Answering Ovid

"Siesta time in sultry summer," wrote Ovid, opening one of the poems in Amores. "I lay relaxed on the divan."

" 'Happy hour' in harsh winter," writes Professor of English Jennifer Clarvoe, "You hunch, tense, at your desk."

Clarvoe's newest poetry collection, COunter-Amores (University of Chicago Press), includes a section with twelve poems that "engage in call-and-response" with the anciet Roman's lyrics on love and sex. Playful, richly suggestive, and finely crafted, Clarvoe's poems talk back to Ovid's, often twisting situations and reversing roles. Ovid's speaker gazes at his lover "On the loose in a short dress, / long hair parted and tumbling past the pale neck." Clarvoe's proclaims herself "buttoned up / pinned up, wound up, just to make you / work hard at the work at hand. . . ."

Here, and in other poems in this, larvoe's second collection, she makes the work at hand seem effortless.