Gilgamesh

Product Description

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first great book of man's heart. Inscribed onto clay tablets around 2400 BC, it enthralled the ancient world with a story of love, heroism, friendship, grief & defiance of the Gods. That it continues to speak to us today, despite its fragmentary state, is testimony to the power & humanity of its themes: King Gilgamesh's lament for his dead friend Enkidu is still among the most powerful poems of mourning in literature. Inspired by the universality of the Gilgamesh story, the poet Derrek Hines has produce a magnificent reworking of the epic, which brings it into a modern idiom whilst maintaining its timeless quality. His striking imagery breathes a new sensuality & vigour into the characters; his poised & energetic language moves seamlessly between the lyric & the bellicose, the comic & the tragic, the classical & the contemporary. Like Christopher Logue's War Music, or Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, this is a work that will communicate to today's reader the sheer excitement & wonder that its first audiences must have felt five thousand years ago.