Virgil's book of bucolic verse, the Eclogues, defines a green space separate from the outside worlds both of other Roman verse and of the real world of his audience. However, the boundaries between inside and outside are deliberately porous. The bucolic natives are aware of the presence of Rome, and Virgil himself is free to enter their world. Virgil's bucolic space is, in many ways, a poetic replication of the public and private gardens of his Roman audience - enclosed green spaces which afforded the citizen sheltered social and cultural activities, temporary respite from the turbulence of public life, and a tamed landscape in which to play out the tensions between the simple ideal and the complexities of reality. This book examines the Eclogues in terms of the relationship between its contents and its cultural context, making connections between the Eclogues and the representational modes of Roman art, Roman concepts of space and landscape, and Roman gardens.

Virgil's book of bucolic verse, the Eclogues, defines a green space separate from the outside worlds both of other Roman verse and of the real world of his audience. However, the boundaries between inside and outside are deliberately porous. The bucolic natives are aware of the presence of Rome, and Virgil himself is free to enter their world. Virgil's bucolic space is, in many ways, a poetic replication of the public and private gardens of his Roman audience - enclosed green spaces which afforded the citizen sheltered social and cultural activities, temporary respite from the turbulence of public life, and a tamed landscape in which to play out the tensions between the simple ideal and the complexities of reality. This book examines the Eclogues in terms of the relationship between its contents and its cultural context, making connections between the Eclogues and the representational modes of Roman art, Roman concepts of space and landscape, and Roman gardens.

Virgil's Georgics, the most neglected of the poet's three major works, is brought to life and infused with fresh meanings in this dynamic collection of new readings. The Georgics is shown to be a rich field of inherited and varied literary forms, actively inviting a wide range of interpretations as well as deep reflection on its place within the tradition of didactic poetry. The essays contained in this volume – contributed by scholars from Australia, Europe and North America – offer new approaches and interpretive methods that greatly enhance our understanding of Virgil's poem. In the process, they unearth an array of literary and philosophical sources which exerted a rich influence on the Georgics but whose impact has hitherto been underestimated in scholarship. A second goal of the volume is to examine how the Georgics – with its profound meditations on humankind, nature, and the socio-political world of its creation – has been (re)interpreted and appropriated by readers and critics from antiquity to the modern era. The volume opens up a number of exciting new research avenues for the study of the reception of the Georgics by highlighting the myriad ways in which the poem has been understood by ancient readers, early modern poets, explorers of the 'New World', and female translators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

ALA Best Book for Young Adults ∙ School Library Journal Best Book ∙ Publishers Weekly Best Book ∙ IRA/CBC Children's Choice ∙ NCTE Notable Children's Book in the Language Arts A Vietnamese girl plants six lima beans in a Cleveland vacant lot. Looking down on the immigrant-filled neighborhood, a Romanian woman watches suspiciously. A school janitor gets involved, then a Guatemalan family. Then muscle-bound Curtis, trying to win back Lateesha. Pregnant Maricela. Amir from India. A sense of community sprouts and spreads. Newbery-winning author Paul Fleischman uses thirteen speakers to bring to life a community garden's founding and first year. The book's short length, diverse cast, and suitability for adults as well as children have led it to be used in countless one-book reads in schools and in cities across the country. Seedfolks has been drawn upon to teach tolerance, read in ESL classes, promoted by urban gardeners, and performed in schools and on stages from South Africa to Broadway. The book's many tributaries—from the author's immigrant grandfather to his adoption of two brothers from Mexico—are detailed in his forthcoming memoir, No Map, Great Trip: A Young Writer's Road to Page One. "The size of this slim volume belies the profound message of hope it contains." —Christian Science Monitor And don’t miss Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, the Newbery Medal-winning poetry collection!

Virgil's Georgics first became known to me through an English translation of the great Roman poet's celebration of agriculture and country life. Readings of other English versions, with the inevitable discrepancies in words and meanings, awakened a curiosity to know what Virgil had actually written. A subsequent study of the Latin text and several commentaries revealed, among other things, numerous references to vegetation in terms not clear to most readers. Although a number of commentaries on the plants have been written, too often the reader is furnished only with names, which, unless he has more than average botanical knowledge, are not linked in the mind's eye with the living organisms. The need became apparent to me for illustrations to bring these names to life. -- Introduction.