"The Good Life"
On Tuesday, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, posted an interesting comment on his blog about Joshua Weiner's recent book of poems, From the Book of Giants. He notes that Weiner's book includes a cleverly updated version of Martial's epigram 10.47—a poem composed of a list of the things necessary for "the good life."
As Stothard points out, it is a list that has been drawn from and imitated profusely throughout the centuries, translated into new languages and fitted into new meters, but whose underlying significance has retained a particular continuity that reappears almost two thousand years later in Weiner's post-modern verse—indeed it is a telling comment on our society that even a work of poetry as informed by modernity as this one still warrants acknowledgment in terms of its classical predecessors. Find out more about the book and read an excerpted poem on its UCP webpage.
Also, note that Weiner will be doing readings in the next few months, especially in April. See our author events page for particulars.