According to T S Eliot, the problem with Ezra Pound’s attempt to modernise Dante’s Hell in The Cantos was that he ended up creating ‘a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends’. In Philip Terry’s supremely witty transposition of Dante’s Inferno (2014), and now its sequel, Dante’s Purgatorio, no such distinction exists. Terry follows his source in drawing together figures from history and myth with luminaries of our own time, friends and colleagues. Hell is Terry’s place of employment, the University of Essex. On its ‘Infernal Campus’, he witnesses the eternal torments reserved not only for murderers and plutocrats, but also for lecherous faculty members and venal vice-chancellors. Purgatory is Mersea Island off the coast of Essex, which is incongruously mountainous here.

In returning to the Divine Comedy, Terry factors in eight years of recent history, including the pandemic. To this sombre subject he brings a fittingly muted touch and a prosody close to the intricately discursive triplets of Dante’s terza rima: ‘When we set out on our journey through Hell,/Three days since, nobody had heard of Covid-19’. As amusing as it was in the first volume to imagine the torments awaiting Blake Morrison, Tony Blair and Jamie Oliver, Terry here intends to purify us of animus. ‘Sectarian hatred’, above all, is the object of his disdain. On the terrace of the wrathful, Catholics and Protestants are ‘untying the twisted knots of their anger’ and Martin McGuinness counsels that the ‘present state of the world is caused predominantly/By one thing and one thing alone: bad leadership’. Nevertheless, Boris Johnson and ‘the one with the small hands’ are among those saved from ‘down below’. The former, saddled with a ‘giant twin-tub’ that washes away pride, escapes Hell on account of his ‘backing then rolling out the vaccine’. In our age of anger, such merciful outcomes are a tonic.

Isabelle Baafi’s adventurous debut, Chaotic Good, is similarly concerned with the business of forgiving, forgetting and moving on. The collection centres on the collapse of a marriage. In ‘Notes on Modality’, Baafi uses a line break to underscore the incompatibility of the couple’s perspectives: ‘I want to call you and