Goodbye Horses

My mind is threadbare

on your subject, Lesbia, ruined

by our ignoble encounters,

the power of your devotion.

I can't wish you a good day,

though you are good,

and if you were not so,

I'd still want you.

In Goodbye Horses, Nathaniel G. Moore reanimates the lion's share of Catullus' surviving poems in an absorbing homage to the beloved romantic, his world, the friends he loved, his style (elegy, anaphora, hyperbaton), the myths he riffed on (Attis, Laodamia and Protesilaus), the writers he admired (Sappho, Cicero) and the family he left behind.