When James K. Baxter, who died far too young in New Zealand last year, began his last book [Runes] with a section entitled 'after Catullus', it was anything but an academic exercise. One of the sources of Baxter's power was that when he drew on myth or literature, whether classical or Biblical, it no longer seemed an outside allusion, but became a natural source of reference, immediate and intimate…. What he shared with Catullus, and with Rimbaud, whom he translated brilliantly, was a primary intensity of feeling, an apprehension in which the passing detail retained its depth of sensuous texture, yet acquired an almost elemental force. It brings him equally close to the Jacobeans, who experienced afresh, in the tropes of classical rhetoric, the shock of mortality—'I thought, shoving my muscle through black hair, / "What is a man, this glittering dung-fed fly / Who burrows in foul earth...