Please join us to celebrate the launch of Isobel Williams’s new poetry collection, Catullus: Shibari Carmina. Hosting the reading will be barrister and friend of the author, Catherine Rowlands. The event will feature readings and discussions, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will also be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along.

Isobel Williams’s Catullus is different in kind from earlier versions: Catullus: Shibari Carmina draws on the art of Japanese rope bondage (shibari). For Williams, the dynamics of shibari release Catullus from conventional constraints and delivere him to new rigours: ‘I found context, metaphor and idiom for Catullus – whom one could glibly define as a bisexual switch from the late Roman Republic when such concepts were meaningless: a stern moralist who splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling sub with his nemesis, the older glamorous married woman he calls Lesbia (here called Clodia, which might have been her real name).’ The poet uses the terminology and forms of social media, a very contemporary idiom which is at once subjected to severe scholarship and tight syntactical discipline. All the crucial language knots are firmed up, the sense of the Latin emerges with Catullus’s own laughter restored, along with the other registers of love and loss. Isobel Williams’s drawings add immediacy to her versions which ‘are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.’

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.