Wodwo Vergil

Adam Roberts' incomparable versions of Vergil's Ecologues are wise, witty, reeking, rollicking, knurled, greenly flourishing, leaking and shimmering with fusions and fissions. These zephyrs have the guts to zigzag when requisite to give it to us straight. 'Nature is always the resource that has always already been worked. The landscape is not ‘nature’’ it is what cultivation has made of the natural resource. Nature is worked, and therefore Pastoral is always reworked—practically speaking, an eclogue is always a reworking of Hughes as a reworking of Wordsworth as a reworking of Vergil as a reworking of Theocritus (for example). Pastoral is a kind of blockchain, and in a more acute and formally self-reflexive sense than the standard ‘intertextuality’ argument might suggest, the generalist insistence that all literature is a kind of blockchain. Pastoral is much more specifically so.'