Ian Patterson: Time to Get Here. Selected Poems 1969-2002. (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-92-7185pp, pb, £9.95, $13.95) Salt's project gets clearer as the list grows, and there are a number of strands to it; the younger US innovative poets, the younger Australians ditto, neglected British poets who've never been satisfactorily collected, anyone in Cambridge that doesn't have a publisher (no, I didn't mean that). Patterson is in Cambridge, but he very definitely fits into category three; I must have first read his work when I was a student in one or other of the journals that we all read in those days to see what was going in the younger early 70s avant-garde. Grosseteste Review etc. ("Etc" because I can't remember the other names…put it down to age.)

The earlier work here is not unlike that of several others at that time: skilful, a bit arch, nodding towards American models from the sixties, a little uncontrolled. As time passes, the level of control increases and the later works seem to me very fine indeed, especially Hardihood, which appeared in jacket a few years ago:

Change sun by sun and fling and laugh
as any spot that now had fired the waste
from the bill twitted within my brain’s
winter edge, shaped in slow regret.

I wrote two letters. Given words to mine
it cuts like my table carried off by name:
touchdown will carry you back unpaid
as a vane would disjoint witchery from me.

(the beginning of a 15-page poem of some cumulative power.)

This is quite a dense book that I had to read in short doses, but it's none the worse for that. A useful publication that fills a gap which needed filling.

Harry Polkinhorn & Mark Weiss (eds.) Across the Line / Al otro lado. The Poetry of Baja California. (Junction Press, San Diego, 2002. 382pp, pb, $25). We've been lucky with Mexican anthologies recently, with both Reversible Monuments and Sin puertas visibles making good cases for the vibrancy of the younger generation of poets in Mexico. To the mix we now have to add a further illuminating volume, this time confining its selection to the poets of Baja California. It's an odd state by Mexican standards, jammed up against the US frontier to the north, a peninsula jutting into the Pacific (and the Sea of Cortes) to the south, desert in the middle and, on the face of it, a less likely choice for an anthology than, say, Chiapas or Oaxaca. Or maybe not. On that northern border there's vibrant (but appalling) Tijuana, San Diego's guilty secret, as well as Mexicali.

The book attempts to be a real guide to what is relatively new literary territory, including some indigenous lyrics (re-translated here from the Spanish) and two political corridos, about assassinated heroes (one a journalist, the other a politician). Corridos are popular ballads, and one of the two included here was actually recorded by Los Tigres del Norte (The Tigers of the North), the biggest-selling norteño (northern Mexican) music-group. The vast majority of the book is however devoted to poetry as we would recognize it and, as you might expect, it's not anything like the poetry that we read in English. And that's a good thing. There are echoes of Beat poetry here and there, though I think this comparison needs to made with great care; there are too, without doubt, influences from the post-surrealist tradition that seems to be the most vibrant strain in contemporary Mexican verse; there's a lot of quasi-baroque, luxuriant, long-lined verse that Spanish seems to do so well, and with which English–language poetry often seems uncomfortable.

I enjoyed the majority of the poets represented here and it seems invidious to select individuals, but let me say that the youngest representatives, Heriberto Yépez (b. 1974) and Juan Reyna (b. 1980) were particularly interesting; the range of Yépez's work here and in Reversible Monuments mark him out as a special talent. (He is the only poet to appear in both volumes.) Then Edmundo Lizardi's long poem Baja Times (also its title in Spanish), which is almost a summing-up of contemporary Mexico, warts and all; Luis Cortés Bargalló's prose-poem Towards the Untameable Shore (Al margen indomable), here represented by selections; Raúl Antonio Cota's delightful engagement with the landscape and myths of lower California; Estela Alicia López Lomas's experimental texts such as Alice in Wonderjail (again a selection from a long work); Ernesto Adams' wonderful Precepts of the Ancient and True Religion, his only poem here; the bizarrerie of Elisabeth Algrávez's Sandbook (Arenario) which ends: The reptile arrives / reptile-embrace, reptile-kiss, reptile-hand, reptile-caress / and embraces, kisses, touches and caresses it / seadesert, sanddesert, airdesert / that unfolds, surrenders, yields itself. (Llega el reptil / reptil-abrazo, reptil-beso, reptil-mano, reptil-caricia / y la abraza, la besa, la toca y la caricia / a ella / desiertomar, desiertoarena, desiertoaire / que se desdobla, se entrega, se deja.)

Across the Line / Al otro lado is an important work of discovery, which opens doors that most of us would not have thought of opening and we'd be all the poorer for its absence. There's a large sample of work (50 pages, 17 poets) from this anthology online in jacket 21, together with an introduction by Mark Weiss.

Subtitled 'a cul-de-sac off Excavations', this is a series of 31 nine-liners in a style that will not surprise anyone familiar with Snow has fallen […] Bury me here, Alstonefield or the recent Setts poems. These are good to have, pending the release of the updated Alstonefield at the end of the year.

Old light, Italian, passing into the stone as I sat
there between them in a personal shade where
slow toads walk and funeral candles burn. Causing
an absence in the day, a blink in the light which is
full of history and tracks all deaths and sorrows. There
in the burning light on the sculpted portal the lost names
file in at the door on a hopeless quest for peace
and belonging, refused point blank at every office and
no reason, for there is none. We shrug. We have sold
the light to the tourists and wait with candles in the black hall.

I'm surprised that the author connects it to Excavations, the full reach of which will only become clear when Reality Street publish the larger text early next year. Like Setts, a lot seems to connect it to the prose collection The Dance at Mociu, recently published by Shearsman.

Simon Smith: Reverdy Road (Salt, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-844710-27-0, pb, 233pp, £10.95, $14.95).  Simon Smith's second collection is vast, and represents an enormous shift from his first book Fifteen Exits (Waterloo Press), although the latter contained work that ranged back several years before publication. This one is full of word games. Take Should for example:

Should anyone need to know anyone
Else for the matter or why digging

For knowledge long-gone, why should
I put myself forward pushing noses

Against arses, pressing noises against

Muses till birds and insect thud in the ground.

Why should a poem make sense
When the world around it doesn't?

I mean, I can't believe my ears what
They're telling me or where they've been.

— which is a series of observations I'd have to agree with. The book has a lot of quite slight poems, positively minimal compared to the one quoted above, such as More Sense:

Streets of binary coded shadow so close

Silver on silver dips in and dips out again

Soaked to the skin what relates what

To what angels leap clear of tracks

Of air the next cell and the next

That's the key to this book's sheer length – it has a lot of white space, and it's good of Salt to give each poem one page instead of bulking them up two at a time. I confess I think the book is a little too long, even so, and both the Household Gods and Xenia sections would have benefited from a little pruning. Notwithstanding that, the collection is welcome; like many of Salt's publications it allows to see what's going on in someone's work in a way that has hitherto not been possible, and may well not have been possible otherwise.

Tristan Tzara (trans. Lee Harwood): The Glowing Forgotten (Leafe Press, 1 Leafe Close, Chilwell, Nottingham NG9 6NR; 2003, chapbook, centre-stapled, £3.50 / $7. ISBN0-9537634-9-8). This is a delightful small selection from some long-unavailable translations of Tzara by Lee Harwood; 10 poems ranging from all phases of the poet's life, beginning with the Dada period in 1913 and ending with a poem first published in 1955. Given the complete lack of available translations of Tzara, you are heartily recommended to acquire this slim volume. If you don't like dada and surrealism and think overheated foreign poetries are really something unnecessary in these sceptered isles, you'll of course not be interested.

Here's the end of The Jugglers (Les saltimbanques, 1916):

…
my aunt is crouching on the trapeze in the gymnasium
          her tits are herring's heads
                    she has fins
          and pulls pulls pulls her breast's accordion
she pulls pulls pulls pulls her breast's accordion glwawawa
prohabab
in the small towns the sun smoulders under the ploughs in front of
the inn
                    nf nf nf tatai
the small boys fart watching the circus's luggage
where there are lice
and grandmothers covered in soft tumours
that is to say in polypi

and part of The Approximate Man (L'homme approximatif, 1925-30):

…
who will free us from the encumbrance of possessions and flesh
the applause of the sea breaks over you
the tragic and taut sea wall on the first step of the amphitheatre
old stone wrinkle on the worm forehead of the world
the wreckage and rubbish thrown into the sea
and the sea's into the world
…

You get the idea, I'm sure.

Scott Watson: No Vision Will Tell (Bookgirl Press, Sendai, Japan. ISBN 4-915948-2-0. 123pp, pb, $10, ¥1,500). Available in the US and on the web via Longhouse. Scott Watson is an American poet long resident in Japan who edits the magazine Bongos of the Lord. His work belongs to the minimalist strain of American poetry that owes more than a little to that other American poet resident in Japan, Cid Corman. Fittingly Watson's work carries an elliptical, almost oriental feel, with the short poems in particular teetering on the edge of haiku. Light and direct, and not a word wasted:

most don't want
what the all is
that is all I can

give and give
freely to all
but they will

pay me for
language, for my
words without me

(The Disembodiment of Teaching English).

The book is well-produced, as seems to be the case for most Japanese publications, and is good value at $10.

Another exquisite production by K-W of a slim collection by James Weil, sometime publisher of the Elizabeth Press. Slim syllabic poems, delicate observations, choice memories:

This harpsichord was
built by a member

of the church we hear
it played in. He has

painted the sounding
board with flowers, and

Haydn has written
down how to play them.

("Concerto for Harpsichord in D")

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