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David Constantine is an award-winning poet and translator. His collections include the award-winning Watching for Dolphins, The Pelt of Wasps and Something for the Ghosts; Bloodaxe published his Collected Poems in 2004, and he has been shortlisted for both the Whitbread and Forward poetry prizes. He has translated the work of, among others, Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, and Michaux, and was awarded the Corneliu M Popescu prize for European poetry in translation in 2003. His latest collection, Nine Fathom Deep, comes out this month. For this workshop, I'd like you to write an elegy. The following are a few notes which may be helpful but are certainly not binding: you should write what you like!Formally, though, an elegy is a poem written in elegiac couplets; a line of hexameter followed by a line of pentameter. That definition, however, pays no regard to the poem's particular subject or tone: more generally, an elegy is a poem of lament (in any form), perhaps on the death of a beloved p