Poetry. Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. Tacitus tells, in his Annals, how the Romans were defeated by "a simple woman." On a chariot with her two daughters, who had been raped by Roman legionnaires, Queen Boudica made the round of the Breton tribes, inciting them to follow her into battle and, in the first round, defeated the Roman invader. Paol Keineg's sequence of 40 poems, with their hammered rhythm, their echoes of blows given and taken, raises a monument to Queen Boudica's courage and, by bold anachronisms, to the Bretons that have resisted forced assimilation through the centuries--down to our own time.