Island Press

When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press co-operative.

Microtexts (Island Press, $21.95 pb, 93 pp) is a set of aphoristic prose pieces grouped under the following chapter headings: ‘Poetry and the Narrative of the Self’; ‘Poetry and Poetics’; ‘Writing’; ‘Art’; ‘Reading’; ‘Critics and Criticism’. It is not academic literary theory, but personal and professional musings by a poet with five collections to his credit. Martin Langford’s poetry adopts a lyric voice which, to my ear, sounds variations on the ground-bass of a slightly lugubrious, melancholy tone. It is idiosyncratic and not unpleasant: ‘time we outwitted / behaviour, the sad primate life’ (from his poem ‘Lake Coila’).