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The Poems
The Poems
Nov 11, 2025 7:20 PM

Author:Catullus

The Poems

One of the most versatile of Roman poets, Catullus wrote verse of an almost unparalleled diversity and stylistic agility, from the brevity of the epigram to the sustained elegance of the elegy. This collection contains all of Catullus' extant work and includes his lyrics to the notorious Clodia Metelli - married, seductive and corrupt - charting the course from rapturous delight in a new affair to the torment of love gone sour; poems to his young friend Iuventius; and longer verse, such as the extraordinary tale of Attis, a Greek youth who castrates himself in a fit of religious ecstasy. Ranging from the tender, moving and passionate to the vicious and even obscene, these are poems of astonishingly modern force and content.

Reviews

He is by turns hilarious and subversive, a master of the cheekily surreal, whose conspiratorial mateyness often conceals a grinning skull

—— New Statesman

Very individual, imaginative, fresh work... The poems are disquieting, odd, dark, beautifully honed and cadenced

—— Ruth Padel , Financial Times

Always original, genuine and generous, Matthew Sweeney's poetry has matured to the point where its artistry can be recognized. He's brilliant on stories that disclose the strange, the ironic, the sad

—— Douglas Dunn

Here are the small and great truths of the imagination that bursts forth out of our daily lives. Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its very best

—— Charles Simic

One of our greatest authors... Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations... For experience of a whole century he was the man within

—— Norman Sherry , Independent

Mr Greens' extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration...moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion

—— The Times

His style is spare, that's what is so beautiful. His novels are genuine romans philosophies - novels illustrating ideas

—— Piers Paul Read

In a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety

—— William Golding
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