H.’s deft new translation of Ovid includes the Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris and Tristia 2, the last a potential outlier in a collection that stretches over 3,700 verses. The book's title aims to clarify the link among the poems by suggesting that they all relate to love – or, rather, to sex – and its potential to cause offence. This seems plausible, but only in moving through the texts and the accompanying notes does one see the rich interconnectedness here, and H. deserves praise for bringing these poems together in a reliable and eminently readable translation.

The obvious connection between the Ars and Remedia is amor: in both poems the praeceptor amoris is strenuously engaged in dispensing advice, now on modes of seduction, now on cures for love. Another connection is made explicitly in Tristia 2 (and elsewhere in the exile poetry, Tr. 1.1.67–8; 2.212, 345–7, 539–46; 5.12.67–8; Pont. 2.9.75–6), where Ovid identifies the Ars as the poem of the famous dyad, carmen et error, the alleged causes behind his banishment. H. makes her own compelling connection (p. 38) by showing how the ironic didacticism at the heart of Ovid's instructional manuals on love resurfaces in Tristia 2. There it turns a letter to the emperor Augustus requesting a reprieve from exile into a lesson on the art of reading: for the exiled praeceptor legendi everything from Homer to Virgil can be construed to be about sex.

To contextualise these poems and the reading of Ovid generally, H. offers a punchy introduction with catchy subtitles like ‘Myth and Lit 101’ and ‘Fifty Shades of Metaphor’. This last section consists of an impressive catalogue of metaphors in the Ars grouped by category, for example ‘War’, ‘Hunting’ and ‘Religion’. Like the notes accompanying the translation, the introduction includes helpful discussion of the text and ample references to current scholarship. Following scholars like G. Williams, J.-M. Claassen and others, H. eschews the search for the reasons behind Ovid's banishment and finds something universal in the suffering on view in the poet's representation of exile. As H. has shown elsewhere (‘“To R. B.”: Hopkins’ Ovidian Letter from the Black Sea’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 17 [2010], 53–9), that representation seems to have moved the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who ‘found Ovid's late works a source of inspiration and solace in the darkness of his own “winter world”’ in Ireland at the end of his life, suffering a kind of spiritual ‘exile’ from his native England (p. 39). She adds, ‘I believe both poets recognized that exile, fundamentally, is not an accident of geography, but a characteristic of the human condition’ (p. 39).

Hopkins is also the inspiration for H.’s own ‘sprung rhythm’, the elastic interchange of stressed and unstressed syllables Hopkins used to imitate natural speech. In rendering Ovid's elegies, she creates a pliant distich with six stressed syllables in the first line (hexameter) followed by five in the second (pentameter). Her metrical scheme is basically iambic – with its variations on da DUM, or da da DUM, or even da da da DUM – though H. says she prefers to compose ‘in DUMs, not in feet’ (p. xvii). The result is a brisk and buoyant translation, such as at Ars 1.101–2:

In H.’s verse-scheme this should be read:

The text's layout is most welcome with translation and notes on the same page. There are subheadings within the translation, for example to start the Ars: ‘Both Poet and Prophet’, ‘The Three Tasks’, ‘Step One: Finding the Girl’. In general, H. rises admirably to what she calls the ‘commentator's challenge’: ‘to present information essential to understanding the text without bombarding readers with too much information’ (p. xiii). Of her readers, she writes, ‘my imagined audience is a college freshman or general reader with no knowledge of the ancient world beyond, say, one or two Percy Jackson movies’. That is a fairly low bar that belies the polish of this translation and the erudition on display in the notes. H.’s volume is readily affordable and could easily be deployed in classes on gender and sexuality, Roman culture and myth, and I heartily recommend it to all Ovidians, translators of Greek and Latin verse and generally interested readers.