Richard Caddel: Writing in the Dark (edited by Ann Caddel) (West House Books, Sheffield, 2003. IBN 1-904052-12-6. 61pp, pb, £7.50.) It's tough to be giving notices to two posthumous collections in the one issue, especially as the authors in question both died too young. Ric Caddel died in April 2003 and had almost completed this book, the torso of which has been edited by his widow for this handsome publication. Let's just say that this one is well worth your while and should be in your collection if you care about late-20C English poetry. Caddel's art was a musical one and it's a pleasure to see these words tripping lightly across the page. The work ranges in style from minimalist lyric to longer-lined short poem and neither can really be quoted here to great effect, as they don't really give an impression of the delightful whole. The minimalist lyrics unravel if quoted out of sequence, the longer ones need their companions to give them some context. Here's Shiner though, an attempt at an appropriate example, from a book I encourage all the acquire:

One star overhead, sound
of night frost crackling. We
follow hard with all our
lives, there's nothing more

of it than space. In this dark
enfolding, we've all just our-
selves, memories, our breathing
individual. Standing

lost so alone in this music
or walking or listening
for what light, what plain
morning we're moving towards—

Paul Celan: Romanian Poems (translated & introduced by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi). (Green Integer, Los Angeles & Copenhagen, 2003. ISBN 1-892295-41-5, 76pp, pb, 152mm x 108mm, $10.95) This is a useful volume for Celan addicts, and is also useful in getting an idea of what he was doing before Todesfuge (which was in fact first published in Romanian translation). The fascination of the book lies less in the quality of the poetry than in seeing more clearly the roots of the surrealist influence that is so clear in the early (German) Celan. Surrealism seems to have had an influence in Romania, whereas any traces of it had been stamped out in Germany and Austria, thanks to the cultural jackboots of the 1930s. The texts are presented in Romanian and English, fortunately, as this means that many readers with some knowledge of Romance languages will be able to see where the original differs substantially from the English version. They won't necessarily understand too much, but will have enough for a health-warning.

Ciaran Carson: Breaking News (Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem; Gallery Press, Oldcastle, Ireland, 2003. Wake Forest ISBNs 1-930630-10-7 (pb), 1-930630-11-5 (h/c). Gallery ISBN 1-85235-340-6, €17.50 (h/c?) ) I've always had a soft spot for Carson's work, although it's rather different to my usual fare. This won the 2003 Forward Prize in the UK, much to my surprise – as I had assumed the usual Picador / Faber / Cape names would turn up. It's an interesting book from a poet I have in fact come to esteem more as a prose-writer in recent times, interesting because he's changed his style dramatically. There are a large number of skinny minimalist lyrics of the kind I would expect to see from an American rather than an Irish (or British) poet, and most of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The longer-breathed poems, such as the splendid War Correspondent and The Forgotten City show, however, that he's lost none of his ability to construct a long line and pack it full to the brim — compared to the sloppy line we've had to see from certain other Belfast poets in recent years, this is a welcome tonic. The book appeared a year ago, but it took me quite a while to find a copy, as the Gallery paperback seems to be hard to find. Wake Forest's production is as good as usual, in their standard tall format (about 9.25ins x 5.75ins).

C. P. Cavafy: I've Gazed So Much
(translated by George Economou, with illustrations by Dieter Hall. ISBN 0-9529961-9-7.
Stop Press, London, 52pp, pb, £8.95).

It seems almost as if Cavafy's time has passed for English readers, and I can't remember the last time I saw new translations of his work. I do however have the old standby Keeley & Sherrard translations of the Collected Poems here on my shelves (Hogarth Press, London, 1975), and it's been an interesting task comparing these poems in the two different translations, especially since my Greek runs no further then alpha, beta, gamma. The linocut illustrations in this new book by Dieter Hall are excellent, and as erotic as you would expect for this poet, but what of the translations?

Well, I went ahead with an A/B comparison of the Economou and Keeley/Sherrard versions, poem by poem. Result? No contest — the Economou versions in almost every case are far superior as poems to the older translations, which often demonstrate a tin ear. I'm sure the K & S versions are correct lexically, but they clunk badly at times and move clumsily. It's a question of being just that little bit more courageous with the translations, and in this new one we have a poet's sense of diction, of the mot juste, whereas in K & S we have lexical correctness and a professorial ear. Given that the older version may well be out of print, this is very recommendable, although (a slight word of warning) it does seem to cover more of the early work and is thus not entirely representative.

Catherine Daly: DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-876857-95-1. 208pp. Pb, £10.95 / $17.95). Catherine Daly is one of the most interesting younger American poets to have come to my attention in the past couple of years, and this is her first full-length collection. Actually, it's three times as long as a traditional full-length collection, and I suspect she would have been served better by a shorter book. Nonetheless DaDaDa is a cornucopia of pleasures and possibilities, and it will be interesting to see which paths she will follow next. I particularly admired the Legendary section here with its meditations on female archetypes from history and myth. The Heresy section too looks at feminine & feminist issues, but uses a dazzling array of structures and stratagems to deal with this subject matter. She raids technical discourses for material, occasionally – it must be said – to the discomfort of the poems, but she has an impressive control of her varied resources. Quoting these poems doesn't really help much, unless I do it to an enormous extent, which I don't want to do here. Nonetheless this is a poetry that we will have to come to terms with: a most impressive volume.

Lisa Jarnot: Ring of Fire (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-84471-007-6. 108pp, pb, £8.95 / $13.95.) This is an expanded edition of a book originally published in Boston in 2001. It has nothing to do with Johnny Cash. For some reason I didn't have any of Ms Jarnot's books on my shelves, but I had been impressed by the occasional anthology pieces & webzine publications I'd come across. Before I read this book, the TLS decided to have a cheap shot at it, quoting the over-the-top blurbs on the rear cover and then some of the text from the Dumb Duke Death collaborative piece here (collaborative with an artist, that is). Now, I would agree that down dire / death day / dim dale / ding dong etc isn't particularly interesting as poetry, although the accompanying images are quite arresting. Damning a book because of 10 pages, or an OTT blurb is an unfortunate recurring trope of the JC column in the TLS. Some other poems use repetition in a not particularly interesting manner, but the book does take wing, with the Sea Lyrics:

I am the waterfront and I cover the waterfront and all
the boats all know me. I am the foreigner of birds and
the shadows of sails upon martinis. I am underwater
buying jam and drinking stolen coffee. I am pelagic now
and sober, having recently discovered all the birds.

This is rather more like the Jarnot poems I'd admired in previous readings, that odd tinge of surrealism draped on the torso of an otherwise lyric piece. Here's Right Meditation from The Eightfold Path:

What thoughts I have tonight of you
myself, with the razors in the bathroom
on the shelf beside the drugs inside the
rain, and the neighbours who are quiet
inside August in the courtyard in the place
where I have lived, with the cat upon the
windowsill who watches at the moon,
with the moon where it should be, near
the fifth floor there and up into the sky,
in the drift that is the color of the snow
across the surface of a lake inside my
head, talked to and speaking in return,
in this dream, obvious, in prophecy, with
life beyond the passage of the night.

There are quite a number of poems like this exquisite little lyric, but I had a sense that the book as a whole had expanded beyond its natural size, with some of the poems coming over as padding. A slim 50-pager would have been a fine book, I suspect, and I'm sorry some of the poems I like best here have been swamped by less attractive material. It's good to see Ms Jarnot's work appearing in the UK, in any event. Her work is worth reading to get a sense of what the younger generation of US poets is up to; it's like nothing over here, but it does have similarities to the work of poets like Charles Borkhuis and the younger Berrigans, though I confess I'd be pushed to say exactly what it was that was similar, other than sensibility. On balance I'd recommend the book, albeit with a few regrets.

Douglas Oliver: Arrondissements (edited by Alice Notley) (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-84471-019-X. 156pp. Pb, £9.95 / C$15.95). This is the posthumous volume of Oliver's work many of us had been waiting for. I'm delighted to say that it's been worth the wait and that it showed the author returning to form. I hope I'll be forgiven for saying that I admired much of Doug Oliver's work in the 1970s, but was less happy with the political poems of later years, which, while brilliant in their way, were overwhelmed – in my view – by the political to the exclusion of the poetic. I know many people disagreed with me on this, but I am always suspicious when poetry is praised for its content and its message rather than for its qualities as poetry. I understand why the poems were written, and the anger that underpinned them, but I couldn't go with them all the way, especially in their sentimentality.

We'll never really know what the next Oliver volume would have been, had he lived, although Alice Notley gives some idea of the projects that were still in train at the time of his death. Arrondissements refers of course to Paris, where the author lived for several years up to his death, and a specific project to write a long series of poems that would be based in the physical reality of Paris but then open out to the greater world. This includes meditations on other writers associated with Paris, tellingly, Celan and Heine among them – both Jewish, both outsiders, both died before their time. Sadly, the first poem about Celan, The Weekend Curfew, is frankly poor and would never have withstood the rigorous analysis that Oliver would have applied to it in his university days (which I well recall). By contrast, the poem about Celan's widow is very poignant and effective, and the poem Crystal Eagle 1 (i.m. Paul Celan) is Oliver at his best:

A crystal eagle tied by the neck
with soft silk braid, like a unicorn
restrained by a virgin, sneers
and draws in snow crystals of its breath
when I move my head to make lights
travel along its beak. There's future
silence of the non-forthcoming in the rue
de Paradis shop window – rue
de Paradis once the près-des-filles-Dieu.
Villeroy & Boch have laid five glass hearts
around the eagle plinth, gold-amber,
lemon, red, blue, purple, whose bruises
slide within the under-wings. Myself
a stranger at home in this widowed
Jewish crystal quarter, I muse
on a suicide that I can't in all decency
address as tu. But if I could,
the silken braid would fall, the eagle
rising, draw a chariot through the sky
towards mauve snow around a throne,
centre of all that's celestial in Celan.

That plays a dangerous game, and teeters on the edge of sentimentality, but it works wonderfully well. There are many more such successes here, and some failures too – the video-game-based section The Video House of Fame strikes me as being unsuccessful in its appropriation of this material: it's a daring thing to do, but I just don't think it works here, notwithstanding a number of fine passages buried within the greater whole. It's the first half of the book where the gems are to be found, the shorter poems that avoid the long prosaic line. It's a book we should be grateful for, even if there are things in it that I regret, and it is in fact the last we'll have, bar the biographical work (is it a poem?) mentioned by Alice Notley in her introduction.

Loss Pequeño Glazier: Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 1-84471-001-7. 112pp. Pb, £8.95 / C$13.95). Hidden in this book there are some stimulating pieces of work, but it takes a while to find them. In short: I like the mix / mezcla of languages, the raiding of the myth-store and linguistic diversity of the Americas; I find a lot of the core information supplied here interesting; I find the surfaces of the poems almost totally uninteresting. And I'm not particularly inspired by the digital background and computer-speak here — I have a suspicion that a lot of this presently cutting-edge e-poetry is going to look rather dated in just a few years, not unlike the machine celebrations of the futurist. My apologies to all for my impatience with this volume.

'Apples and Snakes', to quote the organisers, was established in 1982 as "a platform for poetry which would be popular, relevant, cross-cultural and accessible to the widest possible range of people. We aim to stretch the boundaries of poetry in performance and education, to give voice to challenging, diverse and dynamic poets, and to promote poetry as a live and exhilarating art form".

As I read that, my heart sank. In the space of a few lines, the writer had managed to tick every single Arts Council-approved priority, while leaving definitions of many key words suitably woolly. Cultural managers, especially those who approve grants, really like words such as inclusiveness (which is of course a Good Thing), cross-culturalism (ditto), performance (which means whatever I say it means, but audience-aware events are in great favour with the A.C.E.), diversity (which is more or less the same as inclusive & cross-cultural), and dynamism (eh?). I mean it's all rather mom and apple-pie, if I can use an American term here, but the combination is a bit much. Now, I've never been to an A&S event, and thus can make no judgement on their live presentations, but I'm impressed despite myself that an event series of this nature can keep going for 21 years. It suggests that they are successful in finding and keeping audiences, and in renewing themselves, which in turn suggests good management and the kind of professionalism that the A.C.E. likes to see.

So what's on the page? Well, it's often the case that "performance" work (&, as I've suggested there is no adequate definition of something which seems to include both Caroline Bergvall and Roger McGough — to take two contrasting names at random), and the product on show here varies enormously in quality, in ambition, and in classification. There's Billy Childish's post-beat lyrics, thankfully accompanied by his very interesting woodcuts, Valerie Bloom's poetry for the young, doggerel from Patience Agbabi, boredom from Dannie Abse, predictability from Messrs McGough and Mitchell (Adrian), skilful middle-of-the-road material from Michael Donaghy. There are far too many poets here to discuss them at length, but I was a little dismayed by the sheer number of lightweight anecdotal poems, and there were rather too many with foursquare rhythms. There are many that I think I would enjoy live but I don't enjoy reading – a perennial curse of 'performance' work, in my view; perhaps a CD would have been better so we could at least hear the voices. This may all sound a little unkind, but the problem with the book is that it makes no sense as an anthology; it does make sense as a celebration, as a monument if you like, and it does, despite its shortcomings, encourage one to attend an event. I may well do so, if I'm in the neighbourhood.

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J.H. Prynne: Biting the Air
(Equipage, Cambridge, 2003. 16pp, chapbook, £3.50.)

Another of Prynne's (& Equipage's for that matter) resolutely stern, minimalist productions. Nothing gets in the way of the words, and they are presented cleanly, clearly and smartly. What can one say that is new, intelligent and helpful about a new book by this almost legendary author? Not a lot, is the quick answer. The cop-out response would be that those who like this kind of poetry will like this book, those that don't, won't. But that's of no help at all. What do I think of it? Well, I'm deeply impressed for the most part, more than a little puzzled for the rest. Prynne's late mode is one in which information is imparted with no ownership or apparent judgement. The one pronoun I don't recall ever seeing much of in Prynne's work is "I"; there are the occasional "it"s in this poem, but the actors in this poem are implicitly large-scale off-stage, shadowy figures and/or constructs. In fact the subjects of verbs are often left out entirely, perhaps in allusion to the occlusion of the individual in modern society. If there is a 'you' uttered, it is an all-embracing you, or so it seems to me– there is no addressee. You could have some amusement with a text like this, picking out words and phrases and assuming the poet is not in favour of the item / organisation / personage (although persons don't really walk onto this stage); thus G7 turns up (as does G21), brands, pharmaceutical(s), prices, franchise, tariff, demand-led, forward trading. The last-named turns up in close proximity to crap, gambles, parasitic, ulcerous, infected, sores and toll, but also with barter (as an opposed paradigm, one presumes). As is usual with Prynne, non-literary discourses infiltrate the poem, largely chemical and pharmacological in this case, but his surface is so rebarbative, so unpoetic in the traditional sense, that you hardly notice this otherwise destabilising entry. If you've read Prynne, you'll know what I'm referring to; for others, unfamiliar with this writing, here is a brief sample:

Assert parallel imports under licence at baseline
emergency exits turnstile one-way. Within pro-
tected gray markets to get what's coming is patent
wrist flexure daunted, prosthetic flavine into

precursor bulk inflows. Wipe out fly before make
sheltered linear attrition social, breakdown on counter
service for snacks.

This may appear a waste of time to some readers, but I would suggest to you that this poem is worth the effort, and that selecting a few lines like this does the whole, immensely compacted poem, no justice at all.

Notwithstanding a frequent reversion to apparently normal syntactic structures, the sentences and clauses are undermined by unexpected juxtapositions, and the whole is built up almost at the phrasal level, brick by thudding brick – there is also a rhythm of sorts hidden in this poem. It's the kind of poetry that does make me feel stupid, but I do feel the need to engage with it, much as I have done over the years with Pynne's work — and I've been reading him since about 1972, albeit not always with the same degree of attention or puzzlement. This poem is continuously interesting, even if its communicative values will only be intermittent for many readers. The ending

Don't you yet notice
a shimmer on bad zero, won't you walk there
and be the shadow unendurably now calibrated.

had me going back to the beginning, and I'll be reading this several more times yet before I'm done with it. I don't think I'll get very close to what's going on in this resolutely opaque poetry, but I'm going to try.

Equipage publications can be sourced direct from the publisher, Rod Mengham, c/o Jesus College, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB5 8BL, or from Peter Riley's mail-order service.

Adam Thorpe: Nine Lessons from the Dark (Cape, London, 2003. ISBN 0-224-06385-5. 79pp, pb, £8) This is Adam Thorpe's fourth collection and he's an unusual writer in being both novelist and poet. I'd always regarded him as an original and highly literate novelist (Ulverton, Pieces of Light, among others) and was intrigued that he also wrote verse. His third collection, From the Neanderthal, also from Cape, I found disappointing in its lack of ambition, however.

The problem I have with his poetry in general is that his poems too often read just like shorter pieces by an intelligent, literate novelist, rather than works which demand your attention as poems per se. Scratchings, for instance, begins with a quote from the doyen of late 20th century French poets, Yves Bonnefoy — a poet who handles the abstract and a compressed language better than most poets of the past 50 years — but descends into a fairly ordinary poem of observation written in a kind of heightened prose that passes for verse in many areas of the current UK mainstream. I suppose I should be grateful that's it's 'heightened', as all too much current writing stays resolutely flat on its back. He's at his best in an early section such as the following, where the level of compression is greater, and despite one or two rather knowing images, like the nod to Edward Hopper:

The woman, skin-ruffed, grimly at the counter
With headphones, lipmike, lonely in the fall

Of frosty light, takes our orders and calls
Lonely Hopperish all-night brightness,

lonely buzz of the kitchens' electrics like anxiety.
Madness. Madness in the absence of prairie, here –

something deadly numbed not there that should be.
Is this precisely where (this spot) the Sioux,

for instance, spied their non-gods
in loneliness of fasting, creatures of earth and air,

the solemn hide-flap of the tipi opening
to a universe speeding from the eyes like horses

to no known end of breathing?

It's not a bad poem at all, and in fact I rather enjoyed reading it, as I did some of the rest of the book, but it doesn't have the mystery and excitement I'm always looking for. In short the book is pleasant, but unexceptional, where the novels are most exceptional. I am looking forward to Mr Thorpe's next novel.

Tears in the Fence 36 (Autumn 2003. ISSN 0266-5816, edited by David Caddy, 38 Hod View, Stourpaine, Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 8TN. Single copy £6 / $7 cash. Subscriptions £15 / $25 (airmail) for 3 issues, cheques i.f.o. Tears in the Fence.) I like TiTF, though I tend to find the reviews and essays of more interest than the poetry. Having said that, this issue does feature good material from John Kinsella, Jeremy Hilton and Anne Born. The poetry tends to be more conservative than the editorial views being expressed in the magazine, which is odd, but it's good to see another journal looking in all directions for new work and not just to a coterie of the tried-and-tested.

Zwischen den Zeilen 21 (May 2003, guest ed. Ulf Stolterfoht. 231pp, pb, €17, Sfr30)
Zwischen den Zeilen 22 (December 2003, ed. Urs Engeler. 305pp, pb, €17, Sfr30)
ISSN 1022-002X, ISBNs 3-905591-55-3 and 3-905591-71-5, respectively.
Available through the pan-German book trade, and from amazon.de and other online outlets, as well as from the press at Postfach, Dorfstrasse 33, CH-4019 Basel, Switzerland.

Zwischen den Zeilen (which means Between the Lines) has frankly become essential reading for anyone who wants to know what's going on at the cutting edge of German poetry, and these two large volumes show why. Urs Engeler's press – Urs Engeler Editor – expands the process with some fine books by the likes of Peter Waterhouse, Elke Erb, Michael Donhauser and Ulf Stolterfoht.

ZdZ is tough stuff, but every issue has material to both delight and astonish. No 21, guest-edited by Stolterfoht carries the title Elf Widerstandsnester (Eleven Pockets of Resistance), but is not the manifesto-led avant-garde group you might expect. It's not the kind of work that Ulla Hahn's readers will have on their wish-lists either. Inhabiting these pockets of resistance are Paulus Böhmer, Anton Bruhin, Oswald Egger, Thomas Kapielski, Bert Papenfuß, Oskar Pastior, Ronald Pohl, Ferdinand Schmatz, Dominik Steiger, Christian Steinbacher and Hans Thill — a mix of German and Austrian work that crosses generations (Pastior is in his 70s, Egger turned 40 last year), but is united in not being the kind of thing that people expect when the two words German and Poetry are uttered together (and I should mention that Kapielski is represented here by drawings). For some time I've regarded Oswald Egger as the hardest-to-read poet currently at work in German, and the work printed here more or less confirms that. The work from Schmatz, Thill, Steiger, Böhmer and Papenfuß is all fascinating and demands attention. A quite astonishing little anthology.

I opened no. 22 with great relish, given the presence of the Austrian poet Franz Josef Czernin, and I was not disappointed. Here he offers an essay in verse (Die Metapher. Die Transsubtantiation), and some quite remarkable translations of Shakespeare sonnets. The issue also contains some fine new work by another Austrian poet, Felix Philipp Ingold, plus his translations of Russian translations of Shakespeare sonnets (sic) – all three versions are given here, plus a literal German version of the Russian. Fascinating material. Finally there's the German (but Vienna-resident) poet Benedikt Ledebur with his own recent work and his translations of John Donne. This is, in short, a deeply serious issue and one that contains a great many pleasures.

Copyright © Shearsman Books Ltd, 2004. Where quotations are given, these are in the copyright of the original authors.