Catullus' Soldiers, Daniel Goodwin's first poetry collection, takes aim at traditional dichotomies: love and war, the personal and the public, high culture and pop culture, the ancient and modern worlds. In accessible but finely crafted poems that are both understated and energetic, the poet moves easily back and forth between seeming antitheses, his field of vision shifting from Roman surgeon Galen reflecting on skills earned in treating the wounds of gladiators, to a contemporary husband and father reluctantly destroying a backyard wasp nest to protect his children.
