Review Article

Brian Breed (hereafter BB) invokes a wide range of scholarly voices, among them mine, with a freshness & energetic involvement that put me in mind of first coming to the Book of Bucolics myself more than forty years ago, remind me too that only provocative new turns will keep this age-old colloquy alive. BB enunciates a distinctive strategy & theoretical view. He emphasizes & interrogates the role of voice in a poetry that professes (so to speak) to be song yet hints at its own nature as text getting written & read.1 His approach authorizes, even provokes, an inveterate reader to go back, pick out – revisit & review – occasions where the ten elusive pieces style, in a manner of speaking, themselves communicative in one or another wise – by mentioning vocal & audible or legible, to be sure, but also other kinds of perceptible & signiferent crafts.2