This volume is both timely and welcome. In Sappho's Lyre (1991), R. established herself as one of the most graceful and scrupulous translators of Sappho, but that volume included only the more substantial fragments. This collection translates all known fragments of Sappho, down to single-word scraps; even more excitingly, it includes recent new discoveries, most notably the substantially completed poem on old age and the so-called Brothers Poem.

The range of assumed audiences is ambitious. A short introduction by L. introduces, for the non-specialist reader, some of the main sources for interpreting Sappho's life and works: the testimonia, the fragments and their sources, and their social and historical context. He takes a measured approach to some of the perennial questions – how Sappho's works were performed, how to interpret the personae, the implications of the poems’ eroticism – and with remarkable concision exposes the interpretative choices that underlie almost all generalising statements about her. R.'s translations make the poems available to Greekless readers in verse that does a far better job than the prose of Campbell's Loeb (1982) can in conveying the fascination of Sappho's supple and deceptively simply poetry.

As R.'s ‘Note on Translation’ makes clear, she has revised her previous translations as well as creating new ones, with ‘the double goal of accuracy … and poetry’ (p. 20). This is of course an elusive goal – accuracy to what? sound, lexical sense, form, affect, scholarly opinion? – but she rises admirably to the challenge. Some revisions to her earlier versions take the simple but crucial form of rearranging layout to convey poetic form; often she interprets fragments more confidently than in 1991, and produces better sense as a result; occasionally she achieves really stunning effects, as in the replacement of ‘arriving quickly’ for aipsa d'exikonto, enjambed at the beginning of a strophe in poem 1, with ‘suddenly here’. It is an achievement to surprise the reader of one of Sappho's best-known poems with such startling and yet completely appropriate phrasing.

Last comes a poem-by-poem commentary describing the poems’ material survival, plus details of the scholarly editions used and interpretative commentary. It is here that the strain of the multiple assumed readerships shows. For example, the note on fr. 58, the poem on old age, outlines the text's history and which scholarly reconstruction (actually a composite of several) was used, before citing the parallel with Alcman 26, and explaining the myth of Tithonos. It is most unlikely that the same reader will need all this information. First-time readers of Greek poetry unacquainted with the myth will skip the scholarly references; scholars will long for the Greek text. The citation of Alcman without even a summary of the poem's content highlights perhaps the most serious drawback: a general reader will have little sense from the notes of these poems’ embeddedness in a rich poetic culture. Sappho is exceptional; this missing context risks making her exceptionalist. Perhaps this should have been two volumes; but this one is a very good start.