Joyce's epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man comes from Ovid's tale of Dedalus and Icarus: "Et ignotas dimittit animum in artes" - "And he sent his soul down among unknown arts". As mysterious arts go, few have become more familiar in recent years than the wizardry of this endlessly inventive Latin poet. Writers have always plundered stories from Ovid, from Chaucer and Gower to Spenser and Shakespeare, so the precedents were good when Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun published their anthology, After Ovid, in 1994. This was the book that gave Ted Hughes the fillip for his blood-stained Tales from Ovid. Now, before you can look up the Latin for bandwagon, it's the prose writers turn.
Most of the poets in After Ovid took it for granted that they had been asked to produce translations; the underlying assumptions in Ovid Metamorphosed are very different. But Ovid's tales are nothing if not flexible. In editor Philip Terry's "Void" the narrator writes a series of sex tips for a men's magazine, drawing protests from feminist readers who fail to notice what he's really up to: writing a (very) free translation of the Ars amatoria. Patricia Dunker's "Sophia Walters Shaw" surfs the same Zeitgeist with a tale of S&M and Proserpine as a high-class hooker. Bodies are hard to get away from in Ovid: amorous, torn and dead bodies, animal, human and divine. Cees Noteboom's "Lessons" features a gooily forensic description of a beetle vomiting on the body of a rat it has selected as the " carrion pellet" in which to lay its eggs. "Caro Data Vermibus" the narrator thinks to himself in Latin: flesh given to worms. Joyce Carol Oates does her bit to keep the maggots in business in "The Sons of Angus McElster", a retelling of the Actaeon story in which six sons murder their father when he humiliates their mother by stripping her naked in public.
Only a few contributors range beyond the short story. One such is Gabriel Josipovici, who applies the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone to the death of his mother in "Heart's Wings". Ceyx and Alcyone are reunited as kingfishers after their deaths, but Josipovici anticipates no such happy reunion in his case. A. S. Byatt contributes an essay on Arachne, quoting Emily Dickinson's address to the spider: "Neglected son of Genius /I take thee by the hand".
Returning to fiction, Margaret Atwood introduces a revisionist note in "The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions", whose Cumaean Sibyl corrects the misunderstanding that she ever said "I want to die". What she said was "I want to cry", she insists, though her pronouncements remain as immutable as ever.
This is the other side of Ovid's quickchange metamorphoses: the ever-present knowledge of grim necessity and death. Many of the contributors to Ovid Metamorphosed prefer the thrill of the sex and transformation to the grimness and death, but the best are equally sensitive to both, since as Josipovici says, death is the ultimate source of metamorphosis.
David Wheatley's second poetry collection, Misery Hill, will be published by Gallery Press later this year. He lectures in English at the University of Hull.