Entertaining broadcaster and poetry expert Graham Fawcett brings the Romans back to life with his talk on Ovid on Thursday 16 May.
A stand-up comic and entertainer, Ovid’s most famous book is Metamorphoses – a history of the world from Roman ideas of creation through to Ovid’s present day, over two thousand years ago. Graham Fawcett’s great skill is in not only depicting a poet’s life and reading out highlights from his work, but also describing the world he lived in with its culture and politics.
Publius Ovidius Naso was born the year after Caesar’s assassination, was educated in Rome, and started reading his poems in public at the age of 16. His work gives us master-classes in how to write with profound and rollicking delicacy about love and sex, how ti put on a spectacular poetic pageant of the Roman myths, and also to sing with great pathos from direct experience of the heartache of exile.
Ted Hughes’s Tales From Ovid is one of the latest poetry books to attest to Ovid’s powerful influence on English poets and poetry especially through his Metamorphoses, while Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are among the earliest. Francis Meres declared that that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”. The source of so much that we all know and love, Ovid is well worth discovering. But so often the Ovid we admire is the metrical gymnast making us gasp over and over again at the outrageous virtuosity of his mastery of form and content, the parallel bars of a poetry which fine translations reveal as speaking to our own times. So modern does he go on sounding, indeed, that the Italian writer and critic Giuseppe Pontiggia has even described him as a “contemporary of the future”.
Graham Fawcett’s Poetry Talks 4
OVID Evening: Thursday 16 May
6pm for 6.30pm talk. Supper from 8pm. Tickets: £10 / £18 with supper. Phone 01308 459511 to book.
Sladers Yard
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Dorset DT6 4EL
T: 01308 459511
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