The Greek Anthology is a treasure of the ancient world, sixteen books of poems, amatory, religious, elegiac, and satirical, written over the course of more than a millennium. And now at last the legendary Book XVII has surfaced. As full of poems that are delightfully unlike each other as Books I-XVI, here is a trove.

Best, perhaps, to think of it as 'Book XVII'. For Greg Delanty's renderings are not only imaginative, they deal in the imaginary. The poets whom Delanty has called into being have names at once ancient and modern, at once from this land and from that. The living and the enduring enjoy one another's playful respect: Kincellas Major, Longlius, Rosanna Daedalus and Clara Kritikos. And among the poets here also is Heanius, who dedicated one of his own poems to another poet to be met in Book XVII, one Gregory of Corkus.

Unprecedented, this collection, in more ways than one. Great company, they speak and sing, thanks to Greg Delanty.