Anthony Hirst

In this fourth volume of poetry by Anthony Hirst, the 46 poems, written in the fourteen-month period from October 2023 to November 2024, are all dated and arranged in chronological order. They include political themes – responses to the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine and to the destruction of our environment – reflections on personal experiences in the UK, France and Greece, accounts of dreams, and reflections on old age and death; a few poems are humorous or nonsensical.

An extremely varied collection of poetry mostly written in the period May 2021 to October 2023. The second part of the title, "at the road side" is, according to the Introduction, “a metaphor for where an ageing man feels himself to be in relation to the deteriorating world situation”. Included are several poems responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and towards the end of the book to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. There are autobiographical sketches from the distant past, humorous and even silly poems, accounts of several dreams and their connection to reality, some anti-Christian poems, and as an appendix a nine-page piece of literary criticism in verse attacking Wordsworth's Ode on "The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Many poems use constrained verse forms such as tanka and haiku and the 23-syllable 4-line stanza that Hirst has been using since the 1990s.

The Greek Bible and the services of the Orthodox Church have proved a rich source of language for many poets of modern Greece, and perhaps for none more than for Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseas Elytis, whose overlapping careers span the period 1876-1996. A blurring of the boundaries between Orthodoxy and 'Greekness' (hellenikoteta, which all three poets celebrate) has often led critics to assume from the Christian borrowings in the poetry the Christian allegiance of the poets. Through detailed analyses of selected poems, focusing on their relation to Biblical and liturgical source texts, this book questions whether the work of these poets is compatible with Christianity at all. It asks whether a Christ who is assimilated, along with the Virgin Mary, into the ancient Greek pantheon, or presented as a symbol of Beauty, or as object of the erotic desire of the women of the Gospels is still within the realm of Orthodoxy. Above all it asks whether, when the poetic ego appropriates to itself words which in their original context belong to Christ or Jehovah, there is any room left for the divine, or whether the poet has not in fact elbowed God off the stage altogether.

Alexandria, Real and Imagined offers a complex portrait of an extraordinary city, from its foundation in the fourth century BC up to the present day: a city notable for its history of ethnic diversity, for the legacies of its past imperial grandeur - Ottoman and Arab, Byzantine, Roman and Greek - and, not least, for the memorable images of 'Alexandria' constructed both by outsiders and by inhabitants of the city. In this volume of new essays, Alexandria and its many images - the real and the imagined - are illuminated from a rich variety of perspectives. These range from art history to epidemiology, from social and cultural analysis to re-readings of Cavafy and Callimachus, from the impressions of foreign visitors to the evidence of police records, from the constructions of Alexandria in Durrell and Forster to those in the twentieth-century Arabic novel.