Dante's Inferno

by Philip Terry

Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and relocating it to the modern ‘walled city’ of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and ministers for education; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are re-imagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry’s home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time Essex writer-in-residence and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld: ‘I heard the dead, the city dead / The devils that surround us’ (‘Memorial Day’). In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante’s original text.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Ella Kulczar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 9th circle of hell is student housing and Margaret Thatcher is frozen in the ice getting her brain cannibalized by the damned soul of an Irish republican. Incredible nuance and very funny! Belfast for Florence is perfect. The Student Union for the Gate of Dis is also perfect. Even the circles that don’t work quite as well make up for it by being so funny.