Jennifer Barclay Books

I walk back down to the sea and wander the backstreets of Fri. I peek into deserted houses to find decoratively hand-painted walls, picture rails and beautifully crafted wooden ceilings. One home has a pebble mosaic in the courtyard, but the garden is filled with fallen wooden doors, discarded Coke cans and the packaging of a set of H&M ‘short trunks cotton stretch’. Gateways are often rather grand, two columns supporting a triangle.
Among the deserted houses is a large mansion with a red gable, falling into disrepair with a handwritten ‘For Sale’ sign. A plaque tells me the ‘poet of the sea’ D. I. Antoniou (1906-94) ‘lived and was inspired’ here. Later, I find out that Antoniou was born to a great Kasiot shipping family in Mozambique and spend part of his early life in Suez. He joined the navy and reached the rank of commander. Concurrent with his naval career he was a renowned poet, keeping company with some of the most famous in Greece, including George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis.
Roderick Beaton’s biography of Seferis tells of how the twenty-five-year-old Dimitris Antoniou, then serving as a navigation officer on a long-distance cargo ship, visited Seferis in his office in Gower Street, London, and impressed him as a real seafarer. He also impressed Henry Miller, who wrote that he envied him his life, forever stopping off at islands and battling the elements: ‘In Antoniou’s countenance there were always traces of the weather.’ Antoniou’s cabin aboard ship was filled with books, empty cigarette packets and manuscripts. I find one of his poems from 1939, ‘Obstacle to What?’ translated by Edmund Keeley. It tells of a ship returning after many years of exile in distant places, bringing ‘no more than stories’.