The Iliad begins with a grudge and ends with a funeral. In between are passages, if not necessarily of boredom, to alter the war adage, of lists, pathos, sex, humour, fairytale strangeness (golden fembots, a talking horse) and lyric images, punctuated by moments of pure terror (eyes popped out of heads, a spear throbbing in a beating heart, a man cradling his intestines in his hands).
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £25 Tel: 08430 600033. A.E. Stallings is a poet and translator; her books include Olives, Hapax and Archaic Smile. She received a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship in 2011.
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