Michael Begnal: The Lakes of Coma (Six Gallery Press, Geneva, OH, 68pp, pb, $9, €9.) First collection, I think, for this Irish-American poet and editor of the Galway magazine, The Burning Bush. It has many virtues, and a few of the inevitable sins of a first collection. The author, in his foreword, says that this is an American collection and implies that it is somewhat distant from his current concerns. It certainly feels American; there's a cool post-beat kind of feel to a lot of the work here but without the lazy mannerisms that such a style often implies. The cool presentation can sometimes mean however that not enough exploration or penetration has occurred in the poems. Some feel as if they would have more resonance if worked through more, as if they were more than artifacts. Westmeath, a poem I rather like, is a case in point:

I'm back
Westmeathman

fields and fields
and brambles and bushes
and thickets, and the road
has no shoulder

they had a nice new farmhouse,
but way out past the pastures
was the house
of my ancestor's birth,

or the ruins,
or the foundation,
I'm not quite clear.

A little more work in the middle and that would have been really interesting. Michael Begnal is a talented young poet and worth watching out for.

Billy Collins: Nine Horses (Picador, London, 2003. 120pp, pb, £7.99)

I joined the UK's Poetry Book Society last year, and after receiving the execrable Paul Muldoon volume three months ago (which, Lord save us, has now won the Pulitzer Prize, and is also shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in Canada), I now get this tosh. I know, I know, I shouldn't have joined. Collins is better than many I can think of, especially on these shores, but this is really poetry intended not to frighten the horses. Some of it is rather mechanical, image chasing image down the page, and some of it is couched in that rolling, avuncular tone, beloved of certain poets who want you to empathise with their private vision of things. Nothing to get too upset about then, but life's too short to waste on this kind of poetry.

Ian Davidson (ed): On Wales (Skald, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, 2003. 32pp, chapbook, £2.50). A neat mini-anthology of poems about Wales by mostly non-Welsh authors, whom one would associate with the more innovative wing of contemporary poetry rather than the conservative brand that one tends to meet when presented with collections of current Welsh writing. The poets included are Peter Riley, Tom Raworth, Douglas Oliver, Alan Halsey, Ralph Hawkins, Wendy Mulford, John James and Andrew Duncan, and this is a neat little collection of good work (from a thirty-year period) that is well worth acquiring at the low cover-price. Recommended.

Monica de la Torre & Michael Wiegers (eds): Reversible Monuments. Contemporary Mexican Poetry. (Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2002. 675pp, pb, $20). ISBN 1-55659-159-4. What a wonderful book. The crazy thing about it is that this selection of poets born after 1950 does not even have an equivalent in Mexico itself, where anthologies still tend to be dominated by grandees from an earlier generation (which is not to imply that those grandees should be overlooked; it's just that their absence clears the way for the sheer range of contemporary writing in Mexico to be seen). And not only does it include Hispanic poets; there are also indigenous writers (in the Zapotec, Tzeltal and Mazatec languages – just three of the ninety-plus languages of Mexico and far from the most widely-spoken: that accolade goes to Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and varieties of Maya).

The book will take some time to read thoroughly, and this is by way of an initial introduction. It's quite ridiculous to cherry-pick poets from this cornucopia, but I'm going to say now that an enormous impression has been made on me by Gloria Gervitz, Claudia Hernández, Alfonso d'Aquino and Verónica Volkow. I've no doubt that much of the rest will be having an impact too, as this book slowly permeates my consciousness. It's like having maps rewritten, or indeed written for the first time. Essential reading. The translations are high-voltage affairs, by and large.

Reversible Monuments was Shearsman Book of the Month for March 2003. The Book of the Month page contains further commentary and quotations from some of the poems.

Laurie Duggan: Mangroves (University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. 186pp, pb, A$20 (A$22 incl. GST). This is a very welcome volume indeed. Those who have paid any attention to my Recommendations pages on the Shearsman website will be aware that I'm a fan of Laurie Duggan's poetry. Mangroves comes after a hiatus of some six years (94-00) in which the author wrote no poetry. This fact was a little obscured for the reading public by two significant publications, however: a New & Selected Poems, also from UQP, and a long poem in 6 sections, Memorials published by the Adelaide press, Little Esther Books. The new book starts with 85 pages of new work (post-millennium, subsequent to Duggan's re-engagement with poetry); the rest of the book contains some translations and some uncollected and/or revised work that originates before 1994, as well as a 23-page prose piece, The minutes, best classified as 'poetic prose'. Snaking their way through the whole volume are poems in a continuing loose sequence called Blue Hills, the first of which – not included here – date back to the author's 1978 collection The Great Divide (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney).

Gloria Gervitz: Migraciones (2nd edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 2002. 197pp, large-format pb., MXP 150 (= approx £9 / $14) I came across Gloria Gervitz's work in extenso for the first time in the Reversible Monuments anthology mentioned above, and was moved to hunt down more of her work. This appears to be the only volume available, but, since she writes nothing but an ever-developing long poem called Migraciones, I guess that's ok, this edition being up to date. It's been over 25 years in the writing so far, and is somewhat outside the swim of contemporary Hispanic (or Mexican) poetry, perhaps because of the Jewish background. The poetry is deceptively easy to read, but very hard to grasp, a little like the later Edmond Jabès in that respect. It does repay the effort, though, and I'd love to see someone doing a full translation. Oracular, it is, positively oracular.

John James: Collected Poems (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2002. 365pp, pb, £15.95). This is a long overdue collection and, as with the Raworth volume noted below, it finally brings together between one set of covers the entire oeuvre of a very fine poet. I had most of the contents already, but I'm still delighted to have been able to fill in the small gaps in this section of my poetry library. James is usually lumped in with the so-called 'Cambridge School', which isn't a school, and mostly isn't in Cambridge (but it's a long story). James is in fact a Cambridge resident but he wasn't a Cambridge student. He's Welsh by birth and, as far as I am aware, has been left out* of every anthology of Welsh poetry, perhaps because there's nothing discernibly Welsh about his work, at least not as far as the subject matter goes (well, other than The Welsh Poems from 1967). Maybe Welsh literary politics has something to do with it?

There's an American tinge here, which is not unusual for non-mainstream poets of his generation, and it has always seemed that the first New York School (that of the 50s & 60s: Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler) has been an influence: it comes through in the tone, the way the reader (or the poem) is addressed, the artfully artless stance, the throwaway line, the rallentando of the poem's unfolding. There are nods in the direction of (leftist) politics, of music (Hendrix as well as The Human League, anyone?), and of German literature. The work becomes less boisterous with the years, but it's one of those complete collections that you can actually read from cover to cover rather than having to work at with a smug self-congratulatory air, thinking "it tastes bitter, but it's good for me". This one tastes good right down to the bagel at the end.

*Nate Dorward, editor of The Gig, tells me that this is in fact not so: James was anthologised in the anthology Green horse : an anthology by young poets of Wales (edited by Meic Stephens and Peter Finch; Swansea, C. Davies, ca. 1978). If anyone can tell me which poems by James were included, I'd be grateful. The Welsh Poems by any chance?

R F Langley's Collected Poems, published by Carcanet 2 or 3 years ago, was one of the books of the year, revealing a small but wonderful oeuvre to a largely unsuspecting public. Given the small scale of that oeuvre, it's good news that John Welch's Many Press has come back to life to offer us this slim gem of a collection and further our acquaintance with this poet's work. There are seven poems here, most of which have seen the light of day elsewhere but which will have quite likely escaped the notice of all but the most attentive enthusiast. Copies can be had from Peter Riley's mail-order service or be ordered direct from the press. Add 50p for postage, I should think, if it's to be sent within the UK.

I've a taste for Peter Larkin's truly original work, fusing ecology with experimental poetics. In the wrong hands this could be utterly indigestible, but here the results vary from the fascinating to the luminous. An excellent postscript to the recent Salt volume Terrain Seed Scarcity.

John Matthias: Working Progress, Working Title (Salt, Cambridge, 2002. 94pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95, $A24.95, C$19.95) This is Matthias's first British publication for many years, and I wish I could welcome it more wholeheartedly. Two-thirds of the book has already appeared in the author's last US collection, Pages (Swallow Press / Ohio UP), and the rest of that book was much superior to the remainder of this one, a self-consciously experimental work called Automystifistical Plaice [sic], which concerns itself with the early-20th century Parisian avant-garde and the "strange fact that film siren Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on a patent for a radio-directed torpedo in the early days of World War Two". Actually, by that time Antheil was very much a former avant-garde composer, but he had indeed been the darling of the avant set in 1920s Paris. I found this work overwhelmed by its material. Pages by contrast is consistently interesting in its interrogation of memory but, as I say, you'd be better off with the Ohio volume, which would give you more of an idea of the range of this consistently interesting poet, who is not as well known as he should be in the UK. A chance missed, I feel; a Selected would have been good to have.

Steve McCaffery: Bouma Shapes. Shorter Poems 1974-2002 (Zasterle Press, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands. 66pp, pb, no price listed. Distributed by SPD, Berkeley.) McCaffery is the best-known Canadian avant-garde poet, a north-of-the-border offshoot of L=anguage practices, I think, though I confess to some ignorance as to his exact categorisation. This book is beautifully produced, as usual with Zasterle, but I found it rather uninteresting as reading material. I guess, if you know and like McCaffery's other work, you'd be interested in this one.

Eduardo Milán, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, José Angel Valente, Blanca Varela (eds): Las Ínsulas Extrañas. Antología de poesía en lengua española 1950-2000. (Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2002. 989pp, h/c, €32). A big, and well-presented anthology, which by rights ought to be filling a large gap in the marketplace, covering as it does the whole hispanophone world. However, while it offers a number of good selections of important figures, it manages to miss out large numbers of fine writers who became active in the latter part of the period surveyed. I also think there are too many poets from Spain here, compared to the rest. The headcount runs thus: Spain (35), Argentina (9), Mexico (9), Peru (9), Chile (8), Uruguay (6), Venezuela (6), Cuba (6), Nicaragua (5), Colombia (3), Bolivia (1) and France (1). The latter is due to the inclusion of Clarisse Nicoidski, the French Jewish novelist who also wrote verse in her ancestral language, Judeo-español.

At first sight the book is inclusive, ranging across the more conservative figures as well as the vanguardia, but then you begin to realise that there are problems, and you have to ask yourself how much these well-established authors really knew about the whole Hispanic poetry universe. The first problem I had was the absence of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis; this prompted me to start hunting down the other Mexicans, which in turn led me to the conclusion that the editors have either got it wrong, or they haven't been reading enough. The astounding Reversible Monuments anthology (reviewed above) proves conclusively that Mexico has a thriving younger generation of poets: none of them are here (no Claudia Hernández, no Alfonso d'Aquino, no Gloria Gervitz, no Verónica Volkow, for instance). The whole book is short on women in fact, notwithstanding the presence of the excellent Blanca Varela, from Peru, on the editorial committee. Then Nicaragua has no-one represented after Cardenal, who is nearly 80 years old. The Chilean selection looks obvious (Neruda, Parra, Rojas, Lihn, Uribe Arce, Teillier, Hahn, Zurita), which also worries me: if I'd been asked to second-guess a Chilean selection for this period, all but one of those names would have been on it, and I'm not at all up to date with the scene in Chile these days.

So, if the Chilean selection is obvious, and the Mexican selection is missing a good 8-10 significant writers, where does that leave us with regard to the rest of Latin America? The younger Argentines appear to have gone missing, as do the Buenos Aires experimentalists from the 80s and 90s; the Bolivian Jaime Saenz (also reviewed above) is missing; is there really no-one worth reading at all from the last half-century in Paraguay?, or Ecuador?, or the other central American states? I find it hard to believe.

And 35 Spanish poets? The selection is short of women again, though it's true that few women poets made a mark before the end of the Franquista régime; it includes Miguel Hernández, who was a splendid poet, but who died in 1942, outside of the dates of this book, even if some of the work only appeared in print long after his death. (This could be said of many poets exiled during the Civil War too.) I will confess to not having sufficient knowledge of the past 50 years of poetry in Spain to make an informed judgment, but some of the work that I've read here does not seem to be any more significant than that of the young Mexicans whose absence I bemoan above. I think we need another book, quite frankly, perhaps edited from the Latin American side, though there may not be a press there with the wherewithal to manage it. Maybe someone in the USA could do it, instead?

The book contains a lot of good poetry, and is very informative, but anything that purports to be as inclusive as this book does, and which then fails so badly to include very significant work that does fall within its parameters, is not doing the job. Treat with very great care, very great care indeed.

Peter Riley: The Sea's Continual Code. (Llyn details and poems 1979-1999.) With graphics by Colin Whitworth. (Colin Whitworth, Cambridge, 2003. 20pp, spiral bound, £25. Edition limited to 60 copies.) Some more poems in the Welsh sequence that began with the splendid Sea Watches, and continued through Sea Watch Elegies and Between Harbours (the latter also an artist's edition, like this one), all of which were collected in the author's Carcanet Selected poems, Passing Measures. there's nothing new here, true, but when there's a fine sequence of work like this by someone writing at the height of their powers, who cares? The first page is shown left, as the cover is all black. Recommended to Riley fans; the uncommitted should buy Passing Measures first.

Jaime Saenz: Immanent Visitor. Selected Poems. Translated by Kent Johnson & Forrest Gander (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2002. 145pp, pb, ISBN 0-520-23048-5. $19.95, £13.95. H/c edition ISBN 0-520-23047-7 $49.95, £35.) Translation seems to have died a death in the UK recently, other than for the umpteenth version of Rilke, and we never see anything at all from Latin America apart from the usual Nobel-prize-winning suspects. In the USA by contrast – aided by good university presses and by comparative proximity (partly illusory: La Paz to Los Angeles by air takes about 7 hours) – there are large numbers of modern Latin American poets receiving respectful attention and getting good translators.

Here is a case in point. Saenz's name will probably register with very few people in Britain, but I have come across him in a couple of anthologies, such as the Mexican Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana actual (1987; he gets 3 pages). I don't recall ever seeing a collection of his work in Spanish. The last big US anthology of poetas iberoamericanas, Stephen Tapscott's Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996) fails to include Saenz (1921-1986), but, happily, a forthcoming OUP anthology edited by Cecilia Vicuña includes some of the versions in this new book. (That book is of course from the American side of OUP; too much to hope that it would be commissioned by the burrowing creatures on this side of the Atlantic.) Immanent Visitor is one of the most beautifully designed paperbacks I've seen, which makes up for the rather high cover price. As with Forrest Gander's recent versions of Pura López-Colomé, reviewed in the last issue, the policy here is to place the originals in the second half of the book, thus giving the reader a book of translations followed by a book in Spanish, an arrangement I rather like.

So, who was Saenz? A bisexual, alcoholic, bohemian, baroque symbolist somewhat out of synch with the rest of the literary world, who was also the author of two of (apparently excellent) novels that seem to be virtually unknown outside of Bolivia. His work is mystical and baroque & given to the overladen rhetoric typical of a lot of Hispanic poetry, but it barrels along, sweeping the reader with it, leaving meaning in its wake as a secondary issue:

Alive at the edge of language, the head floating in a body not there
a finger in the fog
the running water in the world of those who embroider their presence with a border of flax
and another finger in wind that swings the suns of a miracle named by summer and rain
and the ancientness of light still unrobed, unseen
then one night another finger twitching to a vague melody on the bridge
and the heaviness of sobbing in the bouquet, bequeathed from offspring to offspring
when the swollen fury of the gleaming torrent roars past
but the bond calls you and calls you and another finger sheathed in flame, prods and prods at your heart
— you bat your eyes ay the magical sign that orbits your body and licks at stubborn life
— you're on the way to a city, and someone straining and straining to be born snaps the lighter off
and you eat his desire and the cauldron of a drum disenchants itself before your eyes.

(from Immanent Visitor VII)

Vive a la vera del lenguaje, la cabeza flotante en un cuerpo que no hay
un dedo en la neblina
el agua corriente en el mundo de los que agracian su estar un borde de lino
y otro dedo en el viento que mece los soles del milagro nombrado por el verano y la lluvia
y ancianidad de la luz que todavía no viste
una noche otro dedo paralelo a una ambigua melodía en el Puente
y el peso del llanto en el ramillete guardado generación tras generación
cuando las modulaciones y la furia del agua fija y reluciente pasan de largo
mas el vínculo te llama y te llama y toca y toca tu corazón otro dedo con el apoyo del fuego
— parpadeas a poco la fórmula mágica que ronda tu cuerpo y lame la áspera vida
— a una ciudad vas, y tiene apagado el mechero alguien que está y está por nacer
y le comes su intencón y un fondo de tambor se descencanta ante ti.

(de Visitante profundo, VII. 1964)

I believe this to be an important book, which, like a lot of the better 20th-century Latin American poetry, offers a radically different experience from that to which we are used in the Anglo-American tradition. It's the heritage of the Spanish baroque, religious mystical poetry, French surrealism, and the early Latin-American vanguardia — poets such as the Peruvian Vallejo, or the Chileans, Huidobro and de Rokha. It's a heritage we don't share and it's all the more fascinating for that. Other paths, other ways, other modes of expression. Yes, it's OTT, it's excessive in places to an English ear, but the hell with English reserve: it's had its day; we don't need it any more.

If you have Spanish, you'll find more of Saenz's poetry at the wonderful online Latin American poetry anthology palabravirtual .

Immanent Visitor is Shearsman's Book of the Month for April 2003. The text there is identical to the one above.