'Robert Potts rounds up the poetic year'

Was this really all that happened in poetry in 2005? Tsk, tsk, the scene appears a little bare and 
one-sided from this evidence. Well, thank goodness we have Potts to point the way to the only 
collections worth reading. 

J. H.



On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:43:11 -0000, Geraldine Monk <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>If you missed this some familiar names.
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>Sulks, mosaics and misprints 
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>Robert Potts rounds up the poetic year 
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>Saturday December 17, 2005
>The Guardian 
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>Two fine collections of poetry this year seemed particularly timely in their age-old subject 
matter. David Harsent's Legion (Faber, £8.99) describes war, and its contexts and ramifications, 
from a number of angles, coldly accounting for the incalculable h! uman costs with a rightly 
discomfiting fluency of execution. And Christopher Logue added another volume to his superb 
versioning of Homer in Cold Calls (Faber, £8.99), where the bickering of deities, the spectacular 
violence of battle and the bitter sulk of Achilles are portrayed in a manner simultaneously ancient 
and modern. 
> The publication of JH Prynne's Poems (Bloodaxe, £15) this year, expanding the high-selling 
edition of 1999 by the addition of seven new pieces (one never previously published), is a major 
even! t. Prynne's latest poems include "Biting the Air", where a dazzling mosaic of words, placed in 
tense and complex interrelation, draws partly on recent WTO and Gatt negotiations in asking 
desperate questions about property, borders and the value of human life: "This is the cancerous 
lace curtain fringing / a lake of toxic refuse, waiting to be born ... Won't you walk there / and be 
the shadow unendurably now calibrated." 
>For those who believe erroneously that the avant-garde have no sense of humour, Peter 
Manson's Adjunct, An Undigest (Edinburgh Review, £5.99) - certainly the most entertaining 
collection of the year - is highly recommended. A seven-year creation, it manically folds together 
rueful diary entries, irreverent comments on artists, writers and musicians, gleeful misprints, and 
all sorts of found and heard material. Undigested in appearance, but regurgitated in combinations 
either crafted or mathematically determined, the consistent hilarity! of its relentless, deadpan 
juxtapositions has inescapably serious implications too. 
>Two other Scottish poets also produced interesting books. Richard Price's Lucky Day (Carcanet, 
£8.95), seen as a first collection but in reality gathering excellent work from a variety of small-
press publications over the past decade or more, is a book full of pleasures, from the tiny, 
perfectly crafted pop-like lyrics of love and fatherhood to longer, exploratory poems, in which a 
careful hesitancy and wry questioning combines with a winning musicality. And David Kinloch, 
with In My Father's House (Carcanet, £8.95), has created an elegiac volume that ranges in 
unexpected directions - sexuality, colonialism, theatre - and intriguingly punctuates all this with 
translations of Celan into Scottish. "Celallans", one might term it. 
>Trinidad-born Vahni Capildeo's Person Animal Figure (Landfill, £2.50), a bargain pamphlet from 
the author of No Traveller Returns, is a sim! ilarly entertaining and unsettling contribution. Among 
the pleasures here is a frenetic and wickedly ironic interior monologue - painfully amusing, 
penetrating and acutely observed. 
>Ambitious and intelligent poetry published in 2005 also included Geoffrey Hill's Scenes from 
Comus (Penguin, £9.99), a mellower collection than much of his recent work, offering "a grand 
and crabby music"; Sinead Morrissey's The State of the Prisons (Carcanet, £6.95), in which this 
talented poet tackles her historical and political material in a sophisticated and vivid fashion; and 
Alan Halsey's Marginalien (Five Seasons, £15.50), accompanied by a CD. The latter is a mixture of 
tight, punning lyrics, translations and pastiches, prose poetry, graphic art, literary excavations and 
other forms - an abundant and challenging gathering of his work since 1988, in a beautifully 
designed large paperback.
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