Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Admirers of David Solway's poetry know that for many years he spent his winters teaching in Montréal and his summer vacations and leaves of absence living and working on one or other of Byron's "isles of Greece." The names of various islands visited during this period recur throughout his mature work, and closer investigation reveals that most of his individual volumes tended during this period to concentrate on a different island. Thus The Road to Arginos (1976) is centred on Lesbos, Stones in Water (1983) on Alonissos, the first part of Modern Marriage (1987) on Siphnos, the prose-study The Anatomy of Arcadia (1992) on Paxos, Bedrock (1993) on Amorgos, while Saracen Island (2000) focuses on an islet close to Skyros. The range is impressive, but Solway's less travelled readers can all too easily become obsessed by this litany of names, especially if they consult an atlas and discover that the islands in question are located throughout the eastern Mediterranean from the Ionian Sea on the west side of the Greek mainland to the eastern Aegean close to the coast of Turkey. Is it essential, or even desirable, they may ask, to distinguish between these islands? Does each island - and therefore each book - display a different character?

Further textual and bibliographical examination initially suggests that this may not be the case. First, though each volume appears to concentrate on a single and different island, specific poems within them venture further afield. The Road to Arginos, for example, contains a poem entitled "Patmos," three poems in Bedrock ("The Ruins of Phylakopi," "In the Catacombs," and "The Last Reader") refer to Milos, and Saracen Island includes four poems in which Seriphos appears in the title as well as "In Naxos" and "On Karpathos." Moreover, Solway often rearranges his work, reprinting earlier poems in later volumes. Thus the two opening poems in Stones in Water, "Prologue" and "Jellyfish," apparently invoke the atmosphere of Alonissos, yet they appear again in Bedrock, and the same is true of the name-poem and several others. Above all, in a decidedly complicated instance to be discussed later, "The Islander's Complaint," which also first appeared in Stones in Water, is now reproduced in a different context and even attributed to another author!

Despite this contrary evidence, however, I am convinced that, although the distinctions between the various islands that appear in his work are not cut-and-dried, a developing awareness that certain islands and island-groups take on special, indeed universal, significance becomes discernible. These are seen to function not merely as geographical entities but as potentially powerful metaphors. Solway himself makes this clear when, in an interview recorded while Bedrock was still being written, he remarks: "of course my book is all about islands - it is one of the ... central metaphors in the collection" (Starnino 30). In the following discussion, I shall attempt to document this evolution and show how the concept of "island" takes on increasingly greater depth and resonance (a favourite Solway word) as book follows book.

***

The Road to Arginos was at one and the same time Solway's first major book of poems and the first to concentrate on a specific island locale. One poem is glossed "Lesbos," one "Molivos/Lesbos," and yet another "Molivos, Evthelou/Lesbos," while a head-note to the name-poem, the last in the book, identifies Arginos as "a village in northcentral Lesbos." Most readers will be aware that Lesbos is an island in the eastern Aegean close to Turkey, but it may also be helpful to know that Molivos (or Molibos) is "a village on the island" and that Evthelou (or Eftalou) means "Seven Hills" and is "a gaggle of buildings" located "about five kilometres outside the town" (Random 92).

After a verse-prologue, the opening poem is significantly entitled "Pastoral" (11) and clearly presents an inner as well as an outer landscape ("They say whoever lives here lives alone"). It is described as "apache country; hell's terrain; / (so hot the dew hisses, the pebbles roast)," but references to "dead rivers," "a monk," and "mountain-goats" inevitably combine to suggest Greece. Yet the application seems general rather than localized; the Old and New Worlds are linked metaphorically. However, subsequent poems emphasize characteristic Greek trees ("olive," "eucalyptus," " cypress"[12]), and a "land / of rock light and water" (13) is unmistakably Greek. It is also, just as unmistakably, a literary landscape. No specific reference is made to Sappho, but informed readers will be conscious of her unstated presence. "The Lotos Eaters" (16) nods towards both Homer and Tennyson, "The Journey" (17) is one of several poems in which Hellenic and Biblical landscapes are compared, while a reference to "the littoral of Bohemia" (15) conjures up memories of sea-coasts, islands, and shipwrecks in Shakespeare's later plays. Solway's islands are thus located in relation to similar islands in Western literature.

But his stay on Lesbos in 1973 had more immediate literary implications. As he notes in an essay in Random Walks, Irving Layton was at the same time spending the summer in Molivos, and the two writers participated in "discussion, argument, and speculation." Solway still qualified, in his own words, as "an apprentice" and profited "immeasurably" from Layton's example (92). The older poet released him, indeed, from an uneasy and inhibiting sense that the key to contemporary poetry lay in "projective verse à la Olson"; from Layton, hailed by Solway as a "strict, responsible maker" (93), he learnt the "discipline" which is proclaimed and exemplified so impressively in The Road to Arginos. The name-poem, incidentally, though ostensibly an account of Roman troops blasting their way through the mountains of Lesbos, is best interpreted as a "parable" (Road 65) announcing Solway's only-just-completed struggle to become a genuine poet. Lesbos is crucial, but its importance for Solway does not lie in its geographical specificity.

Stones in Water centres upon Alonissos, an island in the Northern Sporades, and we soon detect a combination of enjoyment and irritation in Solway's response (an alternation to be documented more fully on another island in The Anatomy of Arcadia). The opening "Prologue" may culminate in a desire to express "a love" (10), but other emotions take on prominence as the book progresses. We note its dedication "to all the resolute and imaginative liars whom I met on the island of Alonissos," and a similar doubleness is registered within the poems. A folk-like refrain-poem indicating what the speaker would bring back from various islands ends: "If I should stop in Alonissos / I'll bring you nothing / but bitterness" (22). Another refers to "modern Greek inhospitality" (51), and the final poem, "Farewell to Alonissos," lists various equivocal aspects of the place that he will miss, including "the front yard freckled with henshit" and "that misbegotten shack / we lived in." The island is an "execrable dump," yet, paradoxically, he "owe[s] it much" (52).

Certainly he expresses a "sense of real things" (to quote the Keatsian epigraph); physical details of the place are evoked with a piercingly observant eye and a formidably subtle poetic ear. We register the apparent specifics of Alonissos far more sharply than those of Lesbos. In addition, in several poems, especially "The View from Alonissos" and "A View of Greece," both appropriately titled, Solway explores the local effects of light and weather that challenge our traditional sense of perspective. "On good days / you can see the cloudy shape of Skyros / forty miles to the east," yet on another occasion "even Skopelos, that massive / rump of an island, only // three or four miles to the west, ... vanishes / as if by some enchantment" (20-21). And, even more probingly: "There is no distance in this land, / background is foreground; perspective / utterly impossible" (38). These observations will be developed later, as we shall see. The poet offers more than expert description and observation, however. Solway constructs an island of the mind, with its own features. As he once wrote in a letter to me, "[t]he Greek island of Alonissos I write about is my pretext, not my text, my metaphor, not my subject" (see Starnino 52). The verse thereby takes on a recognizably deeper resonance.

***

The Anatomy of Arcadia (1992) is best characterized as a meditation on the profoundly significant differences between traditional travel and the "virus" of tourism (153), sparked by a year's stay on Paxos. It takes the form of an undated diary recording both his immediate impressions and his developing intellectual experience of the contemporary world. The book is of particular interest to students of Solway's life and work since references scattered through the text give valuable information about his familiarity with different islands. We learn that his first experience of Greece occurred in 1967 when, following the example of Leonard Cohen, he visited Hydra and spent the 1968-9 year there (166, 77-8). He also spent the summer and fall of 1969 on Crete (169). These initial forays were followed by the now more familiar stays on Lesbos in 1973 (150), five summers on Alonissos beginning in 1977 (174, 188), Amorgos in 1981 (150), and Paxos, briefly in 1983 and later in 1984-5 (15, 26, 166), with occasional escapes to Corfu (124, 169).

This prose work makes us realize that, in much of his poetry, Solway avoids what might be called the underside of "Arcadia." Doubts are hinted at, as we have seen, by certain poems in Stones in Water, but are not developed. The volume contains an unspecified sense of dissatisfaction, but few details are offered, and then chiefly in the concluding "Farewell." In The Anatomy of Arcadia, the emphasis is reversed. Solway begins with an account of being defrauded by an Athenian taxi-driver on arrival, and the opening description of Paxos focuses on the inhabitants' frenzied, dangerous, and often illegal slaughter of migrating birds. These incidents set the tone for the rest of the book. He emphasizes the material greed of the newly affluent part of the population, and the inefficiency and corruption that lead to constant struggles for the basic necessities of life (food, heating, transportation, etc.). He takes pains to challenge our tendency to carry over preconceptions about ancient Greece (where "Arcadia" had already become a literary myth) into the infuriating and uncomfortable present. His wife Karin makes the point succinctly by remarking: "All this takes the romance out of Greece" (73). Solway underlines the ironical aspects of the situation a little later when, on a brief visit to Corfu, he finds himself staying in an inevitably named "Arkadion hotel" while "writing a book whose real subject is the romantic detoxification of Arcadia" (126).

The year on Paxos seems to have been a disillusioning experience for Solway, yet at the same time it proved both an education and an incentive to his art. As he freely admits: "Here I feel I am actually learning something and have no regrets over the steep tuition fees" (73). He goes on to list what he is learning ("How to light wet matches ... how to stay dry when the rain prizes through the roof tiles," etc.), but the whole book bears witness to a higher education than the merely practical. His realization that "in Greece ... there is no clear line between the veridical and the apocryphal" (183) helps him to clarify his ideas about the imaginative stimulus of art in general and poetry (including his own poetry) in particular. "Real travel," he comes to acknowledge, "is always an analogue of psychological faring" (200). Solway's Greek experience was anguished - "Why am I so fond of this infernal, backward, self-destructive country?" he bursts out at one point (166) - but it was also creative. Though he claims towards the end of the book that his "prolonged love affair with Greece appears to be over" (250), this may be true so far as his physical travelling is concerned but does not apply to his "psychological faring" or to the application of his island experiences as manifest in his verse. After 1985, his poetic volumes presenting islands as their subject-matter take on a new dimension. Solway probes deeper into the human relationship with islands, a subject central to Western writing from Homer's Odyssey onwards.

***

Modern Marriage marks the beginning of this change. This pivotal book appeared five years before The Anatomy of Arcadia, but two years after the year on Paxos - hence my postponing any consideration of it until this section. Yet I need say little about the book here, partly because I have discussed it in considerable detail elsewhere (Starnino 53-64), but more defensibly because the island locale is less central than in the other books. It qualifies as an island book because the first half, as Solway noted in an interview, is set "on the Greek island of Siphnos in a village called Plati Yalos - which means 'wide beach'" (Starnino 18). But, as he goes on to explain, "marriage" operates less as a subject than as a metaphor within the book as a whole. Indeed, the concept of marriage as a union of opposites leads him to the exploration of dichotomies both here and in his later work. For our purposes, however, it is more important to note that Siphnos is one of the Cyclades, and that this group of islands proves to be the culmination of Solway's island travels. They become the main focus of Bedrock, and his attempt to give adequate expression to their challenge eventually led him to the complicated manoeuvre that resulted in the creation of Andrea Karavis and the production of Saracen Island.

The Cyclades (or, more correctly, Kyklades) constitute a large group of islands forming a rough circle situated east of the Peloponnese immediately north of Crete. They are described in Bedrock, in the prose section "Entries," as a "wheel or circle of islands, but a wheel that is in perpetual revolution ... They move: subject to earthquakes or to tricks of weather." Solway then goes on to establish what he calls "the cycladic attitude: that unpinnable-down, volatile, what-is-truth reaction to the world" (57). This belief that the islands alter their positions was widely held in ancient times - it gave rise, indeed, to their name - and references recur throughout the book. In the poem actually called "Bedrock," Amorgos, the Cycladic island in question, is seen as "a drifting sanctuary" (17), while in "Cycladics" they are, more ambiguously, "islands wheeling / round a central guilt" (55).

The contrast between the solidity of "bedrock" and the shiftingness of the Cyclades is both intellectually crucial and poetically rich. Here it will be helpful to jump ahead temporarily to a discussion of Solway's later book, An Andreas Karavis Companion. In a short but important essay called "The Cycladic Self," he develops a whole series of paradoxes that he considers especially characteristic of (though not confined to) the region, paradoxes that can ultimately be seen as "central to all authentic human existence." The most significant of these involves the concurrent "forces of scarcity and abundance" which he sees as "reciprocally implicated in the cycladic milieu of a harsh and penurious environment that blossoms in uncountable and unaccountable ways" (37). Once again, a geographical observation is transformed into a poetic metaphor of broader implication. The paradoxes in question include distance and nearness, presence and absence, depth and surface, stability and unsettledness, dream and waking, freedom and captivity, prose and poetry, and doubtless many others.

Because the qualities highlighted by the special features of the Cyclades are universal in their relevance, even if they appear less conspicuous elsewhere, the poems set in the islands attract like magnets paradoxes that Solway has observed in previous locations and recorded in earlier volumes. I have already mentioned the oddities of perspective as treated in Stones in Water. Similarly, in the fourth poem in "Cycladics," it is possible to see houses "fifteen miles away" yet between here and there is "a distance / beyond the conceiving / of land animals" (Bedrock 52). Even more interesting, however, is the phrase "the nearness of distances" in "Prologue" (9). This poem had also introduced Stones in Water, but the reference to perspective takes on a new significance. Solway has now become even more preoccupied with the way we see islands than with the islands themselves. Moreover, the reappearance of poems from earlier books implies more than a canny gift for recycling on Solway's part: like the Cyclades, the poems shift in appearance and meaning when presented within a new context.

The relation between these paradoxical unstable islands and the language with which he tries to express them clearly preoccupies Solway. In "Entries" he writes: "The islands also make up a language in which all parts of speech are interchangeable." Or, somewhat less enigmatically: "Each poem becomes a single word linked to others in a shapely archipelago of temporary sense" (58). He finds a fruitful analogy between the shifting nature of the Cycladic islands and the unstable nature of words and meanings. Language specifically relating to language is common in his work. An intriguing early example occurs in The Road to Arginos in "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" (32) where, in a poem full of Greek imagery ("cast-up jellyfish," "dried-out fern," "sea-copper"), he ends with a reference to "the water's ablative blab," ablative being the linguistic case indicative of place. The use of the word "linked" in the prose-passage just quoted recalls the line "linked and syntactical" in "Prologue" (Bedrock 9). The statue of Nausikaä in "Nausikaä in Amorgos" is described as "a risen / metaphor, lapped by adjectives" (11). In "Bedrock" itself, voices "send / their rambling dactyls through the morning air" and the stanza ends with "a cry feathered between syllables" (17). A later sentence in "Entries" refers to "basic speech erected on a transcendent syntax" (65). The cycladic wheel, of unstable bedrock and ambivalent language, appears omnipresent.

Clearly, Solway found his island material extraordinarily enlarged and complicated by his experiences in the Cyclades. It is not surprising, therefore, that we encounter in Bedrock the first allusions to Andreas Karavis, the mysterious Greek poet whose work Solway later "translates" and whose life and ideas are discussed at length in subsequent volumes. The gradual infiltration of Karavis and his views is instructive to document. On the back cover of Bedrock, reference is made to "the work of several poets [Solway] has known and admired - Nikos Gatsos, Henrik Nordtbrand, and Andreas Karavis." Gatsos is a well-known Greek poet (b.1911), "the celebrated Greek lyrist" who wrote "a long pastoral poem" also called "Amorgos" (99); Nordtbrand, evoked several times here and elsewhere in prose and verse, seems reliably authentic (though experience of Solway's creative effects leads to caution!); Karavis, however, gradually emerges as an invented alter ego.

The tricky fifth section of "Entries" presents the first version of Solway's intricate construction (elaborated and qualified, as we shall see, in Saracen Island and An Andreas Karavis Companion). That Karavis appears at the precise moment when Solway is exploring "cycladic impermanence" (60) is not an accident. One can readily see why, faced with his exploding and fascinating material, Solway needed to create Karavis as an additional persona. First, he wanted a native viewpoint to supplement his own visitor's stance; the Cycladic islands needed an islander to interpret them with authority. Karavis is an insider, yet also (paradox again) "the 'resident outsider'" (Saracen 15), involved yet simultaneously detached and even alienated. Solway also felt that what he calls "the two Greek 'languages,' the high Katharevousa and the low Demotiki" (Bedrock 62) - actually language-levels which he frequently mentions elsewhere - were peculiarly fitted to the expression, in words ascribed to Karavis, of "the cycladic temperament [that] manages to feast and fast at the same time" (Andreas 38). Solway can therefore plead that this linguistic mix is "very difficult if not impossible to render in English" (Bedrock 62), thereby obliquely and ironically drawing attention to his own verbal dexterity. Furthermore, he remarks (extending the Cyclades/language connection), "I continue to navigate among these poems" (65) - which suggests the need for a seasoned, practical navigator.

If we discount "Prologue," the opening poem in Bedrock, "Nausikaä in Amorgos," focuses on a modern statue of Odysseus' Nausikaä that presides as an enigmatic, equivocal muse over both poem and volume, while the closing poem, "Amorgos," concentrates on the island itself. The Nausikaä statue appears as if it has arisen from the sea like Venus, but also represents a structural reversal of the Homeric situation, since in the Odyssey it is the hero who emerges out of the water. But the statue is only visible from the sea, so the poet-narrator swims out to it, thus taking on the character of a modern Odysseus. It is therefore worthy of record that, in a reading and talk given in the University of Toronto Library on the occasion of Bedrock's publication in 1993, Solway confided that this poem was originally meant to be offered as a translation from Karavis. (As it is, only "The Dream Masters" [98] is glossed as "translated from the Greek of Andreas Karavis.") Certain aspects of the text of "Nausikaä in Amorgos" bear out this temporary intention. References (15) to "caiques" (traditional Greek boats) and "loukoumadhes" (sweetmeats) connect with the Karavis material, and the description of Nausikaä as "a kind of muse for shipwrecked mariners" (12) and the speaker as a "latter-day mariner" (16) relate to Karavis better than to Solway. However, the determined swimmer and the opening allusion to Nordtbrand strongly suggest Solway. Here we seem to be in a position to watch Solway still working out the implications of his developing idea. At all events, the shifting association of Solway and Karavis teases the mind.

"Amorgos" has been well discussed by Eric Ormsby (see Starnino 97-104), and I cannot do better than summarize his conclusions. It is divided into three parts: "The Dream," "The Poem," and "The Island." "The Dream" begins with a reference to Nikos Gatsos writing his own "Amorgos" without visiting the island (an idea taken up later in Saracen Island), and represents the ideal we all carry within our minds. "The Poem" is initially Gatsos' own but applies also to the poem we are reading: a creation, an "act of love" (102), a mirror-image of possibility. "The Island" is the reality that cannot be ignored but should not be privileged either; as he has remarked in the "Poem" section: "An island that is there / must sink beneath the weight of an island / that is not" (103). Yet, as Ormsby rightly insists, the three sections "come to exist in a provisional equipoise in the consciousness of the reader" (Starnino 98).

***

The Karavis affair culminated in 2000 with two simultaneous publications from Véhicule Press: Saracen Island, subtitled The Poetry of Andreas Karavis with David Solway's name where we would normally expect the author's, and An Andrea Karavis Companion, also by Solway. The former presents itself as Solway's translations from the work of a Greek poet hitherto unknown outside his native country, where he is supposed to be both famous and elusive. The book is presented in scholarly fashion with Solway also in the role of editor providing a biographical and critical introduction plus twenty-five pages of notes and commentary at the end elucidating the individual poems. The latter is ostensibly, as its title suggests, a "companion," a gathering-together of all sorts of purported information on Karavis' life and work, with translated extracts from a Greek literary critic, an interview, correspondence between Karavis and Solway, an account of Karavis' late marriage (with the interviewer!), several pieces of intellectual commentary, including "The Cycladic Self" from which I have already quoted, and even a photograph (credited to David Solway).

Despite a brief brouhaha in the press at the time of publication (fanned to some extent by Solway himself) and a few grumpy cries of "hoax" from the stodgy and humourless, what characterizes the whole incident is a sense of good fun and high spirits. At its heart, to be sure, these are deeply serious works commenting profoundly if obliquely on contemporary intellectual dilemmas, but Solway takes considerable delight in constructing the details of the obliquity, complete with clues carefully placed to attract the attention of any discerning reader. One of the poems translated, "The Islander's Complaint" (Saracen 91), had already appeared under Solway's name in Stones in Water. Solway duly "explains" this by weaving a tall tale about Karavis publishing the original under a pseudonym in a Greek journal, Solway translating it, and his own publishers omitting the explanation in proofs that the poet never saw! Obviously, the statement draws attention to the oddity. Moreover, he cites a second instance (Saracen 29, 109) in which "translated" similarly dropped out of the text. He also adds to the fun by speculating on Karavis' influence on his own work (Andreas 123), and as early as Bedrock had written: "As I work [on the translations] I have the uncanny feeling that I am translating material which I myself have written in another time, another dimension, another life" (62-3). The code was obviously designed to be cracked.

Careful readers will also notice that the more detailed account here of Solway discovering Karavis' work does not always tally with the earlier version in "Entries" (Bedrock 62). There both Karavis' chapbooks are "out of print" whereas here the second is in its fifth edition (Andreas 27). Moreover, in order to draw attention to the invention, Solway has Karavis employ two pseudonyms, one of them "an apocryphal English poet" with the suspiciously similar name Andrew Carruthers, whom Karavis duly "translates" into Greek (Andreas 27). And Solway, of course, can then translate them back into English! Similar jokes abound. Solway is also said to have given a lecture on Karavis in Athens-on April 1 (Andreas 43). He even manages to draw fellow-poet Eric Ormsby, significantly hailed as "secret fabulator" in the dedication to Bedrock) into the conspiracy (see Saracen 9 and Andreas 48-9, the latter going to the extreme of including a Turkish translation by a fictitious admirer of a Karavis poem).¹

But more is involved than mere intellectual high-jinks, however inventive and refreshing the concept may be. Karavis is presented as an independent spirit under suspicion from political authorities, and profoundly out of sympathy with recent artistic developments, both in Greece itself and elsewhere in the world. (Solway's attempts to explain to an "innocent" Karavis such topics as current literary theory, including gender politics, would be hilarious if they were not so depressingly apt [see especially Andreas 98-107].) Both books are full of shrewd exposés of current trends. The following statements are chosen almost at random: "what we once called 'the self' is the greatest casualty of the age we live in" (Andreas 51); "a century [the twentieth] among whose casualties is language itself ..." (Andreas 88); "the feebleness and pusillanimity of contemporary verse as an expression of the modern spirit ..." (Saracen 130); "the penurious and demythologized condition of the Greek soul in the contemporary world ..." (Saracen 119). As for Canada, it is sufficient to note that, for all the gloomy accounts of cultural decline in Greece (as well as their frustrating experiences as reported in The Anatomy of Arcadia), Solway and his wife are presented as seriously considering a move to Greece, "a prospect that grows increasingly enticing as I contemplate the direction in which the literature and culture of my own country is going" (Andreas 94).

While Amorgos is represented in three forms - as dream, poem, and island - Saracen Island can boast a fourfold meaning. It is at one and the same time "a barren and uninhabited rock off the coast of Skyros" (Saracen 127), the title of a poem, the title of the volume in which the poem appears, and a potent symbol for "where we are now ... the true reflection of our condition whether we like it or not" (127-8). The island is characterized vividly and comprehensively within both poem and book, by "Andreas Karavis" in the poem and by David Solway in the accompanying notes. The poem itself is regarded by Karavis (and therefore by Solway) as his "summing-up of the human condition," and is also, ironically but no less meaningfully, "perhaps the most quintessentially 'Cycladic' in the collection although its nominal subject, the island itself, lies in the Sporades archipelago" (127). Karavis/Solway is attracted to it because, as poet, he is "the exile / in the desolate margins" (97). The poem is crucial because, as Solway explains, writing "Saracen Island" is "one of the ways in which the poet is able to survive his incarceration on Saracen Island" (130). The phrase thus becomes a metaphor for the contemporary intellectual crisis adumbrated in the book as a whole.

The full significance of Saracen Island is highlighted by the revelation that, within Solway's personal myth, Karavis "had never been there." Karavis' explanation is simple: "There was no need to set foot on the actual island. I saw it all too clearly from my vantage point on Aspasia when I sailed past" (Saracen 127-8). Aspasia is the caique in which he sails continually and on which he writes. The allusion here is to Nikos Gatsos who, as already noted, had never visited Amorgos when he wrote his poem of that title. There is one important difference, however. As Kimon Friar wrote in Modern Greek Poetry, Amorgos "is not the subject of his poem, for the name was chosen only as a symbol of evocative beauty" (707). But Saracen Island, by contrast, becomes an emblem of the modern cultural desert with which Karavis/Solway is only too familiar.

It is important to realize that when, in a notebook entry, Karavis claims to be preparing "to run aground on Saracen Island" (Andreas 26), the italics indicate the book, not the island. Similarly, when he asserts, "I have lived for many years on Saracen Island" (65), he is again writing metaphorically. Saracen Island does not have to be visited because it cannot be escaped. This condition helps explain why Solway can describe Karavis - and by analogy himself - as "writing outside the mainstream of the modernist tradition but somehow indelibly there" (Saracen 13). Inevitably, he is a denizen of the Waste Land. John Donne famously maintained that "No man is an island";2 Solway/Karavis realizes that everyone is an island, isolated in Matthew Arnold's estranging sea. He has, it seems, travelled in a (Cycladic?) circle back to the statement made early in The Road to Arginos: "They say whoever lives here lives alone" (11).

Notes

1. Examination of the Solway Papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto reveals that the poet experimented with various ideas for involving his poet-friends in the project. Thus he contemplated persuading the Québécois poet Robert Melançon to join him in creating a correspondence between his pseudonymous Pierre Menard and Karavis (Box 12, File 1). In an early draft he claimed that a (non-existent) poem in Carmine Starnino's Credo (2000) was a translation of an early Karavis poem (Box 12, File 3). Eric Ormsby was also to have found evidence for Karavis' love-affair with the authentic Greek writer Lili Zographou resulting in an illegitimate son (Box 13, File 19). I am grateful to Richard Landon, Director of the Fisher Library, for permission to cite these instances.

2. This was written before I read Solway's latest volume, Franklin's Passage, which contains the lines: "Every man is of course / an island entire of itself / though admittedly at times / a part of the Main" (54).

Works Cited

• Friar, Kimon, trans. and ed. Modern Greek Poetry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

• Solway, David. The Anatomy of Arcadia. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1992.
  ---. An Andreas Karavis Companion. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2000.
  ---. Bedrock. Montréal: Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 1993.
  ---. Franklin's Passage. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003.
  ---. Modern Marriage. Montréal: Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 1987.
  ---. Random Walks: Essays in Elective Criticism. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997.
  ---. The Road to Arginos. Lasalle, Québec: New Delta, 1976.
  ---. Saracen Island. Montréal: Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 2000.
  ---. Stones in Water. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1983.

• Starnino, Carmine, ed. David Solway: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2001.