Published two weeks ago, but only just arrived on the amazon.co.uk website (& still missing from the amazon.com site, alas): RALPH HAWKINS The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights) 110 pages, Ł8.95 / $13.95 ISBN 0-907562-42-6 This is Ralph Hawkins’ first full-length collection in some years and brings one of the most startlingly original voices of his generation back before the poetry public. Besides the title collection, this volume contains the Pushkin poems, which have hitherto only been available in pamphlet form, and two further new sequences, Uruk and The Littoral Zone. “Do you think there’s too much archaeology? Too many people need to dig things up and find them out. It’s not necessary to some people and more than necessary for others. There’s an industry around it ... It’s the doing that’s important, not the knowing about the doing. Because that’s second. So, obviously some poets are more articulate than others, but articulacy can hide things ... There’s a lot about, sounds impressive but misses the point, floundering around. Maybe that’s not what you should be looking at. So I’m not really interested in an archaeology of understanding...” Ralph Hawkins, from an interview with Ian Davidson "Ralph Hawkins’ poems always give the impression of turning up late and being drunk when they do arrive. They minimize the gap of 'constructive effort' between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the “mediated” pleasure of the poem. […] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins’ method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules and values." Andrew Duncan, from Secrets of Nature (Salt, forthcoming) and also amazon.co.uk: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0907562426/qid=1081095215/ sr=1-28/ref=sr_1_0_28/202-4574791-5154233 (NB if the above address carries over to a second line, you will need to cut-and-paste the whole thing as far as 5154233.) Also coming soon: Kelvin Corcoran: New and Selected Poems John Welch: The Eastern Boroughs Lee Harwood: Collected Poems My apologies to any who receive more than one copy of this announcement. Tony Frazer ___________________________________ Tony Frazer Shearsman Books Ltd 58 Velwell Road Exeter EX4 4LD England Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511 http://www.shearsman.com/ ___________________________________