After Callimachus: Poems

The delightful fifth book from poet and critic Burt (Advice from the Lights) brings the ancient poet Callimachus, respected by later Greeks and Romans, to 21st-century audiences. Burt’s contemporary translations and adaptations musically and playfully build on Callimachus’s themes. Love, desire, tyranny, and death, meet technology, pop music, bigotry, and politics. Epigrams ignite with political urgency as they meet contemporary narratives: “Every time I go home there’s a monument/ to a man whose culpable indifference/ sent my peers to their early graves,/ a glib smiler, a bad dad who deserves infamy” (“Epigram 8”). Burt finds pathos in parallels, expanding the world of the ancient Greeks in unexpected ways: “As in Hamlet, but harmless,/ I put the ear-infection medicine drop/ by drop into my baby’s ear./ Then my baby awoke. The horses of Poseidon/ did not thrash so hard,/ nor did the god of the sea feel half so helpless,/ nearly choked with pointless fear.” Burt engages deeply and originally with Callimachus, and the result is a wonderfully rich collection that reveals how the past can cast new light on the present. (Apr.)