Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla is a smart, sardonic and vulnerable updating of Catullus; or at least would be if Catullus weren't already smart, sardonic and vulnerable, and if he needed any updating. The Latin poet's lines are so fresh and limpid and self-aware, their wit so timeless, their invective so endlessly hip and their irony so universal that it's hard to think of their author as anything other than our contemporary. But it's good to have him regendered as well as rendered, and Atkinson's versions are in the finest tradition of creative adaptation: keeping the originals as ballast, but unafraid to sail off on their own tangents. In fact, Catulla is mostly tangent, and all the better for it. Et al, part two of the book, comprises what we would normally call original poems had part one not so mischievously subverted the very idea of originality.
Atkinson's first collection, Kink and Particle, appeared in 2006; this, her second, has her familiar quickness of mind, her spiky, often self-lacerating wit, and her snappy, vibrant diction. Catulla's is a world of decadent excess and morning-after desolation, of hangovers of the moral as well as the physical kind; of reality TV, suburban infidelity, jealousy and besottedness. There's even some dogging, and a few dogs. "May you never know / how slow unlovely women burn," says Catulla, in a poem Atkinson constructs from "Catullus 8" and "11", "nor how we keep our heads down. Sod you. All the books say I must / break this at the stem. Live long, / die happy. Take these petals as they come / for kisses, curses, kisses." Catulla travels all the stops between kiss and curse and back again; in that respect, however brazen its liberties, it's always true to its original.
"Catullus 5" ("Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us Love ") becomes "Basia mille". Where the original goes "Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred," Catulla keeps the maths: "One / can measure out one's span // by letting x be kisses minus t / until." All love's drama is sieved to one equation: passion divided by the time it takes to die.
"Catullus 52" ("What is it, Catullus, why delay in dying?") becomes "00.52", Catulla's small-hours meditation on another day's drift and another night's failed escape from self
Give it up, Catulla! Take the sea for its
easy amnesia; the car, its intimate
monoxides why hang about? Your work could be
done by a monkey
ending with an image of designer suicide: "the blade // in the boutique-scented bathroom, gentle drifts / of paracetamol, the empty bottles / at a photogenic angle [] back, back to the still, white centre, quiet as / a pill."
"Poetry wars" ("Catullus 22" and "44") reminds us that poetic bitching has a long if ignoble tradition: "Potayto / potarto, Sestius. Avant- / garde indeed. I've got handbags / with more counter-culture in." However close-to-the-bone the wit, there is always that Catullan sense that, in the end, the recipient of the sharpest barbs is also their source: the poet herself. Atkinson specialises in beautifully found likenesses that harness something abstract to a concrete sensation or feeling: anger is "a siren at its closest point", women "thicken in the cul-de-sacs / of clapped-out marriages", there's "always someone weeping / down the dry horn of a telephone".
"Hymen Hymenaeus", the most ambitious of Atkinson's tangential versions, both compresses and expands on "Catullus 61":
One for the boy awkward with books
and violin case Oh
that bobtail of white
knicker in the sports hall how it
flickers just behind
his closed eyes
The themes of eroticism, marriage and fertility are conveyed in a poem at once hauntingly archaic and full of modern anxiety:
One for the queenly ovum
in her hive of cells
for the ticklish seed and
fosterers and donors and the white-
coated harvester
pacing her glittering clinic
Other poets translate Catullus; Atkinson creates Catulla, a modern, anxious, sympathetic and merciless persona, caught up in a life she sees through but can't quite get beyond.
Et al shows Atkinson's gift for unsettling conceits and reworking everyday life into a contorted, surreal folklore. One poem gives a dream-like account of the 2007 floods, opening with rain that begins "unremarkably, like many regimes", while "After Bluebeard", "Princess; pea", and "According to" submit real lives to the disturbing relentlessness of fables. The dark side of childhood inflects these poems, as when the speaker in "Chicken Little" warns: "I mean to crack / your pretty neck. I do the fox. It's nature."
"Portrait of the Husband as Farmers' Market" is more like an exercise in marital vivisection than a love poem: "The sex of the husband's a plump / trout, a one-off, lolling silverside-up in its shine / for a wife with the eye of a magpie. His heart, / apparently a leafy crop, is a loom of many rhizomes."
Like Catulla, Atkinson's voices worry about food and drink, sex and celibacy, love and jobs, children, childlessness, money and old age all the usual things, in fact, though knowing they're the usual things is part of the problem: "like, aren't we so ironic these days / lucky us." It's not a problem for the reader though, because that's what gives Atkinson's and Catulla's poems their uniquely jaded freshness.
Patrick McGuinness's Jilted City (Carcanet) was a Poetry Society recommendation.
