What are we to make of these fragments,
These hisses and whispers? Who were
These people who were buried in uncounted chambers
Hacked into the sheer side of a precipice,
Which in their extinct language, they called ‘round’,
Which it was not, great wall of sorrow and forgetting.
They were perhaps undistinguished by the standards
Of their time, producing no poets or philosophers
Whose names history has recorded, but they lived.

                                                         from ‘Pinara’

In the Wake of the Day is a book of memories and journeys; from the chaotic energy of urban life in modern Istanbul, where John Ash lives, to the ruins of vanished civilisations; from personal incident to the narratives and vacancies of cultures. Ash inhabits the fertile and ambiguous territory where East and West meet. We ‘know and do not know’ the past. In an ‘imperial city without empire, place of paradox’, time too becomes fluid. The ancient, half-imagined past of Ur, Alexandria, Cappadocia coexists with a contemporary world in which ‘tank tracks are driven over Babylon’.

At the centre of this collection are John Ash’s versions of poems by the great Alexandrian C.P. Cavafy. Working with Cavafy’s voice, Ash expresses his own urbane intelligence.



Cover photograph: Beyoğlu Street, Istanbul © Dan Auger Cover design StephenRaw.com

Contents


The Couple    
Olives    
Unasked For    
Finding Prostanna    
In Jean Dubuffet’s Crimson Landscape    
Babylon    
Tristia    
Near the Euphrates    
Impossible    
Poem: ‘I never really wanted…’    
Lines Written in a Hotel Room in Afyon    
The Cut    
Tramway    
Partial Explanation    
Practical Criticism    
Difficult    
The Towel of Alyattes    
The Result    
The Women of Kars (or Some Other Places I Know and
Do Not Know)    
After Cavafy
Without Memorial    
Fever of Kleitos    
The Battle of Magnesia    
Antiochus Epiphanes    
The Gods in their Wisdom    
In Ösroene    
Disillusionment of Demetrius Soter    
The Triumph of John Kantakouzenos    
Exiles    
A Byzantine Nobleman Writing in Exile
In a Syrian Harbour    
The Bergamot Tree
Pinara    
In the Wake of the Day    
Finding Prostanna (2)    
Two Poems with an Uncritical Apparatus    
Stations    
Prose for Ebubekir Akbulut    
The Antiochiad