Tunnels meeting is an apt image, for this is more than just the usual selecting and translating job of the editor of an anthology of poetry; John Fairleigh, a lecturer at Queen's University of Irish Studies, who is quite correctly described on the elegant cover as "Ireland's unofficial cultural ambassador to Romania", has brought together 10 Irish poets and 10 Romanian ones, paired them off and asked each to produce versions of the other's work. It's a fruitful idea which sees Seamus Heaney rework Ana Blandiana - "I am from summer,/A homeland so frail/ The fall of a leaf/Could crush it to nothing" - Paul Muldoon team up with Marin Sorescu - "My cat is washing herself/ with her left paw,/There's going to be a war" - and Derek Mahon sketch in the air the enigmatic lines of Cezar Baltag.
Fairleigh's introduction also provides a timely reminder of the intensity and bleakness of recent Romanian experience; timely and, also, perhaps, necessary, tar in the seven years since his over throw and death everyone seems to have forgotten how to spell the name of Nicolae Ceausescu, rendered here several times as Ceaucescu.
