Category Poetry

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Biography books, Books, Culture, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

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

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

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.

What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.

thanhtoong0
August 11, 2025

Books, Culture, Deafness and hearing loss, Health, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

‘I’m carrying survivor’s guilt’: Raymond Antrobus on growing up deaf

The poet reflects on his heritage, his new life as a father in Margate – and why his memoir is a call to arms

When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”

Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.

thanhtoong0
August 9, 2025

Books, Culture, John Masefield, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Poem of the week: Sea-Fever by John Masefield

A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing

Sea-Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

thanhtoong0
August 4, 2025

Barbara Kingsolver, Books, Crime fiction, Culture, Fiction, Irvine Welsh, Ocean Vuong, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in July

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

The user-friendly short chapter format of Nicci Cloke’s Her Many Faces, designed for our internet-lowered attention spans, obscures the fact that this page-turning, multiple viewpoint thriller is actually a densely plotted novel full of amazing twists. This is the book you want to take on a long, boring journey you’re dreading. You’ll pray you finish it before you arrive at your destination.

Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver’s titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible.

thanhtoong0
July 31, 2025

Books, Culture, Michael Longley, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Poem of the week: A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

An atheist’s complaint at the scant room made by the church for his personal commemoration of the dead

A Hundred Doors

God! I’m lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Books, Culture, Health, Mental health, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

‘How can I find meaning from the ruins of my life?’: the little magazine with a life-changing impact

After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life

One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.

It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.

thanhtoong0
July 27, 2025

Books, Culture, John Burnside, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age

This posthumously published final collection confronts mortality, alongside the world’s almost unbearable beauty

John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn’t appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year.

His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world’s edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn’t that it exists; it’s no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it’s the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words.