyed in a calm, clear-sighted language, seldom figurative, never ‘over-elevated’.

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

You can tell Harsent is a fine poet in these versions. For example, ‘At the Tobacconist’s Window’ is vivid and thrillingly erotic in comparison to the Keeley/Sherrard version, though it may be that Harsent is unwontedly dialling up Cavafy’s deliberately plain statements. Here, there is an immediate entry into the scene (‘A small crowd at the brightly-lit window’) and the reference to the two men is accentuated by repetition (‘these two, these among many’). The men’s eyes meet ‘by chance’ in most other translations, but Harsent writes their ‘eyes, as if meant to, snag softly’. In fact, this works really well, raising the excitement and tension of the possible encounter and the gentle feminine rhyme in ‘softly’ is repeated 6 times in a 10-line poem, building an undulating sense of erotic possibility. The word ‘snag’ falls more harshly and this rough/tender sense is echoed in the closing line when the two men ‘fall on each other, but gently’. By the end of the poem, Harsent’s two men have driven off together and parked up somewhere more private. In Cavafy’s original, of course, they take a closed, or covered, carriage.

Another example of the changes Harsent makes can be seen in the beautiful poem, ‘The Mirror in the Hallway’, in which a delivery boy brings a package to a big house, stands in the hallway and looks into a mirror. Cavafy’s original starts slowly – supplying context, I suppose – with the size of the house, the mirror and its age (eighty years old). Only then does the delivery boy appear. Harsent begins with the ‘beautiful’ boy who, in the original is described as an ‘amateur athlete’ (surely to increase his physical allure). Harsent goes for, ‘on Sundays / he played park football’, which is wonderfully modern, but perhaps doesn’t make him quite so attractive! Left alone, the boy looks at himself in the mirror. Not in the original, Harsent repeats the phrase ‘looked at himself’ in adjacent lines, again dialling up the intensity, but is this what Cavafy would have wanted? This poem ends in the original text with a (perhaps clunky) personification of the mirror which, despite its eighty years of existence, is now ‘bursting with pleasure’ (tr. Haviaras) at having had such a ‘beauty’ before it. Harsent streamlines the moment, though he punctuates into three sentences, interrupting the original’s single flow of one. He does retain the personification, but has the mirror bask, after the event, in its own erotic pleasure:

The mirror looked back. In eighty years

it had seen a thousand faces and shrugged them off.

It held that matchless beauty

long minutes after the boy had gone.

It is fascinating to look closely at Harsent’s decisions in his versioning of these poems. If the criterion of judgement is that a poem should come vividly off the page, then he is succeeding here, though as I have indicated, these are not faithful to the originals in the way that some might require of a translation. But such fidelity might well have been subject to a dose of Cavafy-esque scorn. John Kittmer’s comment on this beautifully produced chapbook, enthusiastically praises the modern poet’s engagement with the Greek originals as ‘examples of exchange, cross-over, transposition, modulation, sensitive homage and daring challenge’. I’d second that emotion and look forward to seeing more of these Cavafy-Harsent poems.

September Reading Dates

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, writing , , , , , , ,

For those who’d like to hear me read my own work in the next few weeks – and those who find themselves close to the venues listed here – I am one of several readers in central London on the Tuesday 1st September (we’ll each be doing about 15 minutes each) and a more extended reading and discussion (with floor reader spots) at The Riverhouse Barn in Walton-on-Thames, hosted by Katie Griffiths on Thursday 17th September.

So first up is as follows…. on Tuesday 1st September @The Sampler event @The King & Queen pub, 1 Foley Street W1W 6DL – entry £5 on the door – with Maggie Harris, Barnaby Harsent, Christopher Horton and Mat Riches.

Secondly, I will reading on Thursday 17th September at 7.30pm at The Riverhouse Barn in Walton-on-Thames, where I will be sharing the bill with the brilliant Charlotte Ansell whose collection Amittere was recently longlisted for the Forward Prize. The evening is organised and hosted by Katie Griffiths. More details on this event can be found here.

Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)

martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

This review of Charles Tomlinson’s The Change of Light, published by Dare-Gale Press in 2025, first appeared in Acumen magazine, commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary. Many thanks for the invitation to write about these fine, posthumously published poems.

Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.

Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.

It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.

The quality of observation in ‘Trout II’ is likewise as freshly peeled as to feel Edenic. The fish’s ‘wirey curvature’ is held as the water’s currents ‘caress, shape, swerve’ past it. The narrator contrasts the ‘Choice’ the creature has to ride the flow with the lack of choice possessed by a rock in the same stream. The trout has an agency, deciding to hang in the water, and is ‘Willing to be no more than weed / That fluctuates beside him like his shadow’, and in so choosing, the fish transforms its environment into ‘aim, discernment, dance’. Tomlinson imagines the creature acting with ‘pleasure’, a pleasure surely also felt by poet and reader, a pleasure derived in part from the trout’s willing abandonment of its body to the water’s flow.

Tomlinson valued chance in both life and creativity (a 1969 poem is called ‘The Chances of Rhyme’) and to take advantage of chance we need to yield up control. He wrote of embracing possibility, achieved only when the ‘self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’. This self-forgetfulness, the laying aside of individual personality, is key to Tomlinson’s work (and in passing, it is what makes him a great translator). ‘Raindrops Reconsidered’ contains a pun on the seeing ‘eye (an I)’ which observes best when the ego does not bring with it ‘fable’ or the preconceptions of our daily lives and language. ‘Views’ insists that the genuinely ‘realist’ perception questions the ‘bland misprisions of the day’ so that the everyday world suddenly ‘bursts into wing, flame, flights’, into a perception that is ‘festive’.

This ‘festive’ quality refreshes our acquaintance with the world, but it also opens up vistas in which the diminishment of the self becomes not decrease but an access to something greater. In ‘The Infinite’, sitting on a hillside, beside a hedge, the narrator finds an unnerving tranquillity. The wind in the trees contrasts this, opening up a sense of ‘eternity’ and the individual self vanishes into a wider sphere: ‘In this immensity / my own thoughts drown / and it is sweet to shipwreck in this sea’. For such a poet, the loss of any access to his senses would have been devastating. In 1997, a routine cataract operation went awry and deprived Tomlinson of the sight in his left eye. The loss of binocular vision means judging distances is difficult and Tomlinson here laments the ‘flat projection’ he now has instead of full sight (‘The Accident’).

The poems in The Change of Light would appear to be late work; in ‘Courteous Death’ Tomlinson senses his own mortality. Channelling a little bit of Emily Dickinson, the personification of a surprisingly polite Death advances to greet the poet. In a sudden change of mind, Death offers complete blindness rather than demise. Tomlinson’s ‘one good eye’ refuses (at least for a while). Yet like the rock in ‘Trout II’, there comes a point at which ‘preference has no power’, no choice, though up till now, the poet says, he has expected it to ‘tip the balance / Always in my favour’. But Death allows the poet a little more time, time spent perhaps, in part, on these really fine, pleasing and profound last poems.