Charles Tomlinson declares that this book, emerging from the practice, the art and magic of translation, concerns itself with 'the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation - literary metamorphosis - extends this process'.

He takes the syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, as offering an example of the way visual experience, in Ruskin's art criticism, can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet, a technique whereby what is seen directly feeds what is said and how the saying takes shape. Metamorphoses demonstrates, with a wealth of examples and close readings, how poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realised though literary expression and technique.

Tomlinson's own poetic achievement - evinced in more than twenty books of poems, and also in his groundbreaking translations from Spanish, Russian, French and other languages - informs much that these essays describe. Here readers will find a major poet reflecting on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.