B

Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Ned Denny's baroque, line-by-line reimagining - the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys - shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet's version - in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope - is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime