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Come back and take hold of me,
beloved feeling come back and take hold of me,
when the memory of the body reawakens,
and old longing once more passes through the blood;
when the lips and skin remember,
and the hands feel like they’re touching once again.

Come back often and take hold of me at night,
when the lips and skin remember ��.

The translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, has done a sterling job of bringing the works of this mesmerizing poet to life. The introduction is excellent as are the notes which give you an insight into the life of this remarkable individual. Interesting is the fact that he was considered an ordinary individual. In fact his fellow poet, George Seferis, considered that “outside his poetry Cavafy does not exist��. It sounds harsh but perhaps correct.

Mendelsohn has provided the most invaluable introduction on the life of Cavafy and thanks to him he has given an insight into all of Cavafy's wonderful and uplifting poems.

E. M. Forster, who was in Alexandria during World War I and who was an early admirer and promoter of Cavafy's poetry, described Cavafy as a fixture in the city.

Just one of his reviewers states the follow��

His verses have been translated into nearly seventy-five languages. W.H. Auden, among others, claimed him as an influence on his own work. Few modern poets have made such a claim on the 20th century as Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933). His writings insistently confront the collisions of time, history and the fallibility of memory. Perhaps that is why our era has canonized him: As we face the perishing of our own worlds, we better appreciate his anguish and acceptance, his utter lack of self-deceiving sentimentality or conventional emotion as he observes the evanescence of life, pleasure, love.

The beauty of the internet is that one can come across comments such as that made by Henry Miller.

The innocent comment was that there were perhaps references to Cavafy in the Alexandria Quartet. What she couldn’t have known is that once I discovered Cavafy, it struck me that in the Quartet, the city of Alexandria is possibly the canvas on which Durrell paints Cavafy, a city which has haunted me and drawn me in all these years. She didn’t know that I was in panic of reopening the book and never be able to come back up for air again, lost in my increasingly isolated bouts with an excess of beauty. And paint Cavafy he does, most notably at the very end of Justine, where he offers his own translation (he calls it a “transplant��) of The City:”I have tried to transplant rather than translate �� with what success I cannot say.

Whatever your feelings about poetry, the reader will find here works that are so exquisite/sublime that they can never be forgotten and the eras portrayed are excellent.

There is lambent wit throughout Cavafy’s poetry. It resonates, well especially with me and I’m normally not a poetry lover.

A beautiful spellbinding work that I will constantly refer to. How wonderful to know that one can pick up a book at whatever page and find sheer beauty! My…The lap of the Gods is indeed looking down��

I love it!