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Tim Atkins does for translation what Gertrude Stein did for nouns. He’s turned Horace inside out, and booby-trapped the works with strategically explosive pregnant shock and awe. Pope and Dryden have nothing on this guy: Horace has arrived.—Lisa Jarnot

The Latin Horace wrote, “Dulce est desipere in loco”—sometimes acting out is the best revenge—and here comes our contemporary, Tim Atkins, with a Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory.  I’ve admired Atkins’ poetry for years but until now, I’ve known it only in bits and pieces.  Today Horace finds him the room and the canvas to stretch out, in toga Augustan, dripping wet, while garlands of goldfish nibble his private parts from underneath.  Like Noah and Anne Bradstreet, Horace is still a saint of repopulation and revival; he so loved the world that, in a rapture of naming, he invented the word for it.  “Sometimes,” Atkins hears him say, “you just have to/ count the grapes & the plums/ or an empire will fall out.”—Kevin Killian

When I heard some of these poems in Tim Atkins’ voice I was instantly interested and amused: my pleasure and enjoyment have continued, reading them.—Tom Raworth

“A Horace very much in the vernacular and homophonic tradition of Rodefer’s Villon, and Mayer’s (not to mention Zukofsky’s) Catullus. This Horace, however, is well dusted with a dose of 21st-century British argo….I believe this the finest long poem to come out of Britain in a stadium of fortnights.”—Michael Gizzi

ODES II / 1

All natural disasters war on the hole.
A cluster of black grapes emerge.

On the field of the cloth of gold
                                    A wind puffs up
The Prime Minister
—done with his biblical spunks    —stretching on his chaise longue
                        & bombed
Sobs at the loss of 24 hour shopping
                        his broken off cock   left as tribute
                                                in the hind of yon
                                    American   Kong
Now, mothers, hear my song                     —Horace / Tim Atkins

Tim Atkins, Horace (Oakland, CA: O Books, 2007), 76pp., $12

Across the Malvern rather than Sabine Hills comes Tim Atkins’ Horace, shuffling adroitly between the makeshift sets of Augustan Rome and Gorb’s Britain with the shipwrecked gait of Monty Python’s “It’s” man.  (Horace was, for Auden, the “adroitest of artists”.)  These 70-odd short lyrics—bounced primarily off Horace’s four books of Odes but with quick nods to the earlier Epodes and later Epistles—are the freshest poems to have blown through this borough in quite a while, and make for perfect watching-the-leaves-turn reading.
In his introductory essay, Atkins makes a strong case for the social and structural similarities of the literary circle cultivated by Octavian and Maecenas in Rome (circa 40 BC) and the so-called “linguistically innovative” poetry scene of west-central London (circa 1995 AD), before launching into an extended analysis of just why it is, exactly, that there aren’t any photos on Upton Snodsbury’s tourist website.  Okay, I made that up.  What Atkinius actually does is waste no time in introducing us to his Horace (still a punishable offence in parts of the West Midlands) in three quick stanzaic spurts, managing, somehow, to squeeze nobbers, minge, spunk, pamphlets, halitosis, sailors and KY into 18 short lines.  Formal introductions dispensed with, we turn the page to confront Atkins’ respray of the first Ode: “Gong-tormented bogs / I once lunched in // Fulgent without / Remuneration”…
It might not be too much of a stretch to claim that, as a translator, Atkins combines Beckettian concision with the Dagenham drôlerie of Pete and Dud.  Viz. Ode i.19 (“Glycera”):

                                    The pitiless mother of all the amorini,
                                    And Bacchus, Semele’s son, and the lascivious

                                    Goddess Licentia, all of them, all,
                                    Bring back to me all at once the forgotten loves

That was Horace in David Ferry’s translation of 10 years ago, which Atkins renders thus:

                                    Cupids and Bacchus
                                          Have given me carpet burns

Here’s Horace/Ferry again (from Ode ii.6):

                                       There someday you will mourn
                        At the grave of him who was
                                       A poet, and your friend.

And Horace/Atkins:

                                               when I am dead
my dole card