SOURCE: A review of Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 248, No. 13, March 26, 2001, p. 85.

In the following review, the critic compares Before Time Could Change Them with two other Cavafy collections, finding that the main asset of Before Time Could Change Them is its inclusion of several poems never before published in English.

Though Cavafy never published a book during his lifetime, preferring to circulate his poems privately in broadsides and pamphlets, acclaim for his work has grown steadily, both in the U.S. and abroad, since his death in 1933. A Greek citizen who lived and worked in Alexandria, Cavafy is esteemed both for his elegant redactions of classical and ancient history and myth, and for his gorgeously muted and candidly homosexual poems of erotic longing and loss. As is clear in these conversational and freewheeling versions, those two...