C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria s ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as Anna Comnena and You did not understand , while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in Ides of March , The God Abandoning Antony and Nero s Deadline . And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in One Night , I have gazed so much and The Caf Entrance , and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in An Old Man and Of the Shop .