I recieved _For the Birds_  yesterday and stayed up late reading it;
as someone Irish who wasn't aware of this work going on it was an 
eye-opener; 
the poems published I enjoyed, in particular those of Catherine 
Walsh, and David Lloyd;
the essays are interesting in that they both seek to situate the work 
historically and to read some of the poetry critically;

I have also been reading the new chapbooks from Maquette; Ric 
Caddel's _Underwriter_ is a small group of what seem to me tightly 
linked poems, with lyric runs stopping up against syntactic angles; 
lines that smoothly move from one to the next, read again seem to 
break out from each other; 
	your poems flung in forever
	dazzle -- the twofold
	heartabsence --

	contract on the world gone on
	nights kiss hard against
	speech, signpost

	to waking homeless
	in unnatural street clothes

the first line here brought to mind Whitman's spinning spider, 
throwing out her line into space; following that the sense of two 
losses on either side of a divide, a separation, when we usually are 
concerned only with one loss; the lines move out from that loss at/in 
a heart, and at the same time 'contract' around it; 

I will leave it there for now

Mark




Mark Leahy
School of English
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
tel: 0044 (0)113 2334739
fax: 0044 (0)113 2334774


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