By Hubert Moore
Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham, NG9 1BS
52 pp, £6.95, ISBN 1-899549-68-4
The title sequence's Ethiopia is a 'Utopia' found not wholly unutopian. A high-placed sacred ark feeds pilgrim wonder; his wife's bruise, from a mule-driver's fatal-fall-preventing grip, leitmotifs interaction's possibility in this far strange place, the poet bravely risking the snares of mindreading-made-easy. However, in The Loss, Hubert voices wholly other experience with truer conviction. Bewildered illegal immigrants, "fly-tipped out... / on a fierce white promontory, / M20, northbound", speak powerfully as "we" who "stoop out into the light".
Elsewhere, Moore subtly unmasks masculine displacement of emotion, as when Message For A Long-Term Baggies Supporter frames a friend's estranging behaviour within shared loyalty to West Brom's team : "Perhaps he feels for ex-champions, people who wince / at the heat of their own fierce past". unease, weedlike, haunts another male comfort zone : in Bill Cooper's Last, removing a dead veteran's garden traces brings unsought psychic union, as an uprooted foundation "rises, stands here gracious and vague", then "the two of us, we / waddle together"; Trifolium For Michael Ponsford's defeat by ground elder lets the influence of older poets be confessed.
By Gavin Bantock
Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH
60pp, £6.95, ISBN 0-946980-86-1
This is a book of two parts, as dual as the British author's outsider/insider identity after decades resident in Japan. First come poems of insight into the country, and himself within it. Then follows a twenty-three page polemical poem which relates to Japan only in that the title, Hiroshima, comes from a searing historical scar. The piece, which paeans the quasi-divine planet-cleansing potential of a nuclear holocaust, was written in Cold War times, in 1964, but takes on a shivery new relevance, seeming to offer insight into those reawakened fundamentalisms bent on eschatologically remoulding the twenty-first century.
Among the Japan-set poems, we nod in recognition of the likeably corrupt King Log of Town Office, of Five Attitudes To Death's to motorway ghouls, or its murder witnesses who call media, not the police; then blink at utter difference, unburnt bones ceremonially presented to mourners, post-cremation, in correct skeletal sequence.
As Sunflower's ferry, year on year, decays, the poet's obsessive urge to leap overboard grows. This search for utter immersion in another culture recurs yet more intensely, via sexual obsession, in Wakamono. But these are 'Bantockian sonnets', at once Eastern and Western, three haiku and a tanka, rhymed : duality still rules.