The editors need not have worried. Divining Dante is a pleasure to read because not one of the seventy poets in it has reflected on Dante’s influence in a predictable or hackneyed way. Neither do they lean excessively towards ideas of cataclysm or punishment. For each poem that descends into Inferno, another reaches for Paradiso or the moments in Purgatorio when tormented souls rhapsodise about the joy that awaits them once their sins are cleansed.

The book’s other remarkable quality is its global reach. It brings together writers from Italy (in translations by Moira Egan), the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Singapore, and India. Such breadth of vision in an Australian anthology is impressive. It reflects a belief, rare among our publishers, that there is an eager audience for this kind of work, and that the poems can interest and provoke readers without doctrinal poetic statements. The only ambitions the editors express are that the book will open new possibilities to readers who are familiar with Dante, and encourage those who are not to approach him with curiosity.

The light editorial touch has allowed the contributing poets to interpret the anthology’s purpose freely, often to exciting effect. The most interesting poems are those that connect to Dante loosely or indirectly. The reader gains a stronger idea of the authors as free agents with something distinctive to say about their own times and places, with the added intrigue of an unspoken, slant, or barely conscious negotiation of Dante in the background.

Two standout examples are ‘Trittico scientifico’ by Franco Buffoni (Italy) and ‘At Purteen Harbour’ by Jane Clarke (Ireland). Both poets gain from Dante a sense of the marvel of longevity. Buffoni’s short triptych reflects on deep time and the preservation or breakdown of matter. Each part alludes – just – to the world of the Comedy, but Buffoni’s achievement is to evoke the primordial mechanism that has allowed Dante’s work to survive in the first place: the ‘beast-conscience’ of isotopes and DNA, which also warn us of climate apocalypse. With equally impressive economy, Clarke relates a folk memory that grants veterans of shark fishing the blessing of seeing the recovery of species they destroyed. As boys, ‘they couldn’t wash the smell [of shark flesh] from their skin’, but as old men their regret is purged when twelve basking sharks swim into their harbour, tailfins recalling the sails of the old boats: ‘It was as if they’d been forgiven.’ Buffoni and Clarke really do ‘divine’ Dante, inferring the long arc of the Comedy in a contemporary setting, without exposing it.

Most of the other poets draw on aspects of the Comedy overtly or address Dante directly, but such choices do not sacrifice originality. Judith Crispin imagines an Australian ‘Purgatory’ in which tormented natural imagery reflects the abuse of sacred land. Adrian Caesar thinks likewise, admitting at the end of a finely observed description of an Australian beachside suburb, ‘our little piece of paradise / depends on someone else’s hell’. Mirroring Dante’s condemnations of church corruption, Eleanor Hooker denounces the suffering the church has inflicted on Irish children. Jean Sprackland (UK) poignantly twists the redemptive function of purgatory, instead seeing ‘purification’ in her father’s vanishing into dementia, ‘where language belongs to others’ but the father can still respond instinctively to nature. Craig Raine (UK) discounts redemption ironically: the speaker of his ‘Paradiso’ is surprised to find that heaven is an eternal vision of the mundane spot where he died. Such adaptations of Dante’s ideas are the basis of most poems in the anthology.

Many are also generous with humorous possibilities. In almost every section of the book, poets approach Dante playfully, taking opportunities to satirise Singapore’s taste for excess (Christine Chan, ‘Gluttony is no sin in Singapore’), to interpret the Comedy as an epic movie whose ‘sequels are being shot’ (Suhit Kelkar, India, ‘Lights, Camera, Dante!’), or to object that Paradiso contains nothing that real people consider heavenly (Tabish Khair, India, ‘Fake News’). The speaker of American poet D. W. Fenza’s ‘Mr Blanquito in Hell’ is an advertising executive who has sold his soul to capitalism.

Not every inclusion is successful. Several poets adopt Dante’s terza rima verse structure, but it is less elegant in English than in Italian and can become an unwieldy distraction. One element that weighs down the book is a tendency, not restricted to any national group, to slip into grandiose abstractions and emotional overstatement. In reaching for Dante’s cosmos, some poets overreach their own material.

These cases are outnumbered, however, by poems that succeed in balancing the cosmic and abstract with the immediate and concrete, using Dante’s sharp sense of scale as a model. ‘Inferno’ by Medha Singh (India) and ‘E ombra vedi’ by Massimo Gezzi (Italy) are two examples. They are very different poems – one a set of portraits of characters from Inferno, the other a bleak reflection on lockdown isolation – but both hit home with great poignancy because they create tension between intangible and intimate forces. ‘Your sin was none but to forsake the myths / of your fathers,’ Singh’s Dante cries to the damned soul of the lustful Francesca, ‘it was wanting life / to be all your own’. ‘Bodies and distances,’ laments Gezzi, for whom lockdown makes us ghosts of ourselves:

embraces
typed and not felt, hands
that don’t recall the squeeze of handshake …
[…]
And when we’re solid again,
will we know how to recognise each other?
Will we still be real?

In some of the best poems, as in the best parts of Dante, the personal chafes against the supernatural rather than yielding to it.

Divining Dante is a refreshing contribution to our poetry landscape and, surely, to those of the other countries involved. It is a showcase for the multitude of ways in which tradition in poetry lives on through invention, a fitting tribute to the poet who best symbolises that endurance.