A classicists's poems…

… Patrick Kurp reviews Olives by A.E. Stallings | Quarterly Conversation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As a classicist, Stallings is ever mindful of the “golden past.” In 2007 she translated The Nature of Things into rhyming couplets, turning Lucretius’ dactylic hexameters into iambic (mostly) heptameters. In her prefatory note to that poem she says the original Latin possesses “something of the pleasure of a crossword puzzle, though one to which there were no guaranteed answers,” and declares: “Rhyme is not the essence of our poetry, but it is I think the honey of it.”