In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: ¿Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful.¿ Bach¿s final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds ¿Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afloat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence.¿ And his afterlife: ¿When three-headed Cerberus greeted him / Socrates replied: I won¿t need / an attack dog, thank you. I married one.¿