The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. Its eternal freshness is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed-the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider. For this dazzling collection Philip Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their invention free. The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia. We find fables, grotesques and white -coated scientists; sports-cars, swans and shells; and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.

Contents:

• Hick, Hack, Hock by Roger Moss
• The Shell Game by Ken Smith
• Void by Philip Terry
• Hypsidyle to Jason by Michele Roberts
• Lessons by Cees Nooteboom
• The Sons of Angus MacElster by Joyce Carol Oates
• Sophia Walters Shaw by Patricia Duncker
• Narcissues and Echo by Nicole Ward Jouve
• Arachne by A.S. Byatt
• Leda by Paul Griffiths
• Leto's Flight by Marina Warner
• Antiquity's Lust by M.J. Fitzgerald
• Eurydice's Answer by Suniti Namjoshi
• Heart's Wings by Gabriel Josipovici
• The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions by Margaret Atwood
• Disjecta Membra by Rosalind Belben
• Nightfall on the Romanian Coast by Paul West
• A Bestiary of My Heart by Victoria Nelson
• Report on the Eradication and Resurgence of Metamorphic Illness in the West, 1880--1998 by Catherine Axelrad