Shearsman 51 Tony Frazer Books Received, Noted, Recommended. Editorial note: The volume of incoming work is now such that the on-line version of this section is larger than the print version. All content on this page, other than quotations from texts under review, is copyright © Shearsman Books, 2002. David Annwn: Arcs Through. The Poetry of Randolph Healy, Billy Mills & Maurice Scully (Coelacanth Press, Dublin, 36pp chapbook, hand-stitched. £5; £10 limited signed edition. Available via Wild Honey Press.) Valuable essay by Annwn on three Irish poets from the alternative tradition. The first in a series of such essays to be published by Coelacanth, and very welcome. John Ash: Two Books: The Anatolikon / To the City (Carcanet, Manchester, 2002. 140pp, pb, £9.95. Isbn 1-85754-560-5). The Anatolikon was published by Talisman House in the States last year in a large format edition. This volume adds a second collection to it and makes quite a big book. I imagine that the format of Talisman’s edition was driven partly by the length of Ash’s lines, which carry over all the time in the title poem here. The font-size is too large for the page-size in this edition, which I find very irritating. So much for the design. The poetry is of course wonderful, and the new part of this book kicks off with the mocking verse quoted on the back cover: Because they didn’t get it, and wanted to be polite, critics used to call my poetry ‘experimental’. This always puzzled me. Was I some kind of scientist? Was I planning to clone Mallarmé or an ox? What did they mean? Uh. I always thought it was just my heart talking about things I loved and hated, hated and loved, like Scriabin. who was a very strange person, or Gesualdo, who killed someone on a swing and got away with it. In truth, I care little about either of these composers. Ah, sadness and freedom! (My Poetry) It’s been six years since Ash’s last UK book and that was a Selected Poems, and that entire period has been spent in Turkey, a country whose sounds, sights and smells permeate this book, along with the author’s mordant wit, which remains delightfully intact: For some an element of risk greatly enhances the experience of sex, so, for example, they might choose to make love in the path of a hurricane, on the slope of an erupting volcano, on the roof of a house during a flood or in a badly-run game reserve, where, at any moment, they might be trampled to death by a herd of wildebeest. It might be argued that they would hear the herd coming from a long way off, but in the throes of passion they might not. Sliding off the roof could also be a problem, assuming it was pitched. (from Remembering Sex) And what is The City of the title? Istanbul I imagine, city of multiple cultures on the edge of Europe and of Asia: O plumbers of Asia, it is your lyrical and improvisatory compositions that most delight me, filled with the sadness of flooded basements. As with all of Ash’s books, I find this hugely entertaining, and quite unlike most other work in the UK, save maybe that of Peter Didsbury. It is a poetry that we need, and after some ten years without a new collection of his work, it is salutary to be reminded of that fact. I laugh out loud reading this poetry more often than I do with any other, and it’s a relief to be able to do that. Fred Beake: The Cyclops (Menard Press, London, 2002. 96pp, pb, £6.99. Isbn 1 874320 38 1). Subtitled Poems, Translations and an Essay, this book comes with illustrations by Fran Burden and is rather beautifully done. Fred Beake’s poetry is more conservative than most of the things that I follow but I value it for its honesty and seriousness. I particularly liked the versions of Homer and Theocritus in this volume. Ken Bolton & John Jenkins: Nutters Without Fetters (PressPress, Berry, NSW, Australia. 27pp, chapbook. Isbn 0-9580367-0-5). More two-handed fun from Bolton and Jenkins in their fifth joint collection. I imagine as much enjoyment was had by the poets writing it as I had in the reading of it. I wonder how they read them live, one at a time, a bit each, random selection? Tilla Brading: Notes in a Manor: of speaking (Leafe Press, 1 Leafe Close, Chilwell, Nottingham NG9 6NR, 2002. 21pp, chapbook, centre-stapled, £2.50 + 50p p&p within the UK). A welcome new sequence by Tilla Brading who continues to develop her strenuous language games. Part of this previously appeared in Shearsman. Richard Caddel / Anthony Flowers: Quiet Music of Words. Conversations (West House Books, Sheffield, 2002. 40pp, chapbook, centre-stapled, £4.50. Isbn 1-904052-06-1). Revised edition of the interview that appeared in a very short run last year. Worthy companion to the new Selected Poems from the same press (see below): buy them as a pair. Richard Caddel: Magpie Words. Selected Poems 1970-2000 (West House Books, Sheffield, 2002. 182pp, pb, £12.95. Isbn 1-904052-03-7. Distributed in the USA by SPD). This summing-up of Caddel’s career as a poet to date is a valuable one and, in keeping with the West House track record to date, is superbly designed and produced. To confuse matters completely, the book is organised alphabetically by title, rather than chronologically, thus suggesting that the life’s work is all of a piece, as well it might be. You need to know, though, what’s here and what’s not, so here’s a quick rundown: 22 pages from Sweet Cicely, 27 from Uncertain Time (but all of the Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition) 25 from Larksong Signal, all of For the Fallen, which is a Wild Honey chapbook, all of Underwriter, which was a Maquette Press pamphlet plus a few other poems that I think have only appeared in magazines and pamphlets, such as Counter which I published in Shearsman a while back. So the three individual collections are still worth acquiring, in so far as a majority of each one is NOT here, and this Selected is worth having even if you have those individual books, because they constitute only half of the whole. So much for the economics. On the poetry side of things, this book is a delight, a fine survey and not, thank goodness, a monument. It draws a line neatly under the poet’s career to date and serves equally as an introduction to the next phase. Music has always been behind Caddel’s work, as it was behind his mentor Bunting’s, and it’s fascinating to see the application of musical forms to words throughout this book, and the keen eye for the natural world. A book to read and re-read; I’m delighted that the author has been so well-served. Alison Croggon: Attempts at Being (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 174pp, pb, £9.95, $13.95, A$21.95, C$22.95. Isbn 1-876857-42-0). 37 pages of this book are devoted to an opera libretto based on Büchner’s Lenz. Another 15pp are devoted to a theatre piece called The Famine, ten more to a performance piece called Arthur, and a further seven to an improvisatory stage piece. These performance texts are interspersed amongst a large group of poems, some of which I like very much indeed and others which leave me a little puzzled. First time through I found myself responding to some very beautiful short lyrics; next time around the big ones were coming into focus with their extraordinary levels of energy and propulsion. Amplitudes was a particular favourite: Never enough but always that desire which returns And it always does return, although the stars are not propitious They say for example today that I will be offered more opportunities than I can accept And I take that to mean the kisses which will not fit on my skin Which has grown private overnight and wishes to hide its shames… If I have a negative here, it’s that the performance texts got in my way, partly because I’m a resolutely non-theatre-person (which is indeed my problem, not anyone else’s). I thought they obscured the flow and interactions of what was, intrinsically, a fine collection of poems. Linh Dinh (ed): Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane’ohe, Hawai’i 96744, USA. 2001, 61pp, pb, Isbn 0-9712198-3-4.) Tinfish is devoted to the Asian-American nexus and Hawai’ian work. This book is superbly produced, though the small typeface and the coloured paper used in parts of the book caused some difficulty for my ageing eyes. The poets are Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Phan Nhien Hao and Van Cam Hai, presented as being from the fringe and vanguard of an over-censored Vietnamese poetry scene. Reading the translations can be an odd experience, just as it often is with other Asian literatures; it’s as if something’s gone missing along the way – what’s missing of course is any background or sense of the literary tradition that these poets inhabit, including when they are challenging that tradition, or subverting it. So the odd wisps of surrealism that come through – apparently surrealism was more or less acceptable to the Vietnamese ideologues since so many of its adherents were CP members – comes amidst a strange haze of other. I found the book very interesting indeed, even while getting lost within its pages. Reading this kind of work, you ought to have no expectations at all, but you can’t help bringing some along, and then where are you? More please. George Evans: The New World (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT, 2002. 95pp, pb, $13.95. Isbn 1-880684-81-0). Several times in recent years people have asked what happened to George Evans. The questions came up again after I published a fine prose text in a recent issue (now to be reprinted in the 2003 Pushcart Prize Anthology). And as if to answer those questions here he is, back again with a fine collection of work, his first in 10 years. The work has changed, matured, found a new stylistic direction. There are very few short lyrics in this book, and some of the poems are in prose; they deal with the world, with autobiography, with politics and with social realities. They engage. All too much contemporary poetry flops badly when the personal and the political collide but Evans brings it off – the poetry does not get overwhelmed by the political position. Instead the strength of the observations and the power of their delivery merge to get the point across. Now that’s something to be celebrated. A book for reading, re-reading and pondering. Kate Fagan: The Long Moment (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 107pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95, A$19.95, C$19.95. Isbn 1-876857-39-0). Kate Fagan is a 29-year-old Sydney-based poet who is also managing editor of HOW2, which latter fact neatly establishes her innovative credentials. The poems here range from abstract word-driven texts to tender lyrics. There is little engagement with the physical world but her sometimes startling imagery shows signs that a rather more interesting poetry could well develop from here. Bill Griffiths: Durham & other sequences (West House Books, Sheffield, 2002. 64pp, pb, £7.95. Isbn 1-904052-04-5. Distributed in the USA by SPD). Good new collection by Griffiths, produced with the usual panache by West House. It bears all the hallmarks of Griffiths’ work – a fascination with words and sound (grt selvedges of rigs / of bussicles of motes of knowledges…) and an investigative delight in obscure detail. I particularly liked the vegetable poems (…the peak of evolution / when every parsnip aspired (if darwin) to be sapient). Jill Jones: Screen Jets Heaven. New and Selected Poems (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 139pp, pb, £98.95, $13.95, A$21.95, C$22.95. Isbn 1-876857-22-6). Confession time. I’ve never heard of Jill Jones, who is an Australian poet. This is a selection from three previous collections plus some 40 pages of uncollected work. She’s obviously a talented writer but there wasn’t much there to excite my interest, I’m afraid. Andrew Levy: Ashoka (Zasterle Press, La Laguna, Gran Canaria, 2002. 54pp, pb. No price listed. Isbn 84-87467-36-9. Distributed by SPD). I didn’t know Levy’s work until receiving this book, which appears at first to be flimsily produced, but is in fact well-made on lightweight paper and is securely perfect-bound. Web searches indicate that Levy is in fact a well-respected figure in the US. This is a single long poem which, as is often the case with long poems, I like in parts. It’s an open question whether it would lose any overall impact by the arbitrary excision of several pages – on balance, I think not. The title refers not to the Mughal King – begetter of thousands of Indian restaurant names – but “the active absence of sorrow”, apparently the meaning of the Sanskrit word. The text frequently sounds arch, as if a postgraduate student were trying to talk street, but often got it wrong. Sophie Levy & Leo Mellor: Marsh Fear / Fen Tiger (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 101pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95, A$19.95, C$19.95. Isbn 1-876857-07-2). A two-handed first collection for two poets in their 20s and not long out of Cambridge. Inevitably perhaps, this is a little soon for a first collection in both cases, but Levy and Mellor both write with skill and verve. Levy seems more interested in a rougher-edged kind of poetry and Mellor has more cool control of his material: it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here. Kate Lilley: Versary (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 98pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95, A$19.95, C$19.95. Isbn 1-876857-15-3). Now this is a fun book – the first I’ve seen by Sydney-based Kate Lilley, and there is a lovely wry humour work at work here. (Subject for a thesis, somebody: why is modern poetry so po-faced?) The varying registers in thsi book clash to great effect, academe meets street, country-music lyrics meet television, and all put together with a most knowing eye. Worth exploring. Mark Robinson (ed): Words Out Loud: 10 Essays About Poetry Readings (Stride, Exeter, 2002. 82pp, pb, £7.95. Isbn 1 900152 84 3). Essays by Ric Caddel, Keith Jafrate, David Kennedy, Martin Stannard, Lawrence Upton and others. Useful symposium on a vexed subject. I like going to readings but am often disappointed by them and by the apparent inability of many writers to communicate in vox alta. Those that can’t do it should really remain silent. One of the oddest experiences for me was in fact the apparent lack of understanding by one particular writer of his/her own work while reading it aloud. This might have been caused by the sort of tongue-knotting freeze that seems to happen to some people on television or the radio when being interviewed, or worse, it might have been an issue with the text resisting vocalisation – in which case it should not have been read aloud in the first place. Nothing wrong with paper-bound texts. I digress. This book is a good little assemblage and usefully has contributors from most of the existing ‘wings’ of the poetry reading world, as it exists in the UK. Martin Stannard’s amusing description of one particular event sounded all too familiar – but they can’t all be like that, thank goodness. Nathaniel Tarn: Selected Poems 1950-2000 (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT., 2002. 335pp, pb, $19.95 Isbn 0-8195-6542-3. Also available in the UK.). Now, this is a welcome event. Since the mid-70s, Tarn’s books have been scattered across a slew of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (though mainly in the USA), and many of them were hard to find in pre-internet days. The one big Selected/Collected, the Brillig Works edition of Atitlan / Alashka back in 1979, vanished from the marketplace not long after publication, though copies do turn up in the second-hand trade I’ve noticed. It has therefore been almost impossible for an interested reader to get a sense of Tarn’s work as a whole without buying at least all the major individual volumes – an expensive process. Now Wesleyan has done us the favour of a solid selection covering all of the author’s career, neatly summarising a half-century’s work (though I doubt that any of the earlier poems here dates from before 1960 in fact….). As with the Caddel book listed above it may be useful to explain what’s in here. Old Savage/Young City (1964/5 – 2nd date is US publication) – 6pp; Where Babylon Ends (1967/8) – 8pp; October (1969; also published in Vallejo – see below) 9pp The Beautiful Contradictions (1969/70) – 10pp A Nowhere for Vallejo (1971/2) – 24pp *The Persephones (1974) – 4pp Lyrics for the Bride of God (1975/6) – 30pp The House of Leaves (1976) – 32pp *The Microcosm (1977) – 8pp *Birdscapes with Seaside (1976) – 6pp Alashka (1979) – 18pp *The Desert Mothers (1984) – 10pp At the Western Gates (1985) – 28pp Seeing America First (1989) – 18pp *The Mothers of Matagalpa (1989) – 6pp *Flying the Body (1993) – 8pp Poems 1985-1998 (uncollected) – 40pp The Architextures (2000) – 10pp 3 Letters from the City (2001) – 20pp An asterisk indicates a chapbook or pamphlet rather than a full-length collection. After Lyrics for the Bride of God, none of these publications – save The Mothers of Matagalpa, from Oasis Books – appeared in Britain. As with any selection from what is a very large corpus, there are things I would change here and there but, on balance, I think this is a very objective assessment of a fine poetic career. If this were to be the only Tarn volume in your collection, you would have a very good idea of what he was about. (I happen to think at least 4 or 5 of the individual collections should be added, but that’s another story.) In the case of the Lyrics for the Bride of God, a difficult and ambitious book-length work (148pp in the New Directions edition) it is hard to make excerpts but at least the selections here are complete within themselves and not simply bleeding chunks. I have a slight problem with the selections from At the Western Gates, largely because it’s my favourite single volume of Tarn’s poetry. Inevitably the texts get squeezed up together in the Selected – that’s unavoidable – but I regret the excision of a number of texts. Although all five of that book’s long poems are represented here, only the wonderful poem Palenque, the shortest of the five, survives whole. His first two collections get relatively short shrift but, from the distance of almost four decades, I presume they look a little callow. I’ve always liked those books actually, as they typify a certain kind of spirit that bubbled to the surface in the 1960s, and which culminated in Tarn’s ambitious later long works but which was lost to British poetry during the meltdown of the 1970s. From the perspective of the year 2002, it’s amazing how un-British Tarn’s poetry looks, even in its early days. Thematically ambitious and crossing over into his academic disciplines (anthropology, ethnography, native religions) for source material, this was a poetry that could only have erupted in the 1960s, but would not have been intelligible in the 50s and wasn’t very welcome in Britain after about 1975. By 1990 they would have laughed at most of it in mainstream UK journals, which just goes to show what we lost along the way. Tarn has been living in the US since the early 70s, became an American citizen and now regards himself as an American poet. Even in the States much of this kind of work, this kind of ambition, has gone out of fashion since those heady days, though. Fortunately US publishing retains enough depth and range to accommodate Tarn and books continue to appear, albeit with less regularity than before. It’s intriguing to see 40 pages of uncollected work here: it surprises me that these poems weren’t collected before as they are very good indeed. In summary, then, this Selected is a most welcome event, a generous and even essential overview of an oeuvre that too many readers on this side of the Atlantic have lost sight of, and that too many US readers may have missed these past 15-20 years. We need this kind of book and Wesleyan deserves plaudits for having put it together. I hope it establishes his reputation once and for all – then we can have a Collected perhaps? Scott Watson: No Vision Will Tell. 100 Selected Poems 1992-2002 (Bookgirl Press, Sendai, Japan, 2002. 123pp, pb, $10, ¥1500. Isbn 4-915948-25-0). I’m not sure who distributes this in the USA, but I imagine that SPD or Longhouse will have copies. Production values here are high, as in many Japanese books. A very nicely constructed paperback on a kind of écru colour paper. I rather like Watson’s lightweight lyrics, with their inevitable oriental tinge. If I don’t think that Japanese poetic styles move well into English, there is a kind of Anglo (or more correctly, American) variant that mimics the effect of such poems as they sound in translation; Watson operates in this territory and does it well. A pleasant book that I’m pleased to have. Mark Weiss: Figures. 32 poems (Chax Press, Tucson, AZ, 2001. 32pp, chapbook, npl.) As with a previous Chax publication that I’ve seen, this is very well-produced. The poetry too is most attractive and ranges from the light to the weighty. Good to have. C. D. Wright: Steal Away. Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2002. 233pp, h/c, $25. Isbn 1-55659-172-1) A big and very beautifully produced hardback which does a fine job of summarising the poetic career to date of C D Wright, a southern US poet resident in New England now for many years, but who writes like no-one else I can think of, north, south, east or west. The first of her books that I read was Tremble (Ecco Press, NY, 1996), a quite remarkable collection of short lyric poems that I often return to. Most of her previous books were already out of print at that time and it was hard to track any down. Two years later however Deepstep Come Shining appeared (also from Copper Canyon), a difficult and wide-ranging book-length work that uses poetry, prose narrative and hybrid forms to mash together memory, observation, history, myth, allegory, recorded voices, snippets of Lord knows what, so that the poem becomes an echo of life itself. If anything that book is cinematic, not Hollywood-cinematic but Tarkovsky-cinematic: the Tarkovsky of The Mirror. The earlier poems here, such as those drawn from Translations of the Gospel Back Into Tongues (1982), are far more predictable in formal terms but there’s a tensile strength to the verse, a tight control coupled with a merciless eye and accurate ear, which sets her apart. In Further Adventures With You (1986 – 16 pages here), the style loosens up quite a lot, and dream landscapes – shot through with memory as they must be – leave weird echoes in the reader’s head that start to re-echo when you get to deepstep. By the time we get to 1991’s String Light, we’re sometimes in radical territory, explorative, pushing out the boundaries to see how far they’ll go, to see just what will go into a poem, or how it can come out. We still have those poems of memory though, the author’s native Arkansas writ large. Maybe you have to be from there to hear it sing: Give me your waterweeds, your nipples, your shoehorn and your four-year letter jacket, the moulded leftovers from the singed pot. Now let me see your underside, white as fishes. I lower my gaze against your clitoral light.     (Lake Return, from The Ozark Odes) 1993’s Just Whistle (A Valentine) is a long sequence that is intensely concerned with the body, with sexual imagery, with life and with death. I imagine this is not the whole book reprinted here so I’m just going to have to hunt down a second-hand copy somewhere: Let the record show the body has never made such plaintive claims before except in the wake, the wake of.     (from On the Morn Of) Something about straight gold hair on a pillow Something about writing by the kingly light in the quick minutes left before lips     (from Voice of the Ridge) If books can make you happy this is surely one of them. It’s one you need to have. Three Books from Phylum Press: Cathy Eisenhower: Language of the Dog-Heads (Phylum, Hadley, MA., 2001. Unpaginated chapbook. Not for sale.) Peter Gizzi: Revival (Phylum, New Haven, CT, 2002. Unpaginated chapbook. Not for sale.) Roberto Tejada: Amulet Anatomy (Phylum, Buffalo, NY & Amherst, MA, 2001. Unpaginated chapbook. Not for sale.) Why am I noting books that are not for sale, you might ask, and why indeed are they not for sale? Well, Phylum operates outside of the marketplace entirely. Utterly. When the publishers have enough money they put out another book. Said book is distributed gratis to a circulation list of those deemed worthy. I seem to have fallen into the latter category, at least briefly, owing to the fact of a prior acquaintance with Roberto Tejada, an American poet who ran the excellent bilingual US/Mexican magazine Mandorla a few years ago. Each of these chapbooks is a limited signed edition, and each has seen the involvement of an artist or photographer in its design. The Eisenhower book has chopped up postcards glued onto the front cover, and its endpapers are cannibalised from a Rand McNally atlas. The Gizzi book has a photograph on the cover by David Byrne (the former Talking Head?), and comes ‘slipcased’ in a stiff see-through plastic folder. The Tejada is machine-stitched across the cover in two directions, and also has a pink plastic zipper. So these are all delightful objects, but the work within is in each case of great interest too, Tejada’s poems of observation and sexuality, Eisenhower’s collaging of verse and prose, the narrative footnotes subverting the poetic texts to which they ‘refer’, and Gizzi’s fine meditation that begins “It’s good to be dead in America”. These books offer a great deal, both as collections of poetry and as objects. Good to have in more ways than one. MAGAZINES The Gig 11 (ed. Nate Dorward, 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, Canada M2N 2B1. Email: ndorward@sprint.ca. Single issues C$7; 3-issue subscription US$14, C$18; Overseas sub: £10. Cheques payable to Nate Dorward.) The Gig is a consistently interesting mag devoted to poetry from the UK, the US and Canada, although the UK tends to get a little more room than the others. This issue has Ian Davidson, Jackson Mac Low, Lissa Wolsak, Allen Fisher, Ira Lightman and others. Oasis 104 & 105 (ed. Ian Robinson & Yann Lovelock, 12 Stevenage Road, London SW6 6ES. Single issue £2.50; subs £6 for 4 issues. Cheques to Oasis Books. Non-UK subs $30 for 4, airmail, $ cheques payable to Robert Vas Dias.) No. 104 has John Hall, Richard Dove, Frances Presley and a contentious review of Middleton’s The Word Pavilion. 105 has, inter alia, Harry Guest, Ken Edwards. Michael Hamburger, Tim Allen, and some translations of Paraguayan women poets, and why not? Oasis is as energetic, unpredictable and enjoyable as ever. Pity about that Middleton review though: the book obviously touched a raw nerve. There's no accounting for taste. OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED Janet Murch & Bob Mee: The Promise of Rest – Anthology (Ragged Raven Press, Snitterfield, Warks. Pb, 79pp, £6. isbn 0 9520807 9 6). John Robinson: The Cook’s Wedding (Ragged Raven Press, Snitterfield, Warks. Pb, 126pp, £6.99. Isbn 0 9520807 8 8). Rupert M. Loydell: The Museum of Improvisation (Wild Honey Press, Bray, Ireland. 10pp chapbook, Isbn 1 903090 34 2). David Kennedy & Keith Tuma (eds): Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity (Cherry on the Top Press, Sheffield, 2002. 200pp, pb. Special issue of The Paper, 29 Vickers Road, Firth Park, Sheffield S5 6UY). W.D. Jackson: Then and Now (Menard Press, London, 2002. 144pp, pb, £7.99. Isbn 1 874320 04 7).