Dante in China

In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world.

Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: “Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful.”

Bach’s final fugue informs all of nature.

Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan.

Aristotle finds “Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afloat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence.”

And his afterlife: “When three-headed Cerberus greeted him / Socrates replied: I won’t need / an attack dog, thankyou.”