Book Review: The Emperor of Water Clocks
/A grand and jauntily mythological new volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winning Yusef Komunyakaa
Read MoreBook Review: On Elizabeth Bishop
/In the latest Princeton "Writers on Writers" installment, novelist Colm Toibin writes about poet Elizabeth Bishop
Read MoreBook Review: Chinese Love Poetry
/A pretty new anthology dips into the vast Chinese poetic tradition
Read MoreBook Review: Poetry of Witness
/A hefty new anthology collects hundreds of years worth of poetry about the wars, pestilences, triumphs, and plagues poets endured and tried to capture in verse
Read MoreBook Review: Holding On Upside Down
/One of the 20th Century's greatest poets finally gets her definitive biography
Read MoreBook Review: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
/The great critic and memoirist Clive James has a volume of new poems doing some very old things
Read MoreBook Review: The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht
/The great 20th century poet Anthony Hecht was also a charming and indefatigable letter-writer. A new volume does its best to capture the range and wit that captivated two generations of correspondents.
Read MoreBook Review: The Iliad
/Homer's Iliad gets a new and unconventional translation into sometimes very familiar language
Read MoreAnthology Review: London - A History in Verse
/A sprawling new celebration of London in six centuries of verse!
Read MoreClassics Reissued: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
/A wonderful (and long out of print) adaptation of "SIr Gawain and the Green Knight" by the great 20th century novelist and teacher John Gardner
Read MoreThe Better Part of Me: Ovid
/When he was banished for life from Rome, Ovid was trying to alter his artistic forms with his Metamorphoses. Trace the transformations in Steve Donoghue’s final “Year with the Romans”
Read MoreHorace in the Afternoon
/He was everybody’s friend, and his poetry breathes with life even today. He was Horace, and “A Year with the Romans” makes his acquaintance.
Read MoreMiss Hamilton Disposes
/No one had ever written about love - in its infinite and profane variety - the way the Roman poet Catullus did; its explication by a scholarly schoolmistress might seem paradoxical - but Edith Hamilton knew something about love herself.
Read MoreGuide: The Aeneid of Vergil
/Virgil’s Aeneid has been attracting translators for centuries, and Sarah Ruden’s rendering is notable in more ways than one. (She calls him Vergil, for one thing, but that’s just the start.) Steve Donoghue regards her efforts in the latest “A Year with the Romans.”
Read MoreOn Finding a Copy of Ovid’s Fasti at the Local Goodwill
/Among the Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb, Steve Donoghue unearths a rare secondhand treasure in Ovid’s difficult, underrated Fasti. And he celebrates.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Gentle Poet
/At a poetry reading on the Palatine 2,000 years ago, you’d have spent a week’s pay to hear him read. Today he’s unknown, except to our Steve Donoghue (and a few of our readers, no doubt). Here, after a long time gone, is the Roman poet Tibullus.
Read MoreYou Eatee?
/Steve Donoghue reviews John Donne: The Reformed Soul, a new “cuss-and-codpiece” biography by the inconceivably youthful John Stubbs
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