"Earth Records" by Alistair Noon (Nine Arches Press, 2012)

Peter Riley writes on the back cover that "The bite of modernism shorn of academic mysticism cohabits contentedly with lyrical plain speaking".

It begins with 40 Shakespearian sonnets. It ends with a series of poems about celeb poets in unusual settings ("Basho at St. Andrews" (a haibun), "Blake in Munich", "Pablo Neruda in Aylesbury", etc. My favourite of these is "Keats Somewhere or Other"). Between, there's a short section about Eastern europe, borders, etc. There's much mixing of past and present, of here and there. Three extracts from the sonnets will give you a flavour

Hey look, a written word! It flaps and lands with its fox-red back, grey head and zebra wings. For several quick seconds it simply stands under a North German Buche. It blinks (p.12)

As you see, the work isn't syntactically-challenging

Alternatives? The open end of chess, a mix of art and engineering discourses, machines that function both when damp and dry, gulls at rocky coasts that can float and fly (p.13)

This is the conclusion of a sonnet. Even here (a rhyming couplet), the ending isn't a punch-line. It's common for the poems to keep two or more threads open, leaving them unresolved.

Although these lesser hounds are known to bite the legs of larger breeds who think they're chief, it still remains an asymmetric fight: the bigger dogs retain their bigger teeth for when they threaten to deploy their forces and deprive small mouths of their protein sources (p.18)

I wonder what experienced formalists would think of this, because it clearly falls within their critical scope. Those last 2 lines don't seem to add much.

Other Reviews

• Peter Riley (The Fortnightly Review)