"Catullus (c. 84 - 53 BC) was raised in a leading equestrian family in Verona. At twenty he moved to Rome and fell in with a group of new poets, or neoteroi as Cicero called them, living a hedonistic existence for the better part of a decade. After his brother's death, Catullus' thoughts migrated home, perhaps to help with the family business and make a living to support a wife and family, something he would never achieve before his death at thirty. The pain of his brother's death, coupled with the pain of Lesbia's rejection and her unwillingness to marry him followed him until his final days. In Goodbye Horses, Nathaniel G. Moore reanimates the lion's share of Catullus' surviving poems in an absorbing homage to the beloved romantic, his world, the friends he loved, his style (elegy, anaphora, hyperbaton), the myths he riffed on (Attis, Laodamia and Protesilaus), the writers he admired (Sappho, Cicero) and the family he left behind. The book includes an afterword by the author with insight into Moore's more than twenty years studying, reading, thinking and dreaming with the late Latin bard, how his book differs from others, and why he's spent so many years with this particular dead poet."--