JISCMail - BRITISH-IRISH-POETS Archives

They've done it! Poetry can be cloned: and the two Dollys, the new Penguin book of contemporary verse and The Firebox, published within weeks of one another, prove that modern poetry is a monolith -- two massive blocks of verse, poet for poet, word for word the same. Stalinist state art has come home in duplicate from the knackered fifties nostalgia of dusty, ripped up sofas, the dingey suburban bedsit land littered with new laddish sexual encounters, strewn with used condoms draped over lampshades. Surely these Siamese twins are a marketing disaster, a double sign of something rotten to the core, a ham-fisted and thick-eared attempt to bury the delights of The Conductors of Chaos (also from Picador) and its ilk a half-life away. So, as the poetry-reading public shuffle along, heads down under armed guard, chanting the same mantra of Don Paterson and Hugo Williams, the poet formerly known as God, Sean O'Brien, with Saints Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford adjourn to the bar for a piss up after a good day's reaping of souls.

While the self-righteous claim Heaven to be of their own making, the lost generations of poets cobble together blast shelters and improvise trench networks in between the remains of the set left from Terminator II and the recycled output of photocopiers. All bets are off. Or so it would seem. Meanwhile, from the midst of the detritus and radioactive ash, beyond the walls of the Citadel, the Fallen Angel rises, and in the blackness of this nuclear winter figures start to emerge and huddle around braziers for warmth -- at Subvoicive, at Tenter End, at C.C.C.P., or folded and blown along the ground amongst the pages of fragmente, Oasis, Salt, Equipage, Writers Forum, Poetical Histories, The Many Press, or fizzing on the electronic ether at websites like Ixion and Jacket. Further up the valley other lanterns and makeshift settlements can be picked out, beyond them flicker stars unexplored, hard and glassy in the freezing night.

Among the faces and photofits in this issue of The Angel are: John Tranter, Gavin Selerie, Johan de Wit, Anthony Mellors, Tony Lopez, Kelvin Corcoran, John Kinsella & Tom Lowenstein. They speak for themselves.