Mann: Palimpsests

poems based on the classics that speak to the present

Chris Mann

• Publisher: Dryad Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781990992261
• eBook ISBN: 9781990992278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Poetry
• Index: Literature

Like a modern Orpheus, Chris Mann explores the underworld of the past and returns with peculiarly African poetry, based on the classics that deepens our understanding of the present. In this collection, youthful Narcissus gazes into a mobile phone, wandering Odysseus sails the seas of the Internet, and picknickers beside a river's pool in South Africa encounter the shades. The satirical poets of ancient Rome mock a strangely familiar hunger for sex and power among politicians, dispossessed Britons revolt against the empire, Vandals ruthlessly plunder wealth and land, and tech-savvy Phoenicians colonise the coast of a pastoral Africa. Rising seas engulf the lost city of Atlantis, and a terrible plague devastates the Athens of Socrates, Pericles, and the Parthenon. Palimpsests speaks to the interplay of different cultures and how the past is interwoven in the fabric of the present. It is a fresh, new offering enabling lovers of the classics to experience this world in a unique, modern and African way.

Saturnalia Satirica

satires wearing different masks

I

Truth

after Catullus

Why are the nicest girls so plain?

Don’t laugh. Now that liberty

has turned to licence in Rome,

I can’t think of a single woman

who’s both virtuous and beautiful.

Worse still, those brutes, the men –

they make me sick. Even senators

with good looks, adorable wives,

farms in Umbria, Caesar’s affection,

play fast and loose with the truth.

Let the love-crazed poets versify

the shapely white necks of swans,

persuading rich widows that theirs,

theirs is the best, the truest of arts

for being so charming, so beautiful.

That’s Plato’s heady twaddle.

Ha! The sow with hairy breasts

butting her piglets in a bog

is prettier by far than the swan

that paddles a politician’s pond.

Pigs! Isn’t the filthiest old boar

tusking up muck in dung-heaps

more honest than a rhetorician?

What truth’s a poet’s glacéd fig

when offal festers in the Forum?

No, the truth is me, Catullus,

me whom moneymen threaten

and adulterers malign and sue.

Stuff them. The fairest of poems

tell the ugliest of truths.

II

Perfect Sex

after Ovid

Don’t shirk the shapeshifter that lurks

inside the human genome’s walls,

that burns inside a lecher’s blood,

a looting soldier’s balls.

If sex and power best evolve

survival for Charles Darwin’s ape,

is perfect sex, for loveless men,

not that vile thing, a rape?

III

On Philo’s Move to Rome

after Martial

Philo’s joined the scuttling, rat-brained rabble

who flee the whole foul African affair,

and then, throughout their emigrant babble,

exploit the colony they couldn’t bear.

IV

Vanity

after Horace

And now, what’s the matter, Demetrius?

Huddled on a bench, picking at a sandal

and gazing gloomily over smoggy Rome,

you look as miserable as one of your friezes –

one of the better ones, to tell the truth.

A cypress, sooty; a Venus, vandalised …

you couldn’t have composed it better.

I’d call it, Ah woe is me, sans nymphs.

Has someone bust their best Greek chisel,

or chipped the tip off Cupid’s perfect nose?

I bet that’s what you’d tell me if I asked,

but no, I won’t, you look too forbidding.

I know, I know, you’re not like that at all.

You’re sensitive, and intelligent, and kind,

and only look depressed and dourly grim

because your patron was seen with a rival.

How you must hate him. The young poseur,

all surface without any gravitas, you said,

dashing off frescoes for the nouveau riche

as if tragedy and the gods had disappeared.

What a life – grovelling for commissions,

riddled with envy, doubt and despair,

and chip, chip, chipping, year after year,

at busts of scroungers and thug politicians.

Quite frankly, I could murder your tutor,

who said you had such hidden potential.

Remember? The disaster began with flattery.

He needed more pupils. Vanity did the rest.

Go and sell onions, start a whore house,

emigrate to the wilds of barbarous Britain –

do anything, Demetrius, except more art!

Why foist your misery on us till you die?

Listen, the toga on your latest Caesar

still looks like a sack. Stop fleeing the truth!

Your appetite for fame will always exceed

the impeccable mediocrity of your gifts.

V

Abstract Art

after Juvenal

I looke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Heraclitan Heresies
• The Pool of Narcissus
• Aphrodite’s Southern Cousin
• The City of Atlantis in a Diver’s Mask
• The Curse of Sisyphus
• The Clan Bard of the Drakensberg
• The Comrades Marathon
• A Picnic Beside Hlambeza Pool
• In Praise of the Shades
• The Statues on the Pier
• Epiphanies
• The Ithaca of the Internet
• Living with Eurydice
• Sapphic Fragments
• Metamorphoses on Waking
• The Seahorse Pegasus
• The Fall of Thrasybulus the Tyrant
• The Plague of Athens (430–426 BCE)
• Scapegoat
• Saturnalia Satirica
• Getting Ready for the Vandals
• An Argument in Utica
• Dispossessing the Britons
• Saying Goodbye to the Romans
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Michael Lambert Biography