Josephine Balmer and Averill Curdy

Ovid’s poems of exile have found new life not only through Darrieussecq’s translations, but also through the way in which they inform the poetry of Josephine Balmer whose volume The Word for Sorrow includes her ‘transgressions’ of Ovid that take us from the battlefields of the First World War (situated close to the site of Ovid’s exile) to the poet/translator’s present world, as she searches for Ovid in the recesses of the internet and links him to her own family history. On the other side of the Atlantic Averill Curdy, also, is thinking about the reception of Ovid in America, and what his experiences of loss and exile can teach us in the face of tragedies such as 9/11, the financial crisis, and the Iraq war.