New from Veer Books:

Maggie O'Sullivan, ALTO - London Poems 1975-1984

Maggie O'Sullivan's new book presents work from the 1970s & '80s: these powerfully constructed poems offer a place from which it becomes possible to exercise vital thought … rather than just to suffer ...life; to ride in sound and syntax the sinewy entanglement of material existence.

Veer Publication 017 [ISBN: 978-0-9558763-7-0]

68 pages. October 2009. £7.50

The Cultural Society has been updated here.

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Tom Leonard's reading tonight was mighty fine, and, in a week during which the Torys look like they're all set to take the country right back the 1980s, it was the political bite of his work which particularly stood out for me:

The underfunder's utopia

the state hospital
with one bed

always full
always efficient

*

Dear Member:          The Party for the Political Advancement of the
Upwardly Mobile Sons and Daughters of Parents who were Working
Class again requests five dead metaphors and five banal alliterations
for inclusion in our party leader's keynote speech to be forthcoming
annual party conference four acceptances again guarantee admission
to conference, with the opportunity to participate in the ten-minute
standing ovation at the end of the speech itself.

Last year's poll-toppers, "The demise of the dreary dogmatist" and
"A return to radical realism," remain eligible.

Bon appetit!

The Nation

The national day
had dawned. Everywhere
the national tree was opening its blossoms
to the sun's first rays, and from all quarters
young and old in national costume
were making their way to the original National
Building, where the national standard already
fluttered against the sky. Some breakfasted
on the national dish as they walked, frequently
pausing to greet acquaintances with a heartfelt
exchange of the national gesture. Many
were leading the national animal; others carried it
in their arms. The national bird
flew overhead; and on every side
could be heard the keen strains
of the national anthem, played on
the national instrument.

Where enough were gathered together,
national feeling ran high, and concerted cries of
'Death to the national foe!' were raised.
The national weapon was brandished. Though
festivities were constrained by the size of
the national debt, the national sport was
vigorously played all day
and the national drink drunk.
And from midday till late in the evening
there rose continually from the rear
of the national prison the sounds of the national
method of execution, dealing out rapid
justice to those who had given way
- on this day of all days -
to the naional vice.

Roy Fisher

Nice to see the Guardian giving some space today to a review of Tom Leonard's Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965-2009, rather than its usual mainstream fare.

Anyone in the vicinity of the East Midlands might be interested to note that Tom Leonard is giving a reading in Leicester on the 9th.

October

Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples
come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the
random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread
above our island. Rain
lightly patterns on un-
shed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.

James Schuyler

David Kennedy's review of Bloodaxe's new Voice Recognition anthology makes some interesting observations about current trends in British poetry.

The Scientist and the Romantic

Nature writer Richard Mabey discusses on his lifelong relationship with science and the natural environment.

The Last Drop: Versions of August Stramm, trans. Alistair Noon.

September on the Mosses

Wait, tide, wait;
Let the mosses slide
In runnels and counter-flow of rock pool green,
Where web-foot mud-weeds preen
Leaves spread in the sunshine; where
On slow air-ripples the marsh aster lays
Innocuous snare of sea-anemone rays.

Wait, tide, wait;
Behind your wide-
as-winter ebb the poplars of the waves
Turn up their underleaves of grey.
Thunder-blue shadows boom across the bay.
But here the silt is green, the salt is bright,
And every grass-tongue licks its summerful of light.

Autumnal tide,
Mauve as Michaelmas daisies, bide
Our while and summer's. Let the viscious sun
Percolate the turf. Let small becks run
Yellow for ever with shine, and the floor of this moment
Hold back time and shut the gate.
Wait, tide, wait.

Deciduous tide,
on the willow whips of inshore billows the inside
Edge is brown. Crying 'Never!'
Canutes no due tomorrow,
And now is ever
By being not by lasting. So
With pride let this long-as-life hour go,
And flow, tide, flow.

Norman Nicholson

Prynne on "Tintern Abbey".

To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. The Hundred Thousand Places is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island landscapes, from dawn to dusk. Make an early start, 'feel your way out / into what might…take form'. It is a long walk, along the coast, over mountain and moorland, through pine and birch forest, ending on a shore where the sea offers 'another knowledge / wild and cold'.

Attentive and responsive, the unhurried pace of Thomas A. Clark's writing draws the reader into a shared journey, pausing on the possibilities of a phrase, the music of the names of trees and flowers, or turning the page to open new horizons.

Milestones - a survey and gazetteer.

A Model of Order

Selected Letters on Poetry and Making

by Ian Hamilton Finlay

"I don't usually play games but it seems to me that most games are like many poems, in that they are so complex that luck (randomness) re-enters by the complexity - and that it is better, therefore, to have a kind of 'concrete' game, where the basic moves are simple, but can result in a kind of measured complexity which one can see."

Edited by Thomas A Clark
Published by WAX 366
Available from David Bellingham,
119 Wilton Street 2/1, Glasgow G20 6RD
Price £9.95

All this Strangeness: A Garland for George Oppen.