SOURCE: Slavitt, David R. “Eastward Ho!” New England Review 17, no. 1 (winter 1995): 194-98.

In the following excerpt, Slavitt faults My Alexandria for incorporating literary criticism into its verse and for its elements of heavy explication.

The last time I saw Alexandria—wicked Alexandria—its heart was old and gray. It was a sordid ruin of a place, with the glamour and glitter of Lawrence Durrell's lovely quartet utterly gone, replaced by grinding poverty and boring collectivization. Those grand mansions in which mysterious characters had once called “Yassou” to one another and arranged their trysts and hunting parties were now religious schools and orphanages that stared impassively through the unkempt remnants of their shrubbery to a dreary slate-colored sea. And yet, Durrell and, even more, Cavafy, have made the place a metropolis of the imagination, a great center of learning in life's most difficult subjects—acceptance, equanimity, and resignation.

It...