Shearsman 50: Reviews

Shearsman 50

Tony Frazer

Books Received, Read, Enjoyed & Otherwise Noteworthy

John Ashbery: As Umbrellas Follow Rain (Qua Books, Lenox, Mass., 2001; h/c, 48pp. $20. ISBN 0-9708763-0-0.) A new press, edited by Michael Gizzi and Craig Watson, and it starts with something of a bang in the form of a new Ashbery collection. Some of Ashbery’s more recent work has not been as interesting as one has to come expect, but this is an excellent volume. This poet has an extraordinary imagination, a delight in words, and that odd avuncular style which is deliberately at odds with the strangeness of the ‘content’. Consider the elegiac ending to the poem Chinese Whispers:-

The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.
Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them
without noticing. We, too, are taller,
our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured
with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vague,
according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,
a secret thread.
Peace is a full stop.
And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,
now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,
for what purposes we do not know.

No-one else can do that. In short, a delightful volume, which Ashbery fans will need no prompting to acquire. I doubt it will convert the unconvinced, but most open-minded readers will enjoy the book, and I think a small-press venture of this nature deserves to be supported.

Kenneth Cox: Collected Studies in the Use of English (Agenda Editions, London, 2001. Pb, 269pp, isbn 0 902400 69 X). I used to read Agenda only to catch Cox’s thoughtful, well-written essays, so it’s a pleasure to be able to have a compilation of them here. Recommended.

Peter Dent: Unrestricted Moment (Stride, Exeter, 2002. 97pp, pb, £7.95, $14, isbn 1 900152 76 2. www.stridebooks.co.uk; www.stridebooks.com Distributed in the USA by SPD.) A fine collection of Dent’s airy lyrics, his first full-length volume for a while. A excellent summing-up of his work at the close of the 20th century. Buy this book. Consider this poem, Cancellation:

Will we not entirely know it
To unlovely ends but hope for
More which prime account
Is opened often a voice

And just an ordinary mist
Through trees will disappear
Long waiting for it slowly

At first the wind is not
Is she not indescribable the
Nothings of every look

Here’s love lean into it

Chris Emery: Dr Mephisto (Arc, Todmorden, pb, £8.95, 87pp. Isbn 1 900072 67 X) A good first collection, although – as with most first collections – there is no unified style to it. On balance, a stimulating volume. It will be interesting to follow Emery’s development.

Francisco García Lorca: The Tamarit Poems (translated by Michael Smith; Dedalus Press, Dublin. €8.80, £6.95, pb, isbn1 901233 86 3.) A fine new translation of Lorca’s posthumous volume Diván del Tamarit by Michael Smith, who appeared in the last issue of Shearsman as a translator from the Anglo-Saxon. This book is available in both the UK and the US and should be sought out by Lorca enthusiasts who don’t have access to the entire text – the Spanish originals are included.

Martin Gray: Blues for Bird (Santa Monica Press, pb, 286pp, $16.95, C$25.95, isbn 1-891661-20-5. www.santamonicapress.com). A biography of Charlie Parker in rhythmic unrhymed verse by a Canadian poet who specialises in biographical verse. (He’s also ‘done’ Modigliani, Pollock and Gilles Villeneuve.) Alas I’m not a jazz aficionado and have only a passing acquaintance with Parker’s work – which seems to have done for jazz what modernism did for literature – and thus a good deal of this book goes straight past me. It’s telling that the appreciative quotes on the rear cover all come from jazz musicians, and I have a suspicion that they may well be the best audience for the book. Try it out if you’re into jazz, then.

Drew Milne: The Damage. New and Selected Poems (Salt, Cambridge, 2001. Pb, 117pp, £7.95, $12.95, C$16.95, A$19.95.) A valuable survey of Milne’s work to date. At their best, these poems, teetering on the edge of the communicable, offer a delightful playful surface, as if unexpected words had some slipped into someone else’s structures.

Geraldine Monk: Noctivagations (West House Books, Sheffield, pb 118pp, £10.95, isbn 0 9531509 9 2. Distributed in the USA by SPD.) This is the first full-length collection I’ve seen of Geraldine Monk’s work and very welcome it is. I’ll confess that my interest in performance writing is limited at best which reduces, for me, the impact of some of this book, but I enjoyed the more traditional (?) pieces such as Trilogy. As with all West House Books, this is a very fine production, so far above most small-press standards as to be unrecognisable as such. Recommended.

Rochelle Owens: Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (Junction Press, San Diego, 2001. Pb, 220pp, $20. isbn 1-881523-12-8). With an introduction by Marjorie Perloff. This is a big one in more ways than one. Perloff’s claim that Owens is a proto-Language-Poet sits somewhat oddly alongside the poet’s outright assertive communication here. So what is it, and what is she? Well, mainstream verse it isn’t, either American or British. Avant-garde? Maybe; there are recognisable gestures here from the front lines. Feminist? Yes. Angry feminist? Yes again, although not in the way one might expect. Basically the theme of this book is Mona Lisa / la Gioconda, subject of the Leonardo painting. A series of interlinked narrative layers and personae play out a confrontation – the male creative genius, the female sitter & mysterious icon, Freud, even pre-Columbian America and the horror of its meeting with European invaders. The author’s level of distrust and dislike of the violent realities of our past is – certainly from a narrative standpoint – somewhat disingenuous, and I find the simplistic associations of rape/invasion/masculinity/male creative genius etc etc a little wearing. On the other hand, there’s an undeniable power to the writing and it positively leaps off the page in places. I suppose I don’t like the entirety of Luca because that forces me to swallow aspects of the book that I don’t appreciate, but I do like it in parts, because there’s a masterly writer at work in there. On balance I’d recommend the book.

Oskar Pastior: Many Other Compartments. Selected Poems. Translated by Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton & Rosmarie Waldrop. (Burning Deck, Providence, RI, 2001. Pb, 120pp, $10. isbn 1-886224-44-7) Pastior – of Transylvanian Saxon origin – is the only German member of Oulipo, just as Harry Mathews is the only anglophone member, and the delight in games that one would expect from this is at the forefront of the selection here. I’ll admit some bias here: I adore Pastior’s work and have done since first discovering it in Middleton’s translations back in 1982 (when I published them in the first series of this magazine). I’ve since tracked down most of his German collections and – knowing the originals, and the apparent impossibility of translating them, I am amazed at the wonderful outcome here. Obviously it helps when your translators are writers as good as these three, but it also helps when it appears they’ve had fun doing it. There’s no point in quoting any of this, as no one text is especially representative of the volume as a whole, but if you like the playful end of the avant-garde (think Jandl, early Raworth, among others) you’ll love this. Often spectacular re-creations rather than translations per se, but Pastior has been wonderfully well-served here. At $10 it’s a snip, quite frankly, and I think you should all go out and buy it.

J H Prynne: They that Haue Powre To Hurt (privately printed, Cambridge, 2001, pb, 86pp, £9.95). Subtitled A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94, this is a dense, learned, and invigorating exposition of a wonderful poem.

J H Prynne: Unanswering Rational Shore (Object Permanence, Glasgow, 2001, chapbook, 20pp.) This is one of those books that goes back on the shelf in the “too dumb to understand it” section.

Nathaniel Tarn: Three Letters from the City / Tri Pis’ma iz Goroda (WeaselsleevesPress, Santa Fe / Borey Art Centre, St Petersburg, pb, $9.75. Distributed by SPD in the USA). An odd book this, in that (not only is it in English and Russian) it is composed of three texts written at a considerable remove from one another. The First Letter dates from 1968 and was published in Tarn’s excellent 1974 Black Sparrow collection The House of Leaves. The Second is from the mid-90s and appeared in a US journal. The Third is from 1998 and was first published in Shearsman two years ago. It’s always a pleasure to see a new Tarn collection, especially as we don’t see them as often as I’d like these days.

They rarely learned the language to perfection.
But each one as he came
brought from his far-off city some illusion.
To the land of duck
they brought the image of the land of swans,
turned the duck into swans.
Illusion shorelined to reality.

from The Image of the Land of Swans (from The Second Letter)

Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop: Ceci n’est pas Keith. Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie. (Burning Deck, Providence, RI, 2001. www.burningdeck.com. Pb, 93pp, $10. Distributed by SPD in the USA and by Spectacular Diseases in the UK.) Autobiographical texts by two leading figures in the US avant-garde scene. Well worth acquiring.

John Wilkinson: Signs of an Intruder (Parataxis Editions, Cambridge, 2001; chapbook, 22pp). I continue to have a problem with Wilkinson’s poetry and have failed to get my head around this one. File with the Prynne volume above.