Homunculus

by James Womack

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

87 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 21, 2020

Reviews

[Douglas Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant reimagining of late Roman poet Maximianus, not quite a translation, not quite new. Senescence, detumescence, memory, the end of empires, etc…