A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times by Divers Hands - Softcover

Everyone here has put in a lot of hard work, and most of it pays off, some of it handsomely. Croft's rhymes in particular are laugh out loud funny ("Minerva's Owl"/"Simon Cowell") ... And here's the clever thing: even though the poets are using the same scheme, you get more than a glimpse of how their individual voices wound; of what goes on in their heads. This was always Byron's great trick: to teach you something when all you think you are doing is having a good time. --Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

'I hope it is no crime / To laugh at all things', wrote Byron in Don Juan; 'for I wish to know / What, after all, are all things but a show?' Two hundred years after Byron turned his back on the hypocrisy and cant of his native England, fifteen contemporary poets pay homage to Byron s greatest satirical creation by writing a new Don Juan for our own age of cant. A Modern Don Juan follows the sexual adventures of Byron's picaresque anti-hero in the twenty-first century. Mixing Low Comedy and High Seriousness, the book follows night-club DJ Donald Johnson as he stumbles from one romantic disaster to the next. Along the way, the authors pass comment on the customs and common-sense of the contemporary world. Donny seeks his fortune in Cameron's Britain, Berlusconi's Italy and Sydney's clubland. He is a London restaurant critic, a Brussels Eurocrat and a reality TV celeb. If you are quick you can catch him in Greece, Budapest, Central America, a prison cell even in Outer Space. He is indeed new Don Juan for the twenty-first century.