Arranged in four periods -- Glassical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine, Greek Lyric Poetry features works by such ancient masters as Xenophanes, the biting satirist; Simonides, Greece's first national poet and the originator of mnemonics; Archilochus, the first poet to construct entire poems around the autobiographical particulars of his own life; and the incomparable Sappho, who dared to posit the radical notion that the ordinary experience of human love is imbued with significance as worthy of attention as all the marial splendors of Homerica.

"An engaging new book ... meant as a work of art: In it, a single approach, even something like a single voice, unifies work by many different poets over many centuries." -- Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

"Turn almost anywhere among these pages and the reader will find the plenty of the gods in poems of freshness, vigor, excitement, strength and great tenderness. A magnificent achievement, better, more animated, buoyant and richly articulated than any other version I know." -- Anthony Hecht

"Greek Lylric Poetry covers the full range of the lyric ... including many unfamiliar poems which are themselves like archaeological discoveries because never before have they found their finished and beautiful expression in English. Santos takes fragments and epigrammatic stanzas and makes each a singing erotic, caustic or descriptive lyric." -- Willis Barnstone

Sherod Santos is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Pilot Star Elegies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Columbia, Missouri, where he holds the Curators' Professorship in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia.