Author: Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald's translation of The Homeric Hymns (2016) was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize.  His Collected Poems (2012) and Herne the Hunter (2016) are published in the UK by Carcanet Press.  A new collection of poetry, The Gifts of Fortune, will appear in 2020.  He is Professor of British and Irish Poetry, Christ Church, University of Oxford.

A Review of A.E. Stallings’ translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days

A.E. Stallings (trans.): Hesiod: Works and Days
Penguin Classics, 54 pp. $9.00.

At some point in antiquity (nobody really knows when; but in all likelihood during the Roman empire) one Marcus Argentarius wrote a poem about reading his scroll of Hesiod’s already-ancient Works and Days – or rather, about not quite reading it:

I had my hands full, that day,
rolling out another few
verses of Hesiod – when who
should suddenly come my way

but Pyrrha, and as soon as I
caught sight of her, my hand
dropped his volume on the sand,
and I said out loud, ‘Why

A Review of A.E. Stallings’ translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days full post

(1988 words, estimated 7:57 mins reading time)

Unpacking the Michelangelo

On its wheels, the crate is a good
three or four inches off the ground
– useful for the half-hour it stood
in a tarmac puddle at JFK
waiting for papers to be found –
an oblong case made of new wood
still splintery around the sides,
stickered and barcoded the way
anything might be; now it glides
with the gentlest push along the floor
of the storeroom up to a table
we’ve cleared for it, a surface where
cutters and pliers and wire cable
have good room to accumulate:
it takes two of us to lift it
and lay the case completely flat.

Unpacking the Michelangelo full post

(301 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)