John Gallas, who guided us around the world in his celebrated anthology The Song Atlas, here zooms in on Europe. The poems he perfects in English are chosen from the work of the famous (Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Pasolini) and the still-to-be known (the Olafsson brothers, Renée Vivien, Yulia Zhadovskaya). Native speakers provide him with literals and the poems’ sounds. Gallas then ‘re-poems’ them. They constitute an exhilarating poetic journey across a continent and through time. All human life is here: love and despair, excess and wild wistful calm. Gallas understands the many musics of language. His book is a trove of the purest currency of Europe, poetry.