After Dante Jean Boase-Beier

After Dante Jean Boase-BeierThis anthology of versions by 16 contemporary poets from around the world of the 33 Cantos of Dantes Purgatorio is published to mark the 700th centenary of Dantes death in 1321. With an absorbing Introduction by Nick Havely tracing Dantes influence on countless poets over the centuries, and detailed explanatory notes, canto by canto, this volume is both an outstanding work of scholarship and, for the poetry lover, a superb way into the world of this

whose lucid simplicity of language is married to a rich complexity of structure and the bird-flight of images that connect poem to poem

They were intermediaries between human beings and the highest god

goal-hangers

past bare tors

and for the vitality to be discovered in ruins

language is linked to money and debt in a seemingly perpetual state of negotiations

as the major pyramids collapse

the reader

questioning who has the right to write about whom

As she gains distance from her family and comes into her own

the subjects of the poems within vary widely

identity and literature