Chasing the Ivy

"In these modernizing versions of the thirty-eight poems of the Latin poet Horace’s first book of Odes from two millennia ago, Maureen Almond addresses the contemporary poetic career in lyric form, and casts a passionate, ironic and comic eye on trying to break into and advance through today’s literary world. Horace comes alive again in this wry, entertaining and well-wrought collection."

Professor Stephen Harrison,
Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford

"Maureen Almond has taken her place in a line of distinguished English interpreters of Horace-a line which includes Milton, Marvel), Dryden, Pope, and Tennyson. In The Works, she produced what is surely the most significant creative engagement with Horace's Epodes in recent times. Her work will continue to be seen as one of the significant contributions to the tradition of English poetry linked to the classics, and one of the freshest and most original bodies of English poetry in our time."

Dr John Talbot,
Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Classics, Brigham Young University

"Chasing the Ivy is a brilliant and wholly original take on the world of contemporary British poetry, of arts-funding, sponsorships, residencies and the glittering prizes. Maureen Almond draws on Horace's Odes to lay bare the vanity, envy, snobbery and ambition of so much of the poetry scene - fading poets, fashionable poets and amateur poets - with the satirical bite of Pope, Swift and Dryden. But Chasing the Ivy is also a hymn to the civilised Horatian virtues of work, community and friendship, gentle comedy and wise seriousness."

Andy Croft

"The recurring concerns of Maureen's work – trenchant social analysis, ageing and nostalgia, contemporary politics, and the difficulties of maintaining one's own voice in the face of a competitive literary community and established poetic tradition – make for a strongly Horatian brew, but in Chasing the Ivy the originality of conception, sensitivity to structure, and liveliness of language go well beyond the laborious straitjacket of translation."

Dr. L. B. T. Houghton,
Department of Classics, University of Glasgow

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