Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Some translations are playful – ‘Sleep embraced their weary limbs … and I looked up the word for patefactus’ (‘Aeneid II’) – while others superimpose order, as in ‘Mr Ruddock’s speechwriter (Philippic 1)’: ‘The asylum in the desert swallows the phrase, a throat / a drain with birds circling, a gate.’
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