Franz Josef Czernin: elemente, sonette (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2002. Isbn 3-446-20227-7. 159pp, h/c €17.90).

I'm a fan of Czernin’s exceedingly difficult poetry, and had been looking forward to this volume since seeing parts of it in magazines. It contains nothing but sonnets, all rhymed, and he has to be the only avant-gardist anywhere writing rhyming sonnets, let alone sonnets of this complexity. If you can’t read German this is irrelevant, as these poems are unlikely ever to be translated; if you can deal with the language (and do read them aloud to yourself, if your tongue doesn't get stuck in the process) get this book: it’s quite amazing. I confess to liking the previous book (natur-gedichte) more, but anything this man writes is worth your attention.

Federico García Lorca: Collected Poems. Revised Bilingual Edition (ed. Christopher Maurer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2002. 990pp, h/c, $50).

I think there is a softcover edition of this too, and it should be available in the UK. I'm still in my early days with the book, but it's pretty formidable and includes just about everything you need, unless you're obsessive and really do want the juvenilia (which you'll have to get from the Spanish edition of the Obras Completas). The revised edition also includes Poet in New York in its correct form (which can now be established, following the reappearance of the final manuscript in 1999 – the story of this long-lost document appeared in a recent TLS). Whether or not García Lorca is untranslatable, as many have suggested, he is the kind of writer who has to be attempted. For what it’s worth I think he is translatable, but not all the time and not (to be honest) by all of these translators. Some of the more baroque surrealist-inflected pieces sound very odd in English, but then we don't have much in the way of Surrealism in English and nor do we have a Góngora or a Quevedo to echo. By and large, the book is a success, however, and ought to be sought out by anyone interested in this writer – it would best suit those with at least some level of literary Spanish, given the uncertainties, but for all the rest of you – grab it anyway because it's as near as you're likely to get to the work of one of the great 20th Century writers.

Charles Hadfield: The Nothing We Sink Or Swim In (Oversteps Books, Salcombe, Devon. Isbn 0-9541-376-0-4. Pb, 47pp, no price listed).

The third full-length collection by Shearsman regular Charles Hadfield, and published by Anne Born's Devon-based press. There are a couple of minor design problems here, such as the glossy paper, insufficient allowance for guttering, typeface for titles not being the most appropriate, etc. I think I've committed each of these sins at one time or another myself, to be honest. The book's appearance is rescued, however, by the clean & unfussy cover with its Chinese character and neat typography. Hadfield's poems are not noisy — this is a quiet and undemonstrative art, often elegiac in tone, and concerned with other lands, the poet being much-travelled. It’s a pleasure to have a new collection by him.

Two more from Oversteps Books:-
James Cole: From the Blue (40pp, pb, £5.95); Mandy Pannett: Bee Purple (44pp, pb, npl). Two more south-coast poets for this Devon press, and first-time print collections in both cases. I have to say I'm not too excited by what's going on here. The poetry is attractive and accomplished enough but it doesn't get into my soul and doesn't push at the frontiers of perception in any way. Both books are safe and unassuming, well-written of their kind, and as such will no doubt find a more accommodating audience than myself.

David Jones: Wedding Poems (ed. Thomas Dilworth, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002. 83pp, h/c, £12).

Yes, it's that David Jones. These are the last two poems by Jones that remained unpublished, having been left out of the Roman Quarry 'opus posthumous' for reasons personal to the editor of that volume (which strikes me as absurd, and an abdication of academic principles, but what do I know…). If you like Jones, you have to have this book, which is exquisitely produced. The Prothalamion is 36 lines long, and the Epithalamion 236 lines. Essays and scholarly apparatus make up the rest of the book. Further welcome news lies in the fact that the editor of this book is engaged on a biography of Jones for Jonathan Cape, due in 2006.

Alice Oswald: Dart (Faber, London, 2002. Pb, 48pp, £8.99).

Memo to Faber's designers: green on turquoise looks foul. Other than that, the new typographic house-style looks good and clean.

This book has created quite a stir in the British broadsheet press, in a way that poetry usually does not. And then for a book that is only the author's second collection. Some of the press commentary was a wonder to behold, the book being proclaimed in The Independent as "poetry for those who don’t read poetry". This was of course sophistry: it simply meant that the article's author didn't read poetry and was surprised that the book was both readable and enjoyable. We won’t go into what some of the real poetry reviewers said in any detail, but I was amused by the attempt in The Guardian to argue that Alice Oswald had managed to straddle the divide between Hughes and Larkin. Really? Larkin would have hated this.

The book is the result of a few years spent in, on and around the River Dart, a process for which the author received some Lottery funding in the 'Poetry Places' scheme. For once the results of such lubrication are positive. The book is a fine one, and is the first attempt I've seen from a British mainstream perspective to dig into a poetry of place of the kind that Williams was trying in Paterson, for instance. Now that’s not to say that Dart is of the order of Paterson — far from it. Its aims are less ambitious, but this is nonetheless a fine evocation of place, and is formally adventurous, being composed in prose and various kinds of verse, with a sprinkling of marginalia that add to the unfolding of the poem. The voices of real people are a vital part of the process and the interviewees are acknowledged at the beginning of the book. The poem's diction is compelling, and takes every opportunity to swerve into a watery onomatopoeia:

when the lithe water turns
and its tongue flatters the ferns
do you speak this kind of sounds
whirlpool whisking round?

If it clunks now and again:

I would sing the wedded kiss
continuous of Salmacis

Ms Oswald is also capable of delightful local usages that show a poet's genuine pleasure in sound and language:

o I wish I was slammicking home
in wet clothes, shrammed with cold and bivvering but
this is my voice
under the spickety leaves

I don't know if those are really local words, but they sound as if they ought to be and, as with many dialect words, they convey meaning even when their lexical definition is opaque.

I like the ambition of this book, and not just because of a predisposition to like the local landscape in the poem (most of the poem’s locales are within 20 miles or so of the house where I write this and some of them are familiar). It's the kind of ambition I don’t expect to find in the current British mainstream, and it’s good to have one’s preconceptions confounded like this. I acquired the book expecting the worst after those press reviews, only to find some very fine writing and a poet who is not simply wearing the locale as a convenient crutch for her writing. A book that you should read.

Frances Presley: Somerset Letters (Oasis Books, London, 2002. Chapbook, Isbn 1-900996-20-0, 36pp, £5. With illustrations by Ian Robinson).

Another place book, and another one worth your time. In this volume the difference between the prose sections and the verse is more forcibly marked, divided as it is into numbered pieces, with no mixing of the two. This seems to have started as a book of letters & prose observations, with the poems gradually entering as the work developed. I'd say this has been to its advantage, as Ms Presley is a more compelling poet than she is a prose-writer. Notwithstanding this, the book as a whole works well and I look forward to further developments of this kind in the author’s work.

Gustaf Sobin: In the Name of the Neither (Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, 2002. Isbn 1-58498-030-3. Pb, 57pp, $14.95. Available via SPD.)

Anyone who reads this magazine regularly or has seen the comments on the Shearsman website about Sobin's work, will know that I yield to none in my admiration for his work. His latest collection, a most welcome one after his recent fiction sabbatical, is all that one would hope for. There is little new here, but Sobin's art is already so singular that it seems churlish to mention it. The style has long since settled down and his faithful readers can expect continuing refinement rather than new barricades being broken down. All that I love about his work is here in abundance: the ethereal atmosphere, the delight in language, the oddly fractured almost-prose line in some of the poems, the ability to use abstraction in a way that most English-language poets simply cannot:-

         the beauty of mimosa, of
all flowers, finally, resides in the
             commotion they provoke, that barbed, be-
         wildering disorder that sends you, each
                   time, to the far, the facing side for the
                                            spectacle of some all-
                                                  too-fleeting placation.

(From a Mimosa Sketchbook)

Grammar, parts of speech, syllables and breath all occur and re-occur throughout these poems almost as if the author is struggling to reclaim some primeval sense of expression that has long since been lost to us. The world is defined according to grammatical principles, has its own grammar if you will, the poet's breath and expression giving it air, sense, definition. And a book like this is a breath of fresh air, always.

ANTHOLOGIES

Christoph Buchwald & Lutz Seiler: Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2003 (C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich, 2002. Pb, 135pp, €12.90).

The latest in this useful series of annual anthologies. The thematic divisions are always somewhat spurious, but the poems are interesting at least, and often very good indeed. This is a good place to find what’s going on in contemporary German poetry, though you won't find too many representatives from the avant-garde. I guess they'd frighten the annual buying public.

First Eleven Poets (Dept of English Literary and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle, 2002. Isbn 0 7017 0140 4. 63pp, pb, £3.50).

A showcase for the members of the MA course in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University, this includes work by 11 women poets (it was, I assume, an all-female course): a nice thing to do on the part of the University. The range and style of the work included is rather unambitious and will not surprise anyone who follows the Bloodaxe list (for instance). The introduction is by Jo Shapcott, who teaches part of the course. Would-be students can contact Professor Desmond Graham (d.f.graham@ncl.ac.uk) or Mrs. Rowena Bryson (rowena.bryson@ncl.ac.uk).

MAGAZINES

Das Gedicht No. 10 (ed. Anton G. Leitner, Wessling bei München, 2002. Website. (190pp, €11.50). Special issue, Politik und Poesie: Gedichte gegen Gewalt.

Latest of several special issues of this annual magazine, which is no longer as informative as it once was. It's still a good place to find out what's been published, however, and the ads are useful, but I do miss the exhaustive listings that were an annual checklist for those of us not within reach of a decent German bookstore. The poems printed in it range from the interesting to the mediocre. It is by no means improved on this occasion by having poems from Sean O'Brien and an interview with Peter Forbes, late of Poetry Review. Not one of the better issues of Das Gedicht.

Near East Review Vol. 1, Nos. 1 & 2, 2002. (ed. George Messo, Faculty of Humanities & Letters, Bilkent University, 06533 Ankara, Turkey. 171pp, $10, TL 13 million. ISSN 1303-3174). Subscriptions (2 issues) $18; add $3 for overseas orders.

I confess I picked this up in an Istanbul bookstore while on vacation, and then largely because of John Ash's inclusion, although I had seen an announcement some months previously concerning the impending appearance of the magazine. It is going to take some time to bed down, and it’s dangerous to make assumptions based upon an inaugural issue, but there are good things here: poems by Christopher Middleton, Peter Riley, Peter Didsbury & John Ash, an interview with the latter, some translations of Ernst Meister, letters by Nazim Hikmet, the only Turkish poet I can name, and sundry versions of other Turkish & Kurdish poets, the quality of which I am unable to judge. There’s even a review of an anthology of Hebrew Feminist Poets, which may indicate a desire on the part of the editor to situate his journal firmly in the centre of the old Levantine world. If so, good luck to him: this is a pretty good start.

Poetry Review Vol. 92/2 Summer 2002 (120pp, £6.95).

This is the first issue of PR under the stewardship of David Herd and Robert Potts, after the long fallow years under Peter Forbes. First impressions are very good indeed, particularly as some good books from outside the standard mainstream are reviewed (Prynne, Tranter, Milne, Haslam), and Lee Harwood is a contributor for what must be the first time in 25 years or more. Poems by Ashbery, Hill (who crops up everywhere at the moment), Tranter, Brackenbury, Wilmer and some that aren't even names to me, plus an essay on Edwin Morgan, and a comic-strip (!) by John Tranter. A good start, guys: let’s have more. It should also be noted that the cover-price is the same as that for Stand, which is half PR's length. PR, however, is the only magazine I know that charges more for subscriptions than it does for single issues. You can buy a single copy for £6.95 plus 50p postage, but you can subscribe within the UK for £30 for 4 issues. I suppose you still come out slightly ahead having not paid for a stamp to make the order, but all the same... Overseas (airmail) subs are £40; $56 for the US.

Stand Vol. 3 Nos. 2 & 3 (62pp, £6.50, $12, A$17.95, double issue) & Vol. 3/4 & Vol. 4/1 (64pp, £6.50, $12, A$17.95 double issue).

I imagine that most readers will be aware of the long-running British magazine Stand, founded decades ago by the late Jon Silkin and printed in an odd horizontal format. After Silkin's death the magazine began again, so to speak, under the editorship of John Kinsella and Michael Hulse, and made a promising start. That promise – for whatever reason – was not maintained and the last issue under the Kinsella/Hulse editorship was a dire double-issue joint-venture with Kenyon Review. Since the new Stand promised to offer a home for writers of all aesthetic stripes, its swift decline and disappearance was a great disappointment. Now Stand is reborn once again under the editorship of Jon Glover, from Leeds University. The first of the two double issues listed here smacks of the contractual obligation album, and is positively awful. There are some half-interesting translations from the Montenegrin poet Milika Pavlovic and a couple of prose pieces by that up-and-coming young Russian prose stylist, Anton Chekhov, but otherwise the content is best placed in the round filing cabinet. The second issue is, by contrast, something of a treasure-chest – a Geoffrey Hill special issue, and I can't help wondering whether Hill's status as an ex-member of the Leeds faculty might not have something to do with his appearance here. It is well-timed given that Hill's new volume The Orchards of Syon has only just been published in the UK. The issue contains a 20-poem sequence from a new poem-sequence titled Scenes from Comus, so-called in homage to the composer Hugh Wood – Hill's exact contemporary – who wrote the vocal-and-orchestral piece of that name which inspired the poems, given in turn to the composer for his 70th birthday this year. The 20 poems here make up Part 1, titled The Argument of the Masque. First acquaintance suggests that this Comus does not have the cumulative power of Syon or the latter's tautness of composition, but anything from Hill's pen is worth attention. In addition there is a good review by Rodney Pybus of Syon and a few other texts about the poet. The supporting cast includes a sequence of poems by Michael Hamburger in his easy-flowing late style. But you get this for the Hill poems and the attached paraphernalia, not for the supporting cast.

Where does Stand go from here? I suspect it has no discernible role, since most of what it used to is better done by magazines such as P N Review or Agenda, and, if it is going to do more of what's in its first revival issue, we could do without it. What the market needs quite frankly is a magazine that provides an outlet for serious poetry and prose by younger writers, rather than another quasi-academic quarterly with no raison d'être.