14 of the 29 titles begin with "The". It could have been more. He's becoming more formalist. Stanzas like the following from the "The Swing" sound rather forced.
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I hung the rope up in the air and fixed the yellow seat then stood back that I might admire my handiwork complete |
Maybe he's more gloomy too - death slips into many poems. Here's something from "Phantom (i.m. M.D.)" which adopts Michael Donaghy's voice, I think
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Your eye is no eye but an exit wound. Mind has fired through you into the world the way a hired thug might unload his gun through the silk-lined pocket of his overcoat. |
The poem ends
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In making death its god the eye had lost its home in finding it. We find this everywhere the eye appears. Were there design, this would have been the flaw. |
"Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze" has 4-line stanzas of rhyming couplets, the lines being irregularly long. Here's a stanza
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I have also deduced from your staggeringly ingenious employment of some pretty basic wavetables that unlike many of your East European counterparts, all your VST plug-ins, while not perhaps the best available probably all have a legitimate upgrade path - indeed I imagine your entire DAW as pure as the driven snow, and not in any way buggy or virusy which makes me love you more, demonstrating as it does an excess of virtue given your country's well-known talent for software piracy. |
There's quite a lot I don't get. The first half of "The Story of the Blue Flower" seems slow to me. At the moment I think I prefer his earlier books. Online reviews include
- John Field
- Adam Newey (Guardian)
- Fiona Sampson (Independent)
- Alan Brownjohn (Sunday Times)
- Catherine Woodward (Scottish Poetry Review)
- John McCullough (Horizon Review)
- Jan Schreiber (Contemporary Poetry Review)
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