Christopher Middleton uses translation as part of his own poetic project. Here he offers poems from German, French, Swedish, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish, ranging as far back in time as the medieval age. His approach to each poet is "appropriate": the general rule is to be true to those things that make a poem unique. This selection is divided thematically. Poems on memory by Goethe are next to Rimbaud's "Memoire", Otkay Rifat's "Foxholes" and Ibn Guzman's "The Crow". Other sections are "Loves" and "Art and Artifice"
