Switch

Reviews / Votes

'Every page of Switch is electric with that unmistakable personality: the strutting young genius who knows exactly how talented he is and wants you to know it, too, the brash newcomer from the boondocks determined to conquer the big city, the lover who proudly wears his hemorrhaging heart on his sleeve, the twentysomething with, maybe, a shadow on his lung, writing as fast as he can and bringing everyone he's ever met, everything he's studied, and everything he feels to the party, from Callimachus to inrumo. Some old farts may complain about the accuracy of Williams's new version, but who'd give a penny for their thoughts? As far as I'm concerned, she's right on the money.'

Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker 'Japanese rope bondage seems an odd way in to Catullus, and these poems are often discomforting or actively shocking: but so is Catullus, especially if you sit down to read right through it... But Williams has found a way to pinpoint what is most distinctive about most of Catullus - a combination of passion with the utmost artifice. I think it's a significant achievement.'

Victoria Moul, Horace & friends 'Razor-edged and completely 2023 - translation in the most vibrant sense. It's often strikingly undergraduate and a welcome riposte to all the doomy codes that seem these days to police every action.'

Richard Lofthouse, QUAD (Oxford Alumni) 'I could go on to discuss the skillful paring of text and images, the many exquisite turns of phrase, or the resonance of the title... to get a sense of what it would have been like for a Roman to first read Catullus's work, buy a copy of this.'

Ed Beford, Independent 'This new version of Catullus certainly contains more than its fair share of lively wit and astonishing originality, but Williams goes much further than others have done in making this very much her own work rather than simply a clever translation of the text. ... This book is extraordinary in every way. It takes poems which we have read many times and makes us see them with fresh eyes. The theme of Shibari is both a unifying feature and also a distancing technique, adding a flavour of the exotic and the bizarre which lurks beneath the all-too familiar surface of this poetry. Switch fizzes with new ideas and forces us to re-read and re-evaluate this most quixotic of poets afresh.'

John Godwin, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 'By far the oddest, most eccentric, and most original of the recent Catullus renderings is Isobel Williams' Switch: The Complete Catullus... her book gets at a lot of what makes Catullus Catullan: the daring, the boundary pushing, the emotional nakedness.'

Charles McGrath, The Hudson Review