Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the "Elegies" of his alter ego "Quintilius", a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provinci...

This selection from Peter Russell's work of many years illustrates the range of a poet who, in Kathleen Raine's words, has "kept faith (as did his master Ezra Pound) with what is perhaps the greatest imaginative and philosophical conception of the Eu...