I have added a number of shorter reviews to the site this time. This is due to the fact that I can't keep up the momentum with the long reviews. There just isn't time enough to do everything. Part of the answer is shorter notices here and there — which in no way constitutes a comment on the value of the book under review — and another part will consist of the outsourcing of reviews for the first time since Shearsman was a very young journal... watch these spaces for further developments.

Between the Lines is a small publishing operation run by Peter Hoy and it is a Good Idea. All the books so far have been volumes of long interviews with contemporary poets, coupled with some other appropriate paraphernalia. I already had the excellent Michael Hamburger book, so I went shopping for more, having belatedly realised that several additional volumes had been published. This one is amongst the most recent, and fulfils the expectations that I had, given Mark Ford's empathy with Ashbery. The latter sounds most urbane, relaxed and entertaining, and, while there's nothing really new here, it fills in the odd small gap in my appreciation of Ashbery's work. You get nice asides such as:

MF: I seem to remember you once told an interviewer that you think of yourself as 'John' and the voice of your poems as 'Ashbery'. Could you explain the difference?

JA: I don't remember ever telling an interviewer that, though I don't doubt that I said it, since it's exactly the sort of stupid thing one says in interviews, this one being no exception.

You also get some interesting detail about the genesis of that intractable book The Tennis Court Oath, and what on earth was going on in the composition of Litany, a poem with which I still have problems. The interview takes up some 50-odd pages here; the balance of the book is used up with photos (intriguing – 18 pages' worth, including a splendid one from the early 1970s showing the poet looking as if he's auditioning for a part in Magnum, P.I.), bibliography, a list of published poems, and excerpts from reviews, both positive and negative. There are some lovely lines in the negative reviews that I'd kill for, like Richard Howard, reviewing Rivers and Mountains (1966): 'Existence is reported to be as ineffable as in the poems of Some Trees [Ashbery's first book], but no longer beyond the poet's grasp, because he is no longer grasping…'

Like the others in this series that I've read – so far only Hamburger and Charles Simic – the book is useful and proves the validity of Hoy's approach. A little expensive, perhaps, but a worthwhile investment for anyone intrigued by Ashbery's poetry.

Michael Ayres: a.m. (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 272pp, pb, £11.95 / $16.95. ISBN 1-876857-28-5). This is Shearsman Book of the Month for October 2003. See the review here.

Vahni Capildeo: No Traveller Returns (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-88-9. Pb, 168pp, £9.95, $13.95) First collection by a Trinidad-born poet now at Cambridge, this is a startling introduction to a new voice. The book, as a collection, has its problems: it's way too long and would certainly have benefited from cutting back in search of some quality-control, but there's enough good material there to suggest that Ms Capildeo is a poet with a future. Here's the first poem from Twist in the section Obsessive Talk:

Focused blade-rotating circulation locust buzz
drives into cores reproaches leakage, faultiness,
amplifies intensifies churrs powers winds inside
(put awash with faultiness with leakage lolling head)
my head a flooded street with swimming geese, inlaid
with fixity of nothing nothing but a spreading lid
tile-crazy like an icesheet knapped by puzzling residue.
Toiling plates at earthscale crack unseeably. The moon
appears, an aztec moon, tethers haloes over storm
skittering with scarlet energy. Exhale, go on,
sort out what, like lead, is densest, what will not break down.
The moon appears to know what it is doing, what I did.

Robert Duncan: Letters. Poems 1953-1956 (edited, with an afterword by Robert J. Bertholf; Flood Editions, Chicago, 2003. 71pp, pb, $16. Available from SPD.) First up, let me say this is an exquisite publication – the design and printing are of a very high standard indeed. British readers of a certain vintage – i.e. mine and a little older – may well have these texts in the Fulcrum Press volume Derivations (1968), one of a pair of selections of Duncan's early work that Fulcrum put out in those remarkable days for UK small-press publishing. That edition included an extra poem and split the final poem here into two distinct parts, but is otherwise the same as the earlier Jargon edition of the text, which is the one reproduced here by Flood.

I'm not sure I understand the editorial decision here, and Bertholf does not explain it. I would have thought that it was at least worth including the extra poem in an appendix, in so far as the author had seen fit to include it in the sequence himself, albeit at a later date.

Flood also include the drawings by the author which graced the original limited signed edition, plus the author's correspondence with the typesetter of the Jargon edition, which I find of limited interest.
Letters is something of a transitional volume in Duncan's work, marking the point at which his work began to shift decisively in an Olsonian direction and adopt the style with which most of us now associate him (as in The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow). Transitional it is, but I have to say I still find it more interesting from a lit-historical standpoint, than from a poetical one. I'm sure this will be a minority view, but I'll stick to it. If you're interested in the development of this remarkable poet and don't have the complete text in another form, this is the place to get it. A selection also appears in Bertholf's New Directions edition of Duncan's Selected Poems. Derivations is still available from the antiquarian trade, at a price, but it was not very well laid-out or even very well-printed by Fulcrum's high standards.

Andrew Duncan: The Failure of Conservatism of Modern British Poetry (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 344pp, pb, £14.95 / $23.95; h/c £40 / $56.95) Confession time. I like Andrew Duncan's critical work; there's more to be learned from his off-the-cuff generalisations than from most critics' detailed examinations, because he's such a good reader. He gets some things wrong of course (others will disagree with me about exactly where, and the degree to which this is the case), but I find myself learning even from his waspish dismissals of poets whose work I like: I might disagree with him, but it's worth considering his view.

This book is a kind of literary mine for anyone reading around the UK's non-mainstream poetries from, say, 1960 onwards. The author has patently spent a large amount of time quarrying his way through obscure libraries in search of mouldering volumes that typify the age in which they appeared. By non-mainstream, I don't just mean the innovative or the avant-garde either; there are a number of poets given serious consideration here who have been ignored by the standard mainstream for being in the wrong strand of mainstream-ism. (And these wolves turn on their own just as savagely as they tear into those from another pack.)

So far, so good. The problem with the book is that some of the material has appeared already in print form (in the late-lamented Angel Exhaust and elsewhere), and has been inadequately updated. There are give-away lines referring, for instance, to "the last 15 years", when the textual evidence suggests that those years are in fact 1976-1991, or 1977-1992. Geoffrey Hill gets an interesting survey, but the analysis stops with the Collected Poems volume of the late 1980s; given Hill's enormous late output (Canaan, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon, not to mention some as-yet uncollected work like Scenes from Comus) which amounts to approximately the same page-count as that of the entire previous Collected volume, the view of Hill here is seriously compromised. There are similar problems elsewhere in the book, and it's compounded by a very poor index: given the vast range of names in this book, a comprehensive index was absolutely necessary. A further problem is that the episodic origins of the book (in separate articles covering specific phases in the development of British poetry over the past 40-odd years) are undisguised by the new format; there's been insufficient tying-together of the vast number of authorial threads and not enough cross-referencing. It's an editorial problem, and I can see the extent of the issue facing both the author and the press, but it would have been better for all of us — especially those of us who think that, somewhere in here, Duncan has an important message — if some cuts had been applied and bridges built. I could have done with a clearer summing-up too.

Those who used to read Angel Exhaust regularly will be aware of Duncan's singular approach to classification. It often seems that the world has settled into a comfortable binary system of mainstream and alternative poetries, with fixed boundaries and only rarely does a member of one side join the opposing forces. Duncan ignores this and includes some mainstream poets in his survey who will be surprised to see the company they keep here – David Harsent, for one. Now, Harsent is a talented and capable writer who deserves serious examination, but he's one of those who, unless taken up in this fashion, will always fall between critical stools. Duncan's approving notices of Rosemary Tonks (a fine 1960s poet-novelist who gave up writing, ca. 1973), George Mackay Brown and others, may also surprise, but I also like Mackay Brown's work and value his individuality, his cheerful ploughing of his own furrow. On the other hand Duncan criticises — at times very strongly, although the language has been somewhat tempered here — a number of senior members of the alternative camp, some outright and others by omission. This gives rise to offence, of course, as it's a tight-knit world in which everyone knows everyone else and it's not seen as "the right thing to do" to criticise our chaps (male or female, though it tends to be the men getting it in the neck, rather than the women).

I imagine some readers will be irritated by the authorial tic of comparing poetic work to music groups/rock bands; it bugs me at times too, largely because I don't know who the musicians are or what they did. The problem with such comparisons is that they tend to mean nothing to anyone of a different generation and, in the rock & pop world, generation shifts occur every five years, or less. It would pointless of me, for instance, to compare a virtuoso literary performance with a John Hiseman drum-solo at a Colosseum gig, ca. 1969, astonishing though the latter was (although I confess it has gained the patina of age and the golden aura of another time; I'm not so sure I'd enjoy it now).

Where Duncan does get things very right ("Motion's poetry was the calculated image of mediocrity and reason" is for me a pungent and accurate assessment, for instance), he enlightens; when the thread gets lost, it tends to obfuscate rather than elucidate. What should have been done, I think, was to expand on some of the more interesting analyses and build up an alternative picture of what is really poetically significant in English poetry (and I mean English, as distinct from Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish) over the past 35 years or so. The coverage of Scottish and Welsh poetry seems to me, without too sure a footing here, to be interesting and informative, though the Welsh coverage seems to be also somewhat outdated: I would have thought Robert Minhinnick and Gwyneth Lewis worthy of consideration. There are also fascinating short analyses in this book of (again, for me) indisputably major figures, who are almost never compared and are sometimes not regarded as major; I think we would all benefit from a sustained comparison of Middleton (b. 1926), (Roy) Fisher (b. 1930), Hill (b. 1932) and Prynne (b.1936) for instance. Duncan seems just the man for the job.

This book on failure is alas, in the end, a failure that could have been a success, and I regret that almost more than if it had been an outright calamity. There's more where this came from and it can be rescued and made to cohere – I'm sure of it.

Andrew Duncan: Surveillance and Compliance
(Five Eyes of Wiwaxia, London, 2003. A4 format, 52pp, £3. Available from 17 Hutton Court, 83 Tramway Avenue, Enfield, London N9 8PQ.)

This samizdat publication is the missing collection, so to speak. Threads of Iron (published in two volumes by Reality Studios and Shearsman Books respectively under the titles Cut Memories and False Commands and Switching and Main Exchange) and Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (Waterloo Press, 2000) are the Eighties poems, at least up to 1987; Sound Surface (another samizdat publication in 1992) was the early nineties; Pauper Estate (also Shearsman Books, 2000) collected work from the late 90s. This book takes care of the 1987-92 period that also produced the almost-forgotten Alien Skies collection, published by Equipage in 1993, leaving only the mid-90s work uncollected — 8 of those poems, and very fine they are, turn up in the author's Selected Poems, Anxiety Upon Entering a Room (Salt, Cambridge, 2001).

This collection also reprints eight poems from the selected volume, but fills out the picture for those of you who are interested in the trajectory of Duncan's work. Four of the poems also appeared in old editions of Shearsman. There are no details given for postage costs, but I imagine an extra £1 should take care of that. Admirers of Duncan's poetry, among whom I count myself, are recommended to plug this particular gap in their collections.

Theodore Enslin: In Tandem (Stop Press, London, 2003. 262pp, pb, £14.50. ISBN 0-9529961-8-9). With photographs by Alison Enslin. Enslin is a poet whom I did not take seriously enough upon first acquaintance with his work. I don't know why, and from the perspective of a further thirty years, I wonder at my former idiocy. It's true that Enslin writes a lot, some would no doubt say too much. His output is vast and his two very long poems, Forms and Ranger, dating from the 60s and 70s respectively, each run to over 650 pages. Besides being a poet, he is a composer – past titles such as Ländler, and references within the poems to Bach suggest a classical inclination, as do his early studies with the doyenne of all music teachers, Nadia Boulanger.

He lives in the Maine woods, and has done for decades. His work seems to be grounded in that environment, and music seems to be one of his main interpretative methods.

This is Stop Press' second edition of Enslin's work: the earlier, and much shorter Sequentiae (1999) was very fine, and similar in formal terms to the poems presented here, which draws on work already published in chapbook form in the US. Enslin's work has taken on a different kind of organisation in recent years, in which repetition is used musically – it's tempting to suggest Terry Riley and certain other American minimalists as musical comparisons, but I think we're seeing a different kind of musical organisation that goes back several centuries — pace the several clear references to J S Bach, above all in the Six Music Lessons group of poems. The result is an odd (at first) incantatory quality, that also suggests to me Beckett's late prose:

Not alone    and yet alone within this room
others who have come and left    a darkness
after chambering    and cold with the shadows lone
remembering an air of loneness    not alone
within without    the rooms a chambered emptiness
the rooms grow larger    smaller    as a complement
to those who are    and those were    alone
and not alone    the secrets of the rooms continued
contained within    contained without    a chambering
pertaining to the chambers    not the rooms
in loneness    as not the last will leave them
as the rooms themselves remain alone    lose memory
the rooms containing    not the memory    a key
upon returns    that's possible    pertaining to a memory
of what is loneness    of a chambering    a room
alone    the cold    still grief within the room
a room remembered out of need    a music
in the stillness    soon abandoned    or alone
the past turned future    not enough to show
in darkness    what is shadowed in the room alone

(from the sequence Out of a dark room its light, 1998)

The sequences demand to be read as a whole and not as a group of discrete poems, with the musical impact building throughout the sequence and the whole having an architecture not available to the single short poem. The complexity of the organisation, which at this stage I'm only just beginning to see, is at variance with those huge poems from the 60s and 70s, which were structured like many a Great American Long Poem in the wake of Pound and Williams, relentlessly ploughing forward, carrying everything in their path, and rarely stopping for an editing (or so it appeared).

Old age    not winter    reaches something
of a clarity    of a voice to say what reaches
many keys    the modulations    one or two
still left    a surety    not a cadence    quite
the motion in reverse    not a mirror
much to negate    yet to repeat a melody
one not known    was always known remains
a ground whereon to build    no haste
the signature of many times that left us
what are few to come    once more    and so
the last of it    a wild surprise

(from Six Music Lessons)

The whole book is shot through with musical forms and sounds, with landscape – Enslin's New England, its sounds, smells, and changing seasons. His way of dealing poetically with nature in a poem is quite fascinating, an attempt to convey its wonder through participation rather than the haphazard similes we tend to be fed by lesser writers:

Crow punctuates    his sound across
the closing dark of clouds    snow filled
that sound to be a punctuation
iron filing that the sound is brittle
as the sharpness of the winter air    the ice
of sound flakes through the dark    the clouds
that close on snow and silence    sound the punctuation
of a sentence active in its silence
punctuate a closing dark    snow filled
that sound of iron filing to a punctuation
slow to be a sound of sharpness    ice
in winter    air of closing    clouds dark
crow sound across the dark of iron
filing ice flakes of sound punctuate
the sentence    a winter air    brittle
a sound of punctuation    crow in dark
across an iron filing    dark to ice
brittle sound across a punctuation
crow    his sound    across

(from the In Tandem sequence, 1994-5)

I can only scratch the surface of this marvellous book in a short review; US readers will have access already to some of the contents through publishers such as Longhouse, tel-let and Talisman, but this is a first for British readers, for whom this work will come as something very new, rather alien, and, I trust, captivating. I should add that the photographs of Maine accompanying each of the sequences here are by the poet's wife, and are also very fine indeed. In the US, the book can be ordered from SPD, in the UK from Peter Riley's mail-order service, or direct from the publisher at 263 Nether Street, London N3 1PD. It's well worth acquiring and, I think, not expensive for what it is.

William Fuller: Sadly (Flood Editions, Chicago, 2003. 58pp, pb, $13) This is a fascinating book, the first I've come across from this Chicago-based author (of eight previous publications), and the one of the first I've seen from this very promising new Chicago press. Having dipped into the book and read poems here and there at random, as is my wont with a new arrival, I was rather amused to read the back-cover blurbs, which struggled to sum up the work between these covers. "Dense, elliptical meditations", for one and "[Sadly] finds Fuller 'sloping towards heaven / but not parasitic on it'", for another. Going back into the book, I can see the problem; I'm not sure there is an adequate critical language to deal with what's going on here or, if there is, I don't know it. Ellipsis is a good starting-point, though.

There is a strain of contemporary American verse which is innovative, communicative, not afraid to glory in linguistic surfaces, while at the same time eschewing the L=anguage School's self-referential, determinedly alogical and uncommunicative perorations. Talisman magazine was a good place to find this kind of work, as is First Intensity, Chicago Review and some others. I hesitate to mention names as I don't think comparisons of Fuller's work with others really helps too much: sui generis, it demands to be assessed on its own merits, and engaged with as a free-standing artefact.
Here's the poem Great Polar Sphere:

Speak brightly, lyrically, in the adventure of equivalent
cognitive modes. By way of distinguishing these modes,
you single out one last condition. But the weather
strives to be more exact. The game prematurely ended,
the two teams trade insults and quotations from City of
God as a train rumbles past, knocking over some cans.
A late whistle fades in the autumn sky. Ice forms in
my throat (which later I will find technically useful).
Snow. 6:36 p.m.

I find the sense of epiphany here quite exhilarating; the cheerfully askew observations invading perception in an altogether unusual manner. The diction is inconsistent, and that too is part of the poem's interesting surface: "the adventure of equivalent / cognitive modes" is the kind of anti-poetic phrasing you expect to find in a L=anguage poem; here it's part of the playful overall attack. On the other hand there's the sense of elegy that you get in a poem like No Wakes Please:

Mightn't they read as they are being dismissed merely
for laughing in his face — can I choose promise
not to be there and pretend not to be myself when it
occurs? She whispers 'umbrella,' and the stars begin
to die, the moon opens wide in her head. Suspended
over the dawn, sparks of fear fade, in colors, where a
new set of problems has emerged — for time has hooks
and words have holes.

Looking at the poems in this volume from a more traditional perspective, I suppose one problem for a reader might be the lack of a discernible beginning to many of the poems; they tend to end with a nice flourish (see the poem above for instance), but the first line often feels as if it's an interruption of other things, as if the poem has just sneaked into one's awareness, nudging its way to the forefront. There's a sense of indeterminacy here, which I find interesting, disruptive and really rather exciting. It's not a one-string bow though; poems like Hyperboreans are written with a laconic cod-archaic tone, crossed with the other-worldliness that typified some of Borges's shorter metafictions.
If pushed to define this, I suppose I would have to say that it's a kind of modern lyric poetry, maybe a metaphysical modern lyric, but I can't seem to get away from the verbal play, the dazzling reflections in a broken mirror that so much of this poetry seems to be like. Maybe there's even a kind of surrealism at work here. Look at Mobile Steam Plant / Spare Change for instance, a title to conjure with before one has even started to read:

If and only if the magic pig were a case of sincerity
having been eclipsed by deceit then feeding it abuses
the practice whereby it is eventually dispersed into
those for whom no such questions arise. Patient but
distracted, joining smokestacks and steeples to points
of time distinguished by depth and sunk
perpendicular to the landing strip, you direct them in
writing to restore the site before the snow returns,
electing not to be controversial by consenting to
violate abandoned policy —
                  written in birdseed
          your eyes are cold
improvident
lover hastily calls
precious, precious
it was jealousy —
but hard hints like yours
          make a man avoid the earth
                  I quote

Sadly is an extraordinary book that demands to be read, and read many times. I recommend you buy it immediately.

Olav Hauge: Leaf Huts and Snow-Houses (translated from the Norwegian (nynorsk) by Robin Fulton) (Anvil Press Poetry, London, 2003. 143pp, pb, £9.95 / $13.95. ISBN 0-85646-357-4.) This is the third, and largest selection of Hauge’s poetry to which Robin Fulton has been midwife, and it is the most recommendable. (The others were Don’t Give Me The Whole Truth, Anvil, 1985, and Selected Poems, White Pine Press, Fredonia, NY, 1990; both are out of print.) The book contains almost half of the poet’s output, though this selection concentrates on his last 4 volumes, given that the first three contain largely metrical rhyming poems that the translator freely admits he cannot deal with effectively. [99% of translators cannot do it, and the 1% that can often deliver something which is more akin to a bad English poem than a re-creation of the original.]

Hauge was a countryman and lived all his life in the spectacular Hardanger region. The poems are often about the local landscape, topographical minutiae, the wildlife that an orchard-farmer would come across. There are odd interruptions from outside, such as Japanese and Chinese poets that one assumes Hauge read in translation, but he remains mostly anchored in the north, quiet, contemplative, and a pleasant companion on a dark night. A good poet to get to know.

Copyright © Shearsman Books Ltd, 2003. All quotations are copyright © by the authors, as indicated above.