The book is a translation into English verse of the poems of the Latin writer Catullus (first century BCE). Catullus's poems vary from two-line epigrams to much longer pieces, and they range in subjects from declarations of love (and celebrations of sex), to moving personal poems and also scurrilous attacks on others, including Julius Caesar himself. Although Catullus has often been translated very freely, this collection tries to balance formal poetic style with the sometimes very direct and deliberately startling vocabulary. An introductory essay, which acknowledges how often these poems have been put into English, concentrates not on Catullus himself (about whose life we know very little for sure), but on the general and specific problems of translating his work into poetic English. It also gives background details for some of the longer mythological poems.