“Klug doesn’t skirt an important lesson of the Eclogues : escape is fleeting. Loss, longing and exile dog even the shepherds in this idyll ... Klug confidently reaffirms the abiding comfort of these poems.” —John Tipton In his Eclogues , Virgil offers the reader poems about responding—listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song. Nate Klug’s Rude Woods is an inspired, modern response, a new translation that blends talkative elegance with lyric intensity. “In a manner that is as successful as it is surprising,” notes W.R. Johnson in his introduction, “Klug has devised a conversational idiom that relies on spare diction and spare syntax, on a pure clarity of sight and sound to give us superb poems that give Virgil’s pure lyricism a genuine ‘answering form.’” Nate Klug studied literature at the University of Chicago and theology at Yale. He has published poems in many journals and in a chapbook, Consent (Pressed Wafer). He currently lives and works in Iowa.