Poetry

In Tracy Ryan’s poems there are no safe houses, the walls of domesticity keep falling in and she is the clear-eyed tightrope walker negotiating a perilous foothold. Her lines zigzag across the page:

Mortal Divide is an anti-oedipal odyssey, Joycean roman à clef, migrant memoir, and Orphic mini-epic. Nemerov’s self-reflexive Journal of a Fictive Life is one of its inspirations. George (Yiorgos) is a first-generation Greek translator working at the Multicultural Broadcasting Service. Victim of the media machine, he begins to hear and see things that aren’t ‘real’, including his spectral double Yiorgos Alexandroglou, and plunges videoleptically into dreams whenever he closes his eyes.

There are two reasons for celebrating this chastely elegant slim volume. One is the arrival of a publisher prepared, when major firms are retreating from the field, to declare that poetry is central to a flourishing literary culture, and to match that declaration by commitment to a new series, Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry. The other is the appearance of a new and striking collection from that fine poet Rhyll McMaster.

David Reiter’s fourth book, Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems, opens with the selected work followed by poems that may prove difficult for those who find the sparing endnotes insufficient to enlighten them on Reiter’s subtleties, but often exciting for Hemingway aficionados.

This is not another ‘slim volume’ of poetry; no way would it fit in a coat pocket. Ten years in the writing, weighing in at 740 pages, it is a brick of a book – well-bound paperback, heavy covers, designed to last. The poet had full say over not only the content, but the design, typesetting and production, resulting in a book unlike any produced under the nervous economic dictates of mainstream publishers. Six turned this manuscript down. Unsurprised, p.O. published it himself.

The publisher’s promotional material which was included with the review copy of Philip Salom’s new poetry collection, The Rome Air Naked, indicated the book would be launched ‘with an innovative exhibition which will use computer technology to extend the written work into an aural, visual and multimedia presentation’. After reading the author’s introduction and then dipping into the poems for the first time, I only wished I could be there, to listen to, and participate in, the promised performance which will combine visual image and sound, animating the poetry, allowing it to breathe off the printed page, to dance freely in space.

‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.