classical sites) and of Virgil and Horace (who wrote of everyday life in the countryside). In the first four-book "Odes" since "Horace", he addresses the concerns regarding Western civilisation of Pound, Eliot and Yeats - particularly, the concern Eliot had about the impact of Europe on the man of letters - and finds a new way of carrying them forward. He catches the mood of our time: dismay at the end of the Great Britain of Churchill and Montgomery, elegiac feeling that Englishness is being superseded by Europeanness and globalism, and Britain's hesitant fumblings for a new identity in a time of transition. Never before has Western's civilization's cultural legacy been captured in verse that has such contemporary relevance.

Hide more