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'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. > > >Sulks, mosaics and misprints > >Robert Potts rounds up the poetic year > >Saturday December 17, 2005 >The Guardian > > >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. > > > > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Yahoo! Messenger NEW - crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail