When thinking of world-view altering books, it is likely that commentaries on early Greek poetry are not what comes to mind. Yet I will hazard that B.’s Greek Lyric is such a volume. If your earliest encounter with Greek lyric was via D.A. Campbell's Greek Lyric Poetry: a Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac & Iambic Poetry (1982, new edition) and of early Greek poems that are often (but not always) on erotic themes, often (but not always) employing a first person speaker describing individual experience, ‘I am lord Enyalius’ acolyte / and know too the Muses’ gift of love’ (Archilochus 1 IEG, trans. K. Chew), B.’s book presents Greek lyric as a far more closely circumscribed category of poetic texts. His selection begins with Alcman 1 PMG and ends with Timotheus’ Persians (791 PMG) and anonymous song in the form of carmina popularia and Attic skolia. In between is poetry by six of the other nine canonical lyric poets – Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon and Simonides – to the exclusion of poems such as Alcaeus 6 Voigt (the ‘ship of state’), Sappho 55 Voigt and 94 Voigt (in which the forgetting of another woman after her death and the speaker's wish to be dead are described respectively), Simonides 22 FGE and the epitaph on Timocreon attributed to him by Athenaeus (10.415–16) and the Palatine Anthology (7.348). What may seem to be glaring omissions are to the gain of the study of Greek lyric.

B.’s edition is a vade mecum for The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric (2009), in whose introductory chapter he writes of Greek lyric as too often being seen as ‘one of the least accessible areas of Greek literature’ with a ‘distinct set of challenges’ (pp. 1–2). ‘“Lyric” in contemporary literary criticism is a term as allusive as it is suggestive’: B. opens his introduction to his volume of Greek lyric by not shying away from the difficulties of determining what lyric, whether ancient or modern, is, such that it is no easy task to define precisely what ‘poetic quality’ and what ‘poetic mode’ the term ‘lyric’ denotes (p. 2). Fortunately, B.’s deliberately narrow selection of poems and his richly informed commentary make a fair case for just what lyric's ‘poetic quality’ and particular ‘poetic mode’ are. As he writes, early Greek lyric can first be thought of as ‘poetry composed in sung metres’ which, in contrast to other early poetic genres such as epic and elegy, had ‘a greater variety of rhythmic and melodic expression’ (p. 3). Metre and dialect are the concluding subjects of B.’s introduction with a focus on how the former functions in terms of ‘manifest repetition’ and the differences of stichic vs strophic composition (pp. 22–3). A listing of the various metres would be a helpful reference, though the absence of this does serve the purpose of encouraging an attentiveness to metre not in terms of ‘labels but the development and flow’ as a strophe unfolds (pp. 23–4). B.’s introductory discussion of dialect pinpoints the use of ‘artificial literary languages’ in lyric and the extent to which ‘dialect is particularly vulnerable to changes in the process of transmission’, due to Archaic alphabets, reperformance in different time periods or locales, and the conventions of Hellenistic editors and their methods of systematisation and, at times, resulting simplification (pp. 24–5).

B.’s commentary on individual poems is threaded with thoughtful reference to the scholarly output and papyrus findings of the intervening decades since the publication of Campbell's volume. Concerns of chronology, geography, the length of individual poems, performers and instruments (with discussion of monody and solo performance vs choral), and occasion (highlighting the symposion and the festival in Greek poleis) are examined. The poems themselves are chronologically arranged with metrical notations inserted to complete fragmentary lines. The notes for each poem open with an overview of the subject matter, a sketch of what can be known of an author's life, allusions to other poetic texts and literary reception. These are followed by a metrical schema, an account of the source for the poem, explanations of features of dialect and references to scholarly studies. Longer poems (such as Alcman 1, Sappho 44 Voigt, the fragments of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis and of Timotheus’ Persians) are preceded by essays in miniature about the language, themes, historical context and word choices in each text. For instance, the notes on Alcman 1 are preceded by a discussion of the relationship between the local myth, the description of the two female leaders and of the chorus of unmarried girls as well as themes of beauty and desire, cosmic entities, fighting, horses and the occasion for this choral poem, all with due awareness of the challenge of pinning down ‘the realities behind the poem’ (p. 61) – B. constantly treads with care regarding scholarly reconstructions of the original circumstances of a poem's performance in view of the ‘considerable risk of circular reasoning when the poetic text is our only evidence, as is often the case’ (p. 10). His introductory discussion of ‘Performers, Authors and the Lyric Voice’ takes up the issue of how to read the ‘I’ in a Greek lyric text whether monodic or choral. By mediating between reading the lyric voice as having an ‘impersonal, indefinitive dimension’ and the awareness that ‘authors matter’, as they may name themselves or refer to events of their life in a poem (p. 15), B. demonstrates due diligence about using poetic texts as evidence for their own context and gently reminds us to apply extreme caution about equating what the ‘I’ of a poem says with its author.

Lyric's competitive interactions with epic are a recurring thread. Sappho 44's evocation of the arrival of Andromache in Troy to marry Hector is shown to be a happy moment preceding the darkness to follow or as a means to ‘exploit the contrast between marriage and death’ (p. 139). The fragment by fragment presentation of Stesichorus’ epic of Geryon reveals a transference of epic heroism to a three-bodied monster (pp. 160–3, 166–71). B. also highlights the use of historical subjects in lyric. The drowning Persian soldier's speech in Timotheus 791 PMG presents the uses of lyric to hone in on a single moment in a compact verbal style; such features are also noted in Alcman 89 PMG, Alcaeus 140 Voigt and Anacreon 358 PMG. B.’s inclusion of Simonides 542 PMG on the ‘difficulty of being a good man’, ἄνδρ᾽ ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀλαθέως γενέσθαι χαλεπόν (p. 214) – a text gleaned from Plato's Protagoras – speaks to the complexities the study of Greek lyric casts on its readers, from grasping historical debates about social status and moral values to uncovering what constitutes the very text of a poem from the sources that have come down to us.

Campbell's volume of early Greek poetry leaves hanging the question of what ancient Greek lyric is due to its broad application of the ‘lyric’ label. B.’s ‘green-and-yellow’ commentary acknowledges the complexities involved in even stating what ancient Greek lyric is while still delivering a sustained sense of what makes the ancient genre of lyric so memorable. Some may prefer to use B.’s edition in tandem with Campbell's. Doing so can offer a fuller sense of early Greek poetry but may well leave a student yearning for B.’s guiding voice as evidenced by his well-wrought edition of Greek lyric poetry.