CUPIO Kieran McGuigan

Cupio is Latin for "I desire", and the book keeps faith with its title. That verb gives the collection its centre. These are poems and translations concerned with wanting: a desire for the objects which become stranger when we look at them closely. First printed as a pamphlet in 2020, it now returns in a Dark Branch Press edition under Olivia Petrini's cover featuring a blindfolded Cupid drawn in sepia on white.

It opens on the oracle from Apuleius that sends Psyche up the mountain to marry a winged terror even Jupiter fears, and the arrows fly on from there. There are versions after Catullus, Chaucer, Baudelaire, Hugo, Gautier, Bruno and Lorca; Ossianic night-pieces and a Provençal dawn-song; enamel and ivory from the Fitzwilliam turned into a portrait of the beloved; and a Poundian canto in which John of Salisbury calls on Petronius, Rome's judge of elegance, to settle a quarrel of the centuries. Then the present breaks in as lovers part at Waterloo an hour before lockdown, a Glasgow evening unfolds at the end of quarantine, and a run of ballads closing on an elegy for a little pianist in violet silk.