Michael Longley's 'Laertes'.

Ulysses/Odysseus again. This time one of Michael Longley’s superb reimaginings of Homeric episodes. That magnificent final line, ‘‘And cradled like driftwood the bones of his dwindling father’ with all its humanity and compassion, can be offset against ‘The Butchers’ in which Longley describes, unflinchingly, the brutality of Odysseus’ treatment of the Suitors and Maids.