Third poem in the book (actually Catullus 5):

My Lesbia, let us live and love And not care tuppence for old men Who sermonise and disapprove. Suns when they sink can rise again, But we, when our brief light has shone, Must sleep the long night on and on. Kiss me: a thousand kisses, then A hundred more, and now a second Thousand and hundred, and now still Hundreds and thousands more, until The thousand thousands can’t be reckoned And we’ve lost track of the amount And nobody can work us ill With the evil eye by keeping count.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum, dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus invidere possit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Language nerdery alert: This is the first ever recorded use of the word bāsium to mean a kiss; most Latin-derived languages have kept it (French baiser, Italian bacio, Spanish beso) whereas the Latin synonyms ōsculum and suāvium have vanished from the lexicon.

Many many years ago, two friends who were getting married had the nice idea of giving everyone at the wedding one of the Phoenix paperbacks then produced by Orion, and this was one of the two we got. (No idea now what the other one was.) I've dipped into it from time to time, and finally decided to read it through. Less than 120 poems by Catullus survive, all presumed to have been written around 60 BC, and 57 of them are presented in this book (omitting I think the longer and less romantic ones).

It's difficult to sum up poetry, especially translated from a foreign language; I must say the ones that grabbed me most were not the poltiical references (though it’s interesting to see disparaging remarks about Julius Caesar from someone who knew him) but the short narrative poems about some particular incident, and the passionate ones like no 5 above, whose first half Sir Walter Ralegh translated thus:

The sun may set and rise,
But we, contrariwise,
Sleep, after our short light,
One everlasting night.

And there’s the well known 85:

I hate and love. If you ask me to explain         The contradiction, I can’t, but I can feel it, and the pain         Is crucifixion.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

James Michie’s translations seem to me to catch both humour and passion, from a writer of over 2000 years ago who still catches our humanity.