Seize the Fire

After the success of The Riot Act, his version of Sophocles's Antigone, Tom Paulin turned his formidable powers of transformation on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Commissioned by the Open University, Paulin produced a reworking of the myth, deploying a fluent and sinewy diction laced with the vernacular. As drama it is a brilliant object lesson in what is inessential. Plot and character, even action, are secondary to a gripping, inventive and quasi-futuristic treatment of burning contemporary issues - feminism, the corruption of power and authoritarian politics.

Tom Paulin was born in Leeds in 1949 but grew up in Belfast, and was educated at the universities of Hull and Oxford. He has published nine collections of poetry as well as a Selected Poems 1972-1990, two major anthologies, two versions of Greek drama, and several critical works, including The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style and, most recently, Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent. His most recent collection of poems is Love's Bonfire (2012). Well known for his appearances on the BBC's Newsnight Review, he is also the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.