The Word for Sorrow

Working on Ovid-s extraordinary but often much-neglected exile poetry with an old second-hand Latin dictionary one stormy spring morning, Josephine Balmer noticed a school-boy-s faded name inked on its fly-leaf and a date, January 1st 1900. The Word for Sorrow explores the story of this dictionary and its owner, who, as a subsequent Google search uncovered, later fought with the British yeomanry in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of World War I, near Ovid-s own Black Sea exile. Alongside versions and interpretations of Ovid-s Tristia - the text the dictionary translates - soldiers- original diaries and letters from Gallipoli provide another rich vein of source material for the original poems of the volume, which also follows Balmer-s own journey as she excavates these entwined narratives, underscoring how the emotional charge of the past still resonates down through the centuries.Like Chasing Catullus, Balmer-s acclaimed first collection, The Word for Sorrow explores an interplay betw