Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses . Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." —Helen Vendler With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics. Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.