By Anthony Edkins
Redbeck Press, 24 Airville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH, UK
67 pp, £6.95, ISBN 0-946980-96-9
The semi-detached persona that remarks sardonically, in China : The Former Governor Remembers An important Letter "I can / no longer believe in / urgent calls to action / from sagacious poets / in distant provinces", seems to share the mild uncomplaining disappointment with life, and its livelier substitute, books, that Edkins as himself expresses, when in Giving Up Words he addresses Rimbaud : "Hard to believe your silence / was meant to tell us something / about art or life : as hard / to accept it meant nothing."
Yet these poems, of 1973-93, do not depress; instead, dry wit allies to a painterly precision to give life. First met, the evasive House Guest "...flowed above the breakfast table / his own bacon and eggs", while Today's sun, at dawn "pink eyelids / waiting to peacock", by dusk is "sex bruised / ... / put out / like cat"; Begin Again's futile search for self-reinvention yields sharp throwaways like encountering "the crazy paving of concrete poems".
On Assignment brings elegant conviction to a mythical visitation : the professional cameraman films on, even as the jungle erupts in centaur-minotaur confrontation. Still more darkly timeless, The Old King Has His People's Welfare At Heart voices a nightmare witness, through soundproof windows, of his subjects' incomprehensible sufferings.
Multiverse
By Don Rogers
seren, Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, UK
64pp, £6.95, ISBN 1-85411-282-1
Rogers quixotically jousts, in Transubstantiation, with two metaphysical questions in one : "How can one relate / God to man, or brain to heart?" he asks. Vivid mind-narrative brings closure, all "come together in one risen flesh : / hot and yeasty and improved, like bread." Prose-poem of return, Le Parc St. Cloud seems to enfold a question, too. The fountain may be "still juggling a / plate of sky on its pole of water" - but is this meaningful new seeing, or old illusions revisited? When Rogers speaks elsewhere, in West Kennet Long Barrow, June 20th, 1999, of "Moments captured, dated, faked", perhaps what nevertheless matters is that poetry's bread can rise.
Alongside big dilemmas go ostensibly smaller ones; Missing Bridge shows the poet disproportionately unsettled when his unawareness of what his companion finds obvious is revealed. And Rogers' nose for others' lacunae is as keen as for his own. Blurring The Boundaries skewers his control freak neighbour on its serious final pun : "you'd planted corms; each one a little mine, a mine, a mine." In Aide-Me'moire, a woman's "notes to herself" are the "footing, that helps her, / scale the face of the day"; graffitiing her door with the advice "Open only if you know / you are able to close", Rogers seems to also implicitly warn all who open poetry's Pandora's Box.