As a 'book of memories and journeys', John Ash's latest collection In The Wake Of The Day seems to be underpinned by Cavafy's paradox in the poem 'Ithaca', which says that the journey is more important than the goal: if you do not hurry, he says (implying Odysseian stop-overs) then by the time you arrive, your quest for self-knowledge will have been fulfilled. Nor should you be fulfilled, because au fond 'Ithaca gave you the marvellous journey'. But the quest for exotic locations in Turkey, where the poet lives, can be frustrated as well as paradoxical, as in 'Finding Prostanna':

The city was too far. We had been misled. But I
Did not excuse myself. Prostanna remained an idea,
Something like a thornbush or a cloud, blocking us.

This is reminiscent of Cavafy's comment on the non-arrival of barbarians ('Waiting for Barbarians'); the blocking here seems to be some kind of an answer that allows the vitality of the idea to remain and, indeed, the subject is returned to in the collection's final third section. For all the influence of Cavafy, Ash does not follow the Alexandrian poet in spareness. As the above lines show, a favourite device is the simile, where apparent randomness becomes a stylistic mannerism that both looks back to the poet's earlier New York School influences, but also now gives underlying cohesion. It can work with precision in the Mandelstam-influenced Tristia where 'The past arrives much later/Like starlight, salt or poisoned water', but also forms part of an over exuberant, if exact homage, in 'Practical Criticism', dedicated to the late Kenneth Koch:

The piano
Is a noble beast with strong sinews
Like the famous 'blood-sweating' horses
Of the Ferghana Valley, so prized by

The illustrious emperors of the Han dynasty
That they extended long miles of scarlet silk
To secure their purchase...

The references are equally exotic in the middle section of eleven poems after Cavafy, following the Greek poet's penchant for diving into the arcane depths of Hellenistic and Byzantine history, but (following Cavafy) the language tones down and the results are effective.

The English poet also has a good idea in placing together obvious pairs in the canon, thus 'The Battle of Magnesia' includes its sequel 'The Silversmith' (here 'A Maker of Mixing Bowls'), placing it as a prelude to the poem about the final Roman victory over the Hellenised world; and to the 'Triumph of John Kantakouzenos', where a defeated nobleman, who chose the wrong side in mid-fourteenth-century Byzantium's civil war, contemplates asking the victorious Emperor for mercy, he appends 'Of Coloured Glass', Cavafy's ironic vignette of the Emperor's poverty at the time of his marriage, his finances exhausted by the power struggle.

Set in the centre of his collection, these poems underpin and illuminate the whole work, and provide a contrast with the final section that returns to more Turkish journeys ('The Antiochiad') as well as another poem of gratitude for the friendship of Koch in 'Stations'. In all, a delightful odyssey of questing refracted through Cavafy's lens.