Ovid in English, ed. Christopher Martin (Penguin, £9.99 in UK)

From Chaucer and Gower down to modern times, Ovid has had his English translators or writers of free renditions, Dryden being predictably one of the best. Swift, a good latinist, also tried his hand, as did Addison and Pope and even Congreve. In more recent times, Robert Graves has produced Ovidian poems and so has Ted Hughes, the present Poet Laureate. The selection ends, fittingly, with Seamus Heaney's Death of Orpheus from the Metamorphoses.