Michael Heller: Exigent Futures. New and Selected Poems. (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-51-X, 166pp, pb, £8.95 / $13.95). Anyone already interested in Heller's poetry will want to know how this compares to the Talisman House edition of Wordflow (1997), also a 'New and Selected' volume. The Salt volume takes 7 poems from Accidental Center (1972) against 10 in Wordflow (overlap: 3); 10 from Knowledge (1979) against 18 (overlap 2); 36 from In the Builded Place (1989) against 22 (overlap 3). In addition all 14 'new' poems from Wordflow are reprinted here, and are accompanied by 4 further new texts.

As you can see, Michael Heller is not an over-productive author, and the overlap here is no so great that you need to be bothered. Indeed if you have Wordflow, but don't have the earlier books, you would be well advised to obtain this book. The reverse also holds true.

Heller has published a very fine study of the Objectivist poets (Conviction's Net of Branches, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985) and George Oppen seems to me to have been a major influence on his work. Given my own long-standing admiration for Oppen, I'm predisposed therefore to like Heller's work. Heller has also spoken of the importance for him of the later Williams, of Bronk, of some of Pound's poetry (interestingly enough, the earlier work and the very late work) as well as the Objectivists. In keeping with those nods towards Oppen and, to a lesser extent, Zukofsky, there is a precision to Heller's work that might be ascribed also to his earlier background in science and engineering. Whatever else they are, these poems are well-built. We have here poems of experience – poems that engage with the world, but also with traditions (literary and religious) – but one thing that is really noticeable is an unfashionable concentration of expression, the removal of excess verbiage from the poem and the attempt to express the unsayable, the inexpressible that the best poetry has always represented.

He has a seductive, communicative style:

And so, like whalers, whose diaries record a lostness to the world
in the sea's waves, to find ourselves in talk's labyrinth where

the new is almost jargon, and we speak of lintels of a house
restored or of gods who stage their return at new life or where

pollen floats on water in iridescent sheens.

[from Sag Harbor, Whitman, as if an Ode]

Scouring words for the relieving aura,
breathing deeply old vocabularies of sea,

of pine, ever-present tinge of salt.
Panoply of stars, planets. But often

one can't find what is being searched for,
the galaxy seemingly drained of that covenant.

Thus it is written out for syntax's rules,
for the untranslatable memory of black holes,

for voice, for love and against concept.

[from Winter Notes, East End]

Amongst the earlier poems there are splendid works of observation and interpretation such as Bialystok Stanzas, describing photos of the ghetto in that Polish town, but I value the later work most, which has settled into a wise and musical style. And I do like the flick of the wrist that is To Postmodernity, where certain poetries of incoherence are taken (mildly) to task and yet

… love's obliquity
is still a language,
a tutoring mastery of desires
and hurts, leaps and kneelings
at the utterance of a name.

Exigent Futures is a very beautiful book, and is commended to all that care about beauty in poetry. Even if you already have Wordflow, go and get this one too.

Tony Lopez: False Memory (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-844710-30-0. 116pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95) Approximately the first half of this book has already appeared under the same title from The Figures in the USA, back in 1996. Back then I found it hard to see what was going on but, in the light of later work by Lopez and now the rest of this set of fourteen-liners, the work's radical nature has become clearer. These groups of poems use resolutely topical material from the worlds of politics and contemporary culture, snippets of language from the news and current events being part of the process.

Lopez is not the first poet to do this of course, but I've not come across anyone else who piles them up in quite this way to construct a kind of post-modern commentary, brimming with humour through the collision of unexpected textual material. His work outside of this book (a recent poem in Poetry Review was a case in point) have pushed this style further than is possible here, where he is restricted by the chosen form.

How to characterise this? Free-association riffing? Try this for size, from Studies in Classic American Literature:

Signs poke up among large dripping Friesian patches:
Wholesale electrical distributors, freehold for sale.
I pray with speed put on your woodland dress
We leave the boundaries and sweet gardens of home,
Virgil knew all about ethnic cleansing.
The ability to work with change is at a premium
A bottle of frizz-ease, the five-minute manager –
That phrase was meat from the butcher's slab.
Stand by, put your hands over your eyes, revise,
Think carefully about your statement. Could this be
A cereal ad, digitally remastered? Think big.
The product message, phrased in affirmatives,
Sprouts from wicket fences in quality time.
If you'd like to know more, please turn up your volume now.

The sense of humour is different but the process here is not a million miles away from the later work of John Ashbery. Take a more recent piece from Speckled Noise:

These then were the lessons of American
Narrative process, script driven, whose unspoken
Allegation of transcendentalised high tea
Faded like an old sugared biscuit in a
Second-empire scheme of chocolate, turquoise-
Blue and gold. Benefits include personal calls
Office sex, internet access – it's a sad day
For investigative journalism. She/he sang
"I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart, for they
Are so expressive in their dress and adornments."
Our strongest impression was a kindly
Timidity: tinkle, trill and sweetly jingle,
Silly as any alpine cowbell you may hear
In one of those old-time menthol tobacco ads.

The rear cover blurbs by Perloff and Crozier are actually quite accurate; Jerome McGann's comment that "the world I see is very like the world I see in these poems" isn't too helpful, since most poets with open ears and eyes reflect what's around them. Lopez is unusual, though, in the extent of his raiding of the relentlessly contemporary and ephemeral for his material. A fascinating book.

Rupert M. Loydell: The Museum of Light (Arc Publications, Todmorden, 2003. ISBN 1-900072-58-0, 64pp, pb, £6.95.) Rupert M. Loydell: Ballads of the Alone (Utopian Compensation / Stride, Exeter, 2003. No ISBN, 28pp, chapbook, £5.) Consider a book that opens: My work is governed by secret rules I am reluctant to give away. and closes:

Try to understand everything. Language is remarkably persistent.

One is tempted to conclude that the poet wants to have it both ways, but this book is really a journey and the author wants you along for the ride, listening to these various voices delivered by ventriloquy.

I seem to have lost a language or at least the way to speak it.

In some ways this is a book of questions, a set of puzzled explorations of reality, which might explain the occasional reliance on programmatic forms, such as list-poems (Instructions for the Journey, Final Instructions for the Journey), or the continued reversion throughout the book to the core text Background Noise, where the authorial first-person seems to be a mixture of personae, some of them standing outside the self looking on in consternation. There are snatches of narrative forms that could have come from a fantasy novel - maybe it's because I've read too many of them that I think this:

I rode my horse
into the land of grief.

Gravity was with me.
The stars were splashed with blood.

I loved him
but could not go with him

I long for paradise,
endless and blue, unknown.

I give my creased self up
to the awful future,

watch the snow falling,
the landscape in a coal fire.

There is no reason
to move from where I am now.

We are swimming in grace.
We are full of the light.

(from The Standing Still of the Present Time. Seven Sermons For The Dead)

For all the sense of a poet at play in this volume, it is deeply serious, meditative, philosophic even, and represents by far the best collection that I have yet seen of Loydell's work. I should perhaps add that extensive use has been made of the writings of other people in this book; it's not clear quite how deeply the quarrying process has gone, but it's certainly been beneficial. There is a sense in which Rupert is writing here about writing, which for some readers can be a problem, but I don't feel that that is negative factor.

The more recent chapbook Ballads of the Alone is a limited edition of 100 copies, and can be ordered from the author's own press, Stride. This sequence also makes use of the data-mining technique, though once again it's unclear quite how far the refining of the basic ore has gone. The poem is said to be "after W. Eugene Smith", someone who is not credited on the list of sources. Each section of the poem is accompanied by a facing black-and-white image by the author (who also happens to be a fine painter of abstracts); these at times suggest Franz Kline, which I guess is a cop-out statement regarding black-and-white abstracts, but they are excellent nonetheless, and the print-quality of what I would guess to be laser-printer copy is excellent. This work, even more so than the poems in the Arc volume, has moved onto an elliptical mode of expression that was not apparent in Loydell's earlier work. In some ways, I actually prefer the poems in this chapbook to the longer book reviewed above. It's a nice object, the text has more breathing-space, and the small square format – a similar shape to a CD jewel-box, but maybe 10-15% larger – fits the poems perfectly. Recommended.

Robert Minhinnick (ed): The Adulterer's Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: A Facing-Text Anthology (Carcanet, Manchester 2003. ISBN 1-85754-644-X, £9.95,125pp, pb) This is a much-needed anthology, and I wish it had been larger. Minhinnick is the right man for the job — a good (English-language) poet himself, and editor of Poetry Wales, he has the political as well as the literary credentials. We could do with a huge compendium of Welsh-language writing from the past 100 years, actually, much as Polygon gave us of Gaelic in the anthology An Tuil. There is a recent Bloodaxe anthology Modern Welsh Poetry, which may well do this, though I have yet to see it. (I will update this review as soon as I have…)

The problem with the book, if there is one, is that it's unclear to an outsider quite what rationale has been applied to the selection; now this is true of just about every collection of translations: what the editor doesn't usually tell you is that selection has been compromised by translatability. Like it or not, some poems just won't go satisfactorily into another language, no matter how talented the intermediary. Given the prevalence of formal models in Welsh poetry, that means whole swathes of material are excluded, a priori. That might just mean that we're left with a mediocre lowest-common-denominator kind of poetry, but the final results in this book suggest that – compromises taken as read – the remainder can still be worth the reader's time. I do wonder about the inclusion of the Welsh texts here, though. The publisher must be assuming that the book's main audience will be in Wales, perhaps amongst those whose command of the native tongue is less than perfect. A non-Welsh-speaking audience could have done with more translations, to get a better idea of the kind of thing that's being written in the far west. I can just about mouth the sounds of the originals, with no notion of their meaning, and I suspect that puts me ahead of most English readers.

The reason I acquired the book at all was the fact that it included Bobi Jones, someone who has been just a name at the back of my consciousness for some time, and then largely because he is spoken of most often as the writer of a vast "anti-epic" poem called Hunllef Arthur. He counts as a modernist in Welsh writing, though I'm unclear as to what that might mean in context. The small selection here does him no justice, alas; the poems read well, such as Bilbao Churchyard (reference is made to the destruction of Basque names on gravestones in Euskadi):

These graves make a grammar.
You may study it best
on a moonstruck night
when the Basque words creep
away from their stones
and knuckle the ears
of Spanish in Guernica.
What's left to do
but hurry out with hammer and chisel
to restore mystery to this masonry?
But graves are ungrateful:
always devouring the hand
that feeds them.

For the curious, the last three lines read thus in the original:

Beiddgar fydd beddau.
Myn rhai frathu'r llaw
Sy'n eu porthi.

The other poems are rich in assonance and alliteration (important factors in formal Welsh poetry) and overflowing with imagery, a nice respite after a lot of rather limp English verse.

The other five poets here are Gwyneth Lewis – familiar because she writes also in English, books published by Bloodaxe –, Menna Elfyn, Elin ap Hywel, Iwan Llwyd, and Emyr Lewis; so we have 3 men and 3 women. Perhaps it's not surprising that several of the poems here sound in English just like English mainstream poetry: anecdotal poems of memory, childhood, reminiscence, holidays, foreign travel. Some ancient Welsh creeps into the Elin ap Hywel selection, with poems based on the Rhiannon story from the Mabinogion, and these have a taut strength that I admire, though they will be opaque to English readers that don't have a Penguin Classics Mabinogion to hand. (You should have it anyway…).

Disarmed

Let's call it the first protocol.

His bracelets, his jewellery, the silver
breasts of his cuirass, I lay them on the ground.

Then soon his ancestry, his guild, his kin
his country are shining at his feet.

Then I chip away at the lids of his wounds,
They lie like flags he will never hold again.

How his chainmail slithers slowly to the floor.
How strange that he shivers with my hand upon his skin.

Then Emyr Lewis has Taliesin pay a visit, and this is one where the translation really takes wing:

A sparrowhawk, soaring, I saw
Argoed's English auguries
and so predicted an army of days,
suns' pale faces above shields' black rims,
an empire built of empty eyes and mouths,
and I felt a wind cold as corpse-skin
of our brotherhood

The poem then moves forward in time to WW1 and the Falklands, and loses some of that concentration and effect.

A short notice like this does no justice to a book like this, but it's worth reading for a view over what is alien territory for Anglophone readers. Some of it is quite frankly uninteresting; for me, the nearer the verse here approaches the English mainstream the less interesting it becomes. I've seen too many translations in my time that are presented as fine poetry because they sound "just like us". I'd rather see something that cuts against the English grain, but I imagine a lot of it will be formal in device and thus resistant to effective translation. Have a go at this anyway; there's enough good poetry here to make it worthwhile.

Geraldine Monk: Selected Poems (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-69-2, 235pp, pb, £10.95, $14.95). It seems only a short while ago that we got Geraldine Monk's later work collected in Noctivagations, and now we have a huge selected that ranges over 25 years'work. It's a bewildering book, quite frankly: a frenetic collision of styles and possibilities. Interregnum, her piece on the Pendle Witches, is a case in point, ranging over a variety of possible approaches to the construction of a poem – an undeniably fascinating work. Some of the book leaves me way behind, as did parts of Noctivagations, but it's still good to see the work of one of our senior avant-gardistes being given serious attention like this.

Stanley Moss: A History of Color. New and Collected Poems (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2003. 234pp, pb (226x132mm), $17.95, C$26.95) Stanley Moss is the founder and director of the splendid Sheep Meadow Press in New York State, many of whose books have been welcomed here in the past. He has been published widely in the US and the UK (where four collections have been published by Anvil, a press of a similar stripe to Sheep Meadow), but this is the first comprehensive view of his career to date and it's a welcome book.

Moss's art is a quiet one, and a cultured one. What else would you expect from someone who sells fine paintings as a day-job and edits a fine small press for a hobby? The poet's voice in some ways takes me back to another time; it's the voice of a cultured gentleman in an old, deep chair, sharing confidences. The authorial first person is paramount, and it's nearly always the poet himself, rather than a persona. The title poem is a wonderful elegy on death, colour, history and art, with the regretful barbs of an ageing man looking regretfully on the world:

Death, I think you take your greatest pleasure
in watching us murdering in great numbers
in ways even you have not planned.

The book is organised in reverse chronological order, the new poems first, followed by the more recent volumes and ending with the early work. The collection shows a remarkable unity of vision and style; the significant changes across the years are perhaps an increase in confidence and an inevitable maturity of vision in the later work. Notwithstanding that, he seems to have been prepared to address God, his God, anyone's God, loud and clear, from the very beginning. I would guess that some critics would quibble over the excess of art in these poems rather than the nitty-gritty of contemporary life, but that would be unfair. I'm more than happy to read these cultivated poems and avoid the more forgettable aspects of the world for the time my eye traverses his lines. I would avoid many a gritty piece of realism for poems such as The Decadent Poets of Kyoto :

Their poetry is remembered for a detailed calligraphy
hard to decipher, less factual than fireflies in the night:
the picture-letters, the characters, the stuff
their words were made from were part of the meaning.
A word like "summer" included a branch of plum-blossoms ...

A History of Color is a fine book, commended to any who already know Moss' work and to those who do not. You will have a pleasant companion for several hours in this book, and one to return to many times. Delightful.

Jennifer Moxley: Imagination Verses (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 10876857-94-3, 102pp, pb, £8.95, $12.95).  Jennifer Moxley's previous Salt book, The Sense Record was one of the best books I've read all year and I'm still going back to it. This one contains earlier work and is somewhat less interesting – other than as an indication as to how she got to where she was going. It still has some wonderful lines, like Your life like a wentletrap awaiting clarity out by the sea (from Ode on the Son)

and some very fine poems, but it's not The Sense Record. There are some lovely arch games, a great deal of engagement with that odd beast, the lyric 'I', as the author confesses in her preface, but I find I like best the pieces that approach most nearly the later work, such as Today my mind became an elegy…

Today my mind became an elegy
to the chemistry of 4 dead chambers;
take those familiar streets away from me
or just leave me alone. While you chafers
came so slowly on my pillow did lie
a rash of tomb-like stillness just alive,
ceaselessly caught in bad eternity.

When my battered and dead chambers revive
poets will be chemists in rescue
they will then begin a strict enforcement
of sweet nothings and chest x-rays of you
who pledge unique affection, the climate
will break black and the earth offer solace
to elegiac minds who've lost their place.

Had I not read The Sense Record, I would probably be welcoming this book with open arms; as it is, I like it, and at times very much indeed, but I'd rather read the other book.

It's not worth showing you the cover, given that it's in Faber's minimalist typographic style: grey and white on a black ground. Smart, but not worth reproducing here. It's the UK Poetry Book Society choice for the current quarter and is at least an improvement on the last three that I received. This is Paterson's fourth collection and, while I cannot agree with the effusive mainstream encomia that his work regularly attracts, Paterson is – I have to admit – a talented poet. His range, control, diction and sound all make me wish he wasn't quite so hidebound by the current British mainstream's preferred style.

As a book this is very much a collection of his latest work; I get no sense of a book hanging together here other than through the mysteries of chronology. Given that it is such a collection, there are a couple of damp squibs that a poet as skilled as this should perhaps have excluded from his corpus, but the sins are fewer than the pleasures. There are some attractive poems in Scots here, as well as some excellent versions of (that is, "poems after...") Rilke and Cavafy, which I read as English poems made in homage more than as translations, plus a version of one canto from Dante's Inferno.

So, I'm happier with this than with the last three selections from the PBS, but it would be good if they would actually choose something less predictable. Of their last four choices I could have predicted their selection of Muldoon and Paterson if I'd seen all the possible lists in advance. The PBS doesn't push out the envelope in any sense, takes no risks, chooses only books by the biggest publishers and thus fails to channel its state funding to the publishers that could really use it, and use it well for the furtherance of the art. Muldoon and Paterson will sell anyway, as much as poetry will sell. It's a pity they couldn't go out and look for something even a little less predictable.

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