Poetry

In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that 'there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas's venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years - the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.'

In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in 'a miraculous mix of the poem's original spirit and Heaney's voice'.

Seidel is the great controversialist of American poetry. Dubbed a 'transgressive adventurer,' a 'demonic gentleman,' a 'triumphant outsider,' a 'great poet of innocence,' and 'an example of the dangerous Male of the Species', his sly, witty and wide-eyed poems seem earnest one moment and flippant the next, and will see him rotating his caustic fire from high-society cocktail parties to street-level poverty, genocide to Obamacare, New York to Syria. He's never more than a turn-line from humour, and it is often when he is at his funniest that he is also at his most shocking.

The Independent said of his last collection: 'There is no contemporary poet writing in English as witty, as shrewd, as touching and as debonair as Frederick Seidel. That's a lot of praise, but he surely merits it.'

Widening Income Inequality, Seidel's new collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance. Rarely has poetry been this dapper, or this dire, or this true.