<b>[A]n inspired and enlightening lunacy … here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading</b> … The risk of a single translator rendering many poets might be a homogenising flatness, but Childers retunes his instrument for different effects, adding a string, slapping on a capo, going electric or harmonic. <b>Perhaps most originally, Childers aims to get us to perceive connections across not only centuries and poets but languages</b>. Different metrical patterns are associated with different subgenres or ‘vibes’, and Childers is programmatic in his rendering of said patterns … <b>Childers consistently, and sometimes brilliantly, turns out translations that also work as English poems</b> … <b>Childers’s elegant prose wears its learning lightly, and is often stealthily hilarious</b> … The notes also point us to allusions to these poems or translations of them in the whole sweep of Anglophone poetry, and beyond, making this a <b>relevant sourcebook for readers of Western poetry of any era</b> … This book would make <b>an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical literature: it practically amounts to a degree in classical literature in translation</b>

- A. E. Stallings, Daily Telegraph

For a long time the words ‘lyric’ and ‘poem’ have amounted to much the same thing ... Questions of origin ought to be important: so, where does the lyric begin? One answer ... is given by Christopher Childers’s anthology, in which<b> translations of both Greek and Latin lyric poetry are offered in large servings</b>, with <b>extensive and ambitious commentary</b> … This <i>Penguin Book</i> is both<b> bold and worthwhile</b>, as <b>it puts on display such a wide range of ancient poems</b> … <b>Childers remains close to the Greek and Latin, and works in metrical, largely rhymed, English forms</b> … <b>with his particular facility in rhyming couplets he can pull off the unlikely feat of making even Ovid’s <i>Tristia</i> (<i>Sad Poems</i>) compelling</b> …<b> Childers’s touch is sure and natural, and he is not defeated by either the tonal sophistication of Horace’s <i>Odes</i> or by Pindar’s combination of sonority and subtlety </b>… <b>his fundamental insight, which drives the entire anthology, is that poetic form matters ...</b> <b>he is not wrong</b>

- Peter McDonald, TLS

A monumental work of selection, translation and annotation, the astonishing accomplishment of Christopher Childers

- C. Luke Soucy, The Classical Outlook