Joe Francis Doerr: Order of the Ordinary (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 1-84471-012-2. 152pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, pb, £8.95/$13.95). Order of the Ordinary reveals Joe Francis Doerr as a poet of immense scholarship, intellect and ability. His descriptions are clear, concise and vivid, and numerous references to texts and writers make the work resonate through literary/mythological time and space. As a poet he is master of form and style, at home equally with the prose poem, rhyme or free verse; he presents wonderfully crafted examples of structures familiar and innovative, often in the same poem.

The book presents us with an American poet on top of his game but who takes nothing for granted. No easy read but a work you'll return to for its adventure with language – beautiful, precise, discordant – or in pursuit of one of those innumerable references he makes, which you know but just can't place. For these are poems with their footnotes thrown away; you can accept what you read first time or chase almost endlessly after the echoes, seeking to identify pastiche — stylistic and cultural echoes abound throughout the work. These are no fragments 'shored' against his ruin but a postmodernist deconstruction of the contemporary co-existence of texts — old and newly created — posing the question whether any text can be a creation which does not copy or contain that which superseded it. The text to Doerr is not the raw conception of a single moment but a complex realisation of ideas, language and time. Neither is there a single correct way to respond to what he has written, only the one you use; he challenges both the way the reader uses and makes sense of a poem.

From the title, calling to mind Foucault's "Order of Things", it seems at first glance that Doerr's other intention is to destroy those moribund gods snug in their present day Valhalla, but this is not included in his purpose. Unlike Foucault, Derrida et al he is perfectly content to permit all Western post-Enlightenment mythologies to remain unchallenged, undeconstructed, but not uncriticised. They rule throughout the poems but have to share their rule with mythologies from other times – Celtic, Roman, Greek, Native American. The task as he views it is to disrupt the text, focusing attention on the act of reading rather than making the reader conscious of the way ideology/myth may condition meaning; to achieve this he sets up an ironical discordance between linguistic, typographical alienation techniques and an immense descriptive precision.

The opening poem, which gives the book its title, presents in its opening section the fine detail of a monk preparing a piece of vellum:

… skinside, hairside, skinside
by the reek of tallow smoke;
tonsured pate beaded with his labour
recto, verso, recto ...

Involved in that ancient monastic world, we can smell, see, experience the labour through the rhythm of repetition, but we quickly recognise this as a world closer to the invention of Umberto Eco than the world of Brother Byhrtnoth. In the next section we follow the way the vellum is laid out so it can be written on, leading to that 'supreme moment of doubt' – that of any writer before embarking on a new work. Description is exact; but this is a list of procedures, only its situation makes us read it as poetry. Is that not the case? In section 3 we enter the mind of the monk and are shown a glimpse of the pre-Christian mythologies and magic he still carries as he tries to cleanse his mind before beginning his task:

I command to depart from me mermaids,
who are called sirens…

so that he can begin 'in scholarly fashion' his task of translation – a truly postmodernist endeavour. The final section of the poem comprises another list; a nightmare taxonomy based on the knowledge and superstition which prevailed at the time. This is an ending which is no ending but, like the rest of the poem, is excellent preparation for what is to follow.

A later poem, 'Corrigenda' (or is it a series of poems?) concerns itself, or so it seems, with the translation of Taliesin's 'Marwnat Owein', presenting the reader with the problems of translation while offering a number of versions, from literal to contemporary regional vernacular. But if translation is such an imprecise art so too is reading/writing; part V of the 'poem' presents us this time not with the death of Owein but Dylan Thomas, modern figure of myth and legend. And he is not the only one to co-exist in this book alongside real/imaginary figures from the past, there is an array – Miles Davis, Joplin, Havel, John Wayne, composers and numerous other writers. Thomas's death and return journey, evocatively told partly utilising the language of the poet himself, becomes a meditation on translation and death (the ultimate translation) before dissolving into a simulated scientific writing, at once both abstruse and enlightening as Lucky's speech in "Waiting for Godot". The solitary place footnotes appear in the book is in the concluding section VII to elucidate a poem/prose poem retelling a story from "The Mabinogion" , which itself concludes with a quotation from Bede's  "Ecclesiastical History". What glues this poem together is its concern with translation, its Welsh subject matter and our expectation. Again it has a beginning, a continuation but 'ends' with a piece of text ornament and a footnote.

In 'FUTHARK2K', Doerr manages expertly to incorporate what amounts to a footnote definition into a poem itself and make it rhyme:

Sharp tongues must dull with time; (gladiolus
n [L 'sword,'Celt origin (cleddyf)] 1: Plant
w/ sword-shaped leaves, bright flowers), they must.

'FUTHARK2K' is a poem in 26 sections each taking as its subject a letter from the Old English runic alphabet. Expertly crafted, improvising around the idea associated with each rune – Wealth, Thorn, Sun, Star – a nine line poem which conjures images both within and across time. Social criticism, popular culture, fascism placed alongside a Dark (though not necessarily darker) Age.

Doerr is most directly approachable in what appears to be his more autobiographical pieces; these abound in 'Letters to Woodhenge', places lived and experiences gained interspersed with references to Native American legend and the writings of early travellers and settlers. 'Epistolary Suite' presents adventures and intimacies in the US and Prague he shared with 'lost' friends. 'Hill Country Reservation' is a beautifully poignant poem written in the everyday language of the autobiographical poems which juxtaposes a woman's growing desire to leave home with the swelling of a storm. Her desire is presented as elemental and the urge to depart as irresistible as the uncertainty of the storm into which she heads.

Although Doerr's poetry comprises many 'found' pieces, such as the emails from his nephew used in 'Antebellum Triptych', and pieces 'borrowed' from various other sources, for the most part I enjoyed his originality far more than his juxtapositions – the almost religious evocation of an idiosyncratically perverted world in 'Thumbnails for a Portrait of Sacher-Masoch' and 'Skellig' with its subtle interweaving of myth, history and legend into travel narrative. It is difficult to find fault with Doerr as an intellect, craftsman and creative thinker, but you may be forced to concede that there are times when the work would benefit from a more deeply felt (rather than described) emotional content. Yet Order of the Ordinary remains a book well worth reading – at its best it is challenging, literary, innovative – but there will be times you'll catch yourself wondering whether you might have visited some of his ideas before in the company of Eliot or Pound.

copyright © John Couth, 2004. All quotations in this review are copyright © Joe Francis Doerr, 2003.

John Couth was educated at Warwick and Exeter Universities; he now lives as a freelance writer, photographer and translator; his publications include Buriton – Spirit of a Village, and Aveyron. He lives and works in Britain and France.