St Catz's Shirley Society, founded and named for the Renaissance playwright John, is the oldest literary society in Cambridge. On Wednesday, they hosted a reading by one of the country's newest poetry presses, Perdika Press, which publishes experimental modern poetry and translations, with two of Perdika's founders, Peter Brennan and Mario Petrucci, and one of their poets, Jackie Rowe, reading from their work.

Mario Petrucci, a former physicist - Brennan introduced him as "a scientist and poet filling the same pair of shoes" - read from his translations of Sappho and Catullus. He works from transliterations, updating the poems to be "part Sappho and part me". The resulting ‘renderings' keep the essential spirit of Sappho's fragments, but are brought into the modern world with appeals to "tower blocks", "the smell of toast" and "Heaven's answerphone". Petrucci brings from Catullus' Latin the best of what he calls "an indigenously, inherently smutty language", with references to "buggered night-servants" and frank expressions of Catullus' appeals to Lesbia.

This type of loose translation is about half Perdika's output. Jackie Rowe read from hers, an upcoming ‘rendering' of Guillaume Apollinaire's poems. Rowe is a fairly new poet, and when Petrucci introduces her he speaks of the pleasure in watching "a long-dead innovator possessing a still living innovator". She wrote 70 poems over six weeks, depicting Apollinaire's "Hollywood view of himself" while fighting in WW1 and writing to girls who "seem to exist merely to have love letters written to them". As she says in one of the poems, "Nothing will grow old", and in both her translations and Petrucci's there is a joy in seeing old language made vivid with images like "artillery wound in wire / my heart breaks out of".

Brennan's poetry, from his collections Didymoi and Torch of Venus, deals partly with Frank O'Hara but is mostly original, and Petrucci read from his works somewhere in january and Heavy Water in addition to translations. Perdika Press is due to visit Cambridge again on April 28th, reading at Trinity, and will be worth hearing; Wednesday's reading finished with each poet present reading from another Perdika collection, which displayed an interesting and innovative selection. Petrucci, a Selwyn alum, claims setting up the press has been "one of the great pleasures of the last fifteen years" - and advises "Bored with revision? Set up a press!"

By Colette Sensier