Afterimage, by Len Krisak, is a masterfully-crafted collection of poems in which we see the persistence of history into the present - the ancient market under the polish of urban architecture, the thrum of Roman crowds amid present-day Boston. Horace and Ovid exist alongside Jeopardy and Clark Kent. Whether in a grand, public mode or quietly elegiac and personal, the poems record our contemporary life, often noting the images from such a distant and literary past strikingly alive in the present. From "the topless towers of Troy" to "the trolley's stair step lip," Krisak writes with a metrical and formal eloquence. His voice is both learned and colloquial, demonstratating a careful attention to language and its power to move us.

Prudentius' Crown of Martyrs offers an English translation, with introduction and commentary, of the Liber Peristephanon, Prudentius' vivid collection of lyric hymns in honor of Christian martyrs. To render Prudentius' metrically varied lines for twenty-first-century readers, Len Krisak relies on the inherent iambic nature of English. The introduction offers insight into social, political, and literary features of the fourth century, the life of Prudentius, the poet's other works, his Latinity and mastery of ancient meters, and the manuscript tradition and the reception of Prudentius in the Middle Ages and beyond. Given Prudentius' central place in the history of Latin poetry, this translation is a welcome resource for general readers interested in Western literary history. It will also find a home with scholarly audiences working on Late Antique and Early Christian literature and culture, in a wide variety of college classrooms and in academic libraries.

Prudentius' Crown of Martyrs offers an English translation, with introduction and commentary, of the Liber Peristephanon, Prudentius' vivid collection of lyric hymns in honor of Christian martyrs. To render Prudentius' metrically varied lines for twenty-first-century readers, Len Krisak relies on the inherent iambic nature of English. The introduction offers insight into social, political, and literary features of the fourth century, the life of Prudentius, the poet's other works, his Latinity and mastery of ancient meters, and the manuscript tradition and the reception of Prudentius in the Middle Ages and beyond. Given Prudentius' central place in the history of Latin poetry, this translation is a welcome resource for general readers interested in Western literary history. It will also find a home with scholarly audiences working on Late Antique and Early Christian literature and culture, in a wide variety of college classrooms and in academic libraries.

A new translation of Rilke's groundbreaking volume, following the formal properties of the original poems, especially meter and rhyme, as closely as English allows. Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idiomsof modernism. Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.

The most sophisticated and daring poetic ironist of the early Roman Empire, Publius Ovidius Naso, is perhaps best known for his oft-imitated "Metamorphoses." But the Roman poet also wrote lively and lewd verse on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, and adultery--a playful parody of the earnest erotic poetry traditions established by his literary ancestors. The "Amores," Ovid's first completed book of poetry, explores the conventional mode of erotic elegy with some subversive and silly twists: the poetic narrator sets up a lyrical altar to an unattainable woman only to knock it down by poking fun at her imperfections. "Ars Amatoria" takes the form of didactic verse in which a purportedly mature and experienced narrator instructs men and women alike on how to best play their hands at the long con of love."Ovid's Erotic Poems" offers a modern English translation of the "Amores" and "Ars Amatoria" that retains the irreverent wit and verve of the original. Award-winning poet Len Krisak captures the music of Ovid's richly textured Latin meters through rhyming couplets that render the verse as playful and agile as it was meant to be. Sophisticated, satirical, and wildly self-referential, "Ovid's Erotic Poems" is not just a wickedly funny send-up of romantic and sexual mores but also a sharp critique of literary technique and poetic convention.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire--a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the "Aeneid," he wrote two other collections of poems: the "Georgics" and the "Bucolics," or "Eclogues."The "Eclogues" were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the "Georgics" and culminates in the "Aeneid," they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry.Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, "Virgil's Eclogues" also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.