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Pete -- Have read 20/20 vision, really must get round to sending Randolph a cheque (sorry R) the whole thing is powered by a pretty cogent though lively and discursive attention, I do get a sense of a real person with a rare sense of humour and observational talent living behind (and in front of) these poems, this partly because of their deftness in satirising - ever so gently -- more robust and aggressive kinds of modern discursiveness: this lens is free and quick with its focus and can shift, but still affirms quite solidly the virtue of having a focus and of discriminating between probable focuses. Perhaps this is the pressure of what seems to be a lapsed religious fervency, on a style that attempts to maintain a balance between humane and comical self-exposure, and the experimental mandate to expose a self which might easily be disavowed. You seem to me to be, if I may, a young man at heart. And very interestingly displaced, literally I mean, in terms of where you live and your difficulties in feeling credulously about the range of plausible nostalgias that this displacement could put on offer; this instigates a certain recognisable englishness, in the smart levity of tone that recurs throughout the book, but which is never simply representative of the english context in which it might more ordinarily be expected. This crossover is pretty dynamic. You say, the book is about attention to detail; notwithstanding the irnoy implicit in this remark and polished up by the constant ambiguity of the book's tone, I think this is a pretty apt statement, and would say that I find the more minute and particular resonances -- arising usually from discrete remarks or isolated descriptions -- more confidently achieved than the statements that I understand the poems to be working towards as wholes, or as a whole. That is, the book admits quite explicitly a certain anxiety in its attempts to compass and to comprehend what it might think of as stable and fully coherent reflections. This is part of its excitement, and of its honesty, as I see it. I am not altogether sure that it benefits from its formal constraints, and find myself imagining on occasion that a poem might have contrived to develop its statement somewhat more fully, had it not been under the necessity of cutting itself dead to remain aligned with its group. But then, this gives the opportunity to do some fine cutting-dead, it's always a compromise, I feel this with much of my own work, particularly with the formal constraint imposed on MINCEMEAT SEESAW that it should not allow any full-stops. Still reading and still thinking, k %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%