Poetry. Cultural Writing. Translation. Greek Literature. With illustrations by Fran Burden. Was the Cyclops a lonely, psychopathic monster out to waylay and eat those unfortunate enough to encounter him, or a lonely creature given to impossible loves, who did nothing to deserve his terrible reputation? Fred Beake's new book gives curious readers an opportunity to reassess their own psyches in the light of a gifted modern poet's version of the classical myth. The book also contains original poems, themselves verging on myth, and a fine essay on the significance of myth in and for our times. Fred Beake was born in 1948 and grew up in the rural West Riding of Yorkshire. The present volume is his fourth substantial collection since The Whiteness of her Becoming in 1992; ETRUSCAN READER IX, which Beake contributed to, is also available from SPD.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian War, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical strategem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man's attempt to create a "war-free zone," the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides's sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world's riches. Translations are by Jack Flavin (Acharnians), Fred Beake (Peace), David Slavitt (Celebrating Ladies), and Palmer Bovie (Wealth). The volume includes an introduction by Ralph Rosen, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Poetry. Edited and Translated from the French by Fred Beake. Fred Beake grew up in the rural West Riding of Yorkshire. He studied Afro Asian studies at Sussex University, and has since translated widely from modern French and classical Latin, and more recently classical Greek. Thirty years of work as a poet reveal "a personally realized impersonal vision"--John Silkin. His is a vision emanating from an often surreal, sometimes seditious quest for meaning on the other side of music and myth. THE BEES OF THE HORIZON is a collection of twelve poems, including translations of Paul Valery 'Tombs by the sea', Louis Aragon 'Lilacs and Roses of 1940', Rene Char 'Artine' 'The She of History', etc., Robert Desnos 'The Night of Loveless Nights', and Michel Deguy 'Rural Remnants'.

Fred Beake has been writing since the late Sixties, and this New and Selected provides a much needed overview of a constantly developing body of work. About a third of the book is given over to the very fresh and colourful poems that have been written since he moved to South Devon in 2003. Beake has maintained an interest throughout his career in the short, often very visual lyric; but has also written offbeat fictions around particular characters, and very musical longer pieces such as 'Marona' and 'Towards the West' that reflect (if at a distance) the poet's early interest in the French Surrealists. This is an unusual poetry, and hard to place in terms of the modern scene. It occupies a position that is equidistant between the Imagists and Objectivists, the Surrealists, and much older things.