Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and relocating it to the modern ‘walled city’ of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and ministers for education; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are re-imagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry’s home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time Essex writer-in-residence and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld: ‘I heard the dead, the city dead / The devils that surround us’ (‘Memorial Day’). In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante’s original text. [ www.carcanet.co.uk ]