Cavafy features, briefly, in Evan Jones’ freewheeling, exuberant first collection, Nothing fell today but rain (2003). Or not exactly Cavafy but ‘Cavafy’s death mask on a purple pillow’ (‘Inventory’). Jones is a Greek-Canadian poet, but Cavafy has no special significance in his first book, appearing alongside AF Moritz, Elizabeth Bishop, Rene Crevel, Andre Breton and many others, i.e. as a figure in a crowd of mostly European Modernist or Canadian writers.
That situation has changed in his new book Paralogues. Jones has been domiciled in Manchester for nearly a decade now and it is easy to sense in his new book that Cavafy – poet of outposts and archaeologist of the fragmentary and the strictly unnecessary – has begun to mean more and more to him. One poem in his new book ventriloquises Cavafy, not by way of translation as is the case with so many other English-language responses to Cavafy in the past few decades, but in a biography called ‘Cavafy in Liverpool’. The occasion of the poem is the time Cavafy spent, in the 1870s, as a child living in that city, one of the bases of his family’s failing shipping business. In Jones’s poem the protagonist is oblivious to the mercantile docks and is instead disengaged, distant, ‘not summoned, not answered’ by the unremarkable modern city in which he finds himself. The poem’s final stanza, though, finds its way into a more visionary and interior mode of apprehension
As the river swells and recedes,
like closed eyelids during sleep,
one less wave, he thinks, one less
and then the Persians can get through.
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| Available now at www.carcanet.co.uk |
‘Cavafy in Liverpool’ may well be a signature poem for Jones but many others share its Cavafian mode. ‘The Devoted Widow’ quotes Procopius and memorialises the emperor Domitian, or – even more like Cavafy – notes how his widow memorialises him, while ‘Justinian’s Advisers Recall Him Prophesying’ also seems specifically Cavafy-like in its subject matter (the emperor who presided over his empire’s demise) and its mode which is sidelong and distanced even as it imagines the empire’s apocalyptic ending.
It is that ability to balance different visions in a single, seamless-seeming poem which characterises Paralogues. In ‘God in Paris, 1945’, God finds himself as much outside history as any other dead Roman emperor, riffing on his own anachronism with – it must be said – great vitality:
‘Either the universe is infinite
or I am,’ He remarked to passersby,
‘Either the universe is finite or
I am. Or I’m not. Or I’d better be.’
Another poem, ‘Prayer to St Agatha’, is less a prayer than a report on modernity to its subject, explaining the world as it does so: ‘our cries of ‘Come back to me’, to God and whoever, / go unanswered. No one falls asleep. Ships / sail over the desert and squirrels eat / from our hands. Taxis are yellow and films / end badly’. It is a brilliant premise, executed with great style, as is ‘Little Notes on Painting’, a kind of litany which is hard to stop quoting and which begins:
Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris. Take a Greek
painter and put him in Madrid. Take a Quebecois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian. You wouldn’t
believe what I’m doing now. I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow. There are fewer and fewer days
like this left […]
This poem’s playfulness and wilful crossing of national borders obviously chime with Jones’s own experience although its happy imagination of an international aesthetic sits more easily with poetry’s current online connectivity than the hard facts of visas and work permits with which the book is also familiar.
Its long closing sequence ‘Constantine and Arete’ responds, in 24 parts, to the oldest extant Greek folk song, ‘The Dead Brother’s Song’, shadowing the original ballad with a kind of autobiography of Jones’ travels in Europe since he left Canada in 2004. The sequence is tricky and moving in equal parts as it describes ‘Their life together: / one of them the paintings hanging in the / living room, the other the storm windows.’ The sequence is suggestive about its own dilemmas, dredging up odd coinages and analogies (and false trails, sending this reader to the dictionary to discover ‘the Georgian purdonium, / the fire screen’ has nothing to do with the Greek for fire, ‘pur’, but was the invention of a Londoner called Purdon). The poem, like another recent Carcanet-published long poem by Katharine Kilalea, shifts between different registers, different ways of knowing the world. Constantine, as imagined by Jones, is like a hybrid creation of WB Yeats and Roberto Bolano: when he is not putting off ‘writing / his novel of the immigrant experience / by talking a good game over Satie, / Lee Hazlewood and Gal Costa records’, he considers his birthmark, first ‘as stab wound, laser tatoo removal’ and then ‘a mark / received when he was raped by a waterfall – itself disguised as a god – before / an indifferent river could drag me on.’
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| John Ash, Norm Sibum and Katharine Kilalea are published by Carcanet. |
John McAuliffe is an Irish poet, who lives in Manchester. His third book, Of All Places (Gallery) was a PBS Recommendation for Autumn 2011 and an Irish Times Book of the Year.