The book gathers the most extensive selection of my poems to date. Some have not previously been published while many appeared in fugitive editions and collections now out of print. Its selection features poems which although written over a long period developed into broadly-related sequences such as the verse-letters begun in 1979 as communiques from the borderland of Hay-on-Wye but continuing into the '90s tracked the savageries of the Thatcher years. It also offers an extensive view of my exploration of 'emblematic' verse forms in which traditional devices are reworked within a broadly modernist framework; these small poems veer between political epigram and an Ars Poetica. Many of the poems in the book draw on familiar forms of discourse such as the economic, philosophical and journalistic, set alongside the specialist and marginal vocabularies used in such studies as linguistics, ufology and the paranormal; they may or may not be a satire which is enacted 'in the absence of a validated hierarchy of discourse' (Tim Woods).
Table of Contents:
At the Front
55 Texts for the Journey
Six Letters on Change & Exchange, Hay-on-Wye, 1979
Another Loop in our Days
4 Rounds for Springtime after Lorine Niedecker’s `Wallace Stevens’
From an Albion Notebook
Perspectives on the Reach
Bilateral Poem from The Interpretation of Dreams
Uncollected Lyrics of the Individual Soul
Display
Transcript
Summer Solstice ’81
January: Aphorisms, Proverbs and Presocratic Fragments
Translation of the Heraclitean Fragment 53
As of Military Domains & Salvation Rituals
The Future of Poetry 1982
Bilingual
Narrative Beginning `Pure and best mind’
Five Accounts of the Arrest of English Poetry
Auto Dada Café: Apologies for Absence
Auto Dada Café: Set-piece
`Views to Follow’
Remarks on Substance (Random Re-entries & Accessions)
Continuo
Ars Poetica: Geo. Puttenham to JW
A Book of Changes (Auguries & Telegrams)
27.1.84
Ars Poetica after Peter Huchel
Linked Verses 1984
Klondyke
Further Letters on Change & Exchange, Hay-on-Wye, 1984-85
Benefit of Hindrance
An Alphabet of Emblems
On Raleigh’s `External fancy time alone recureth’
Fragments of the Soul leaving Beulah & preparing for the Chapels of North Wales
In Cusop Dingle, on Change & Exchange
Consolations of Philosophy
Three Moves between High & Low Pressure
Untitled
i.m. LZ
Three Attempts at an Epitaph for Geoffrey Grigson
Trailers & Nightsongs
Mimes for January
A Song for George Younger, Minister of State for Defence
Five Dedications for the Six Weeks of Lent
Broad Street Drag ’87
`Formerly the Nineteenth Century and After’
Pastoral Incursions
The Capitalist Twilight Revisited
Eleatic Alert
Mayday Letter: Hay-on-Wye 1988
Re-reading Lorine Niedecker
An Eleatic Dirge for William Empson
Companion Studies
Table Talk
Answering a New Year Letter, 1989
Self-Portrait in a ’90s Bestiary
Illuminations for the De Règle Group (Tax & Financial Planning Division)
On Change & Exchange: A Letter to JM, back in England, 1990
Subject to Terms
Summer 1990: An Eclogue
An Imitation, in a Prospect of Reasonable Distance, for KC
Song-Cycle 1991
Ashley Hayles: Twelve Poems from Los=Angeles=Notebooks
Notes on the Chapter of Light Removal
Travels in Four Parts
Ars Poetica
Hints for the New Year 1993
Table Talk Reunion: A Prose-Song
An Essay on Translation
Shadow Recension
Campaign Manoeuvres (Spells against Green Field Development)
Coffin Text, Radnor Recension
Short Attention Span: Committee Room Poems for Kelvin Corcoran
Ars Poetica
After R. F. Langley: The Upshot
An Alphabet for Karen Mac Cormack
Forest & Underwoods: Ars Duquesne U.P.
Three Texts after Bryan Wynter’s Imoos VI
Text-Book Remedies
Late Closing Friday
’Round Midnight take two: for GM
Ars Poetica
After Spicer
Ignorantia Elenchi
Bardo Panavision 1949
Ballads in the Days of ’49
Malcolm Lowry: An Uncollected Poem
Poem on his Birthday
Coherent Light
Syllabus of Errors
STC: Initials as Structure
Syllables of Recorded Time, for Gavin
Squibs for 1st January 2000
Easter Sunday 2000
Made in Sheffield: Two Lives
Ars Poetica after Maynard Mack
Dear Johan
From `Lives of the Poets’
Hollow Swaps
`What is your understanding of the cultural and political moment you find yourself in?’:
Answers to a Questionnaire
Monk for Monk
Ars Poetica 2003
Dear Ric
Ars Poetica: A Life of Joseph Warton
The Hunting of the Lizopard Resumed: Emblems from the Ship of Fools Logbook
Ars Poetica after Mercurialis the Younger
Entries & Extracts Volume M
The Fragments concerning Dichotomedes
At Sixes & Sevens
Ars Poetica
Mercurialis the Younger, frag. LXVII
Ars Poetica for `Gutenberg: The Movie’
Ars Poetica: Empsonics including a remark by George Saintsbury
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Life Studies
The Frankenstein Franchise
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts When Broken
Arias & Duets from `Loagaeth, An Opera’
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Contra Memoriam
Fragments Doubtfully Ascribed to Mercurialis the Younger
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Horatian Reflections
Fin de Siècle: Three Lives
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts from the Phoenician
Ars Poetica
