Concatenatio Catulliana: A New Reading of the Carmina.

?Linear readings of Roman poetry books are - happily - gaining statistically on the type of approach that uses hypothetical poem dates to reconstruct the story of the liber?s composition, and C., who follows this trend, has produced a valuable contribution to our interpretation of such libra. In Catullus? case, the poem-by-poem strategy unearths powerful evidence to support the theory that this author set out the collected poems himself. (?) C.?s forte in the hunt for lexical and thematic links between carmina is evident: the obscene innuendo. Recent work on Roman sexualities will see itself corroborated as C. demonstrates that not merely pairs, but whole series of poems are interwoven with ambiguous expressions which signal that the texts - between the lines, at least - somehow have to do with the erotic ?lusus? typical of Catullus. (?) the puns C. discovers in this area will greatly stimulate modern readings, given that the existing commentaries (?) usually dodge the issue. In the allusions-to-contemporaries department, however, he tends to go overboard. (?) The same must be said of C.?s readings of the Lesbia-poems, where he does his best to uncover hidden allusions to Clodia, her brother, and their (?) goings on (?). C.?s argumentation is weakened somewhat by the fact that his method has apparently been influenced simultaneously by post-modern semiotics and old-style philological analysis. He rounds off his running commentaries with brilliant observations on c. 116 and its sense of an ending (p.111) and then proceeds to offer us some rather dated, 1960s/70s-style schematic representations in illustration of ?concentric composition? (?) But, even in the form it has taken, this section of his book will be essential reading for future interpretations of Catullus.? (NIKLAS HOLZBERG in The Classical Review (New Series), 2003, pp.354-355).