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K M Dersley
Between The Alleyways At The World’s
Fair. Feel Free Press £7.99.

The title comes from a couple of lines from That Hectic Heaven. No, this book is not about wide streets but alleyways and the people who live in them. These poems are all about people, often seedy people, and the human condition which K M Dersley draws in a style all of his own. You only get half the story, have to fill in the rest of the picture yourself. There is so much more in these poems than is actually written; there is wisdom and irony mixed with humour as in
Post Room Reject:
      there was Karen that time
      and we’re glad not to have witnessed
      what must have looked like a grass
      snake fixed up with a
      comatose hedgehog.
It does not take long to get into tune with where he is at, the  immediacy, the abruptness of his language.

The Prospect of Glynis starts 
      ran into chain-smoking Glynis,
      attractive with a
      definite talent for not working.
The irony and humour in Uncle Indefensible is plain:
      what a comedown for one who
      always devoutly believed in a
      wet shave and socialistically
      hoped one day to see a TV series
      in which Columbo investigated
      the death of paupers
I have quoted so much because in these poems style is what they are about. And K M Dersley’s style is certainly individual. The language is tight but accessible and the tune simple.

One final quote from One Sorry Liaison:
      despite everything, you were still
      the only woman who gave me money
      to put in my account.
It is little quips like this which are so compelling and hopefully the little tasters that I have quoted will make you want to read more.

                                                    Tim Harris
Ian Caws
The Blind Fiddler.
Pikestaff Pamphlets £3.00.
The speaker in the poems in The Blind Fiddler is usually alone and on the edge of things, beginning one poem ‘Truth is I always lived on the borders’. In House, he comments that ‘... there was love here of a sort that failed’ and this captures the collection’s concern with frustration and misdirection. This doesn’t mean it’s a miserabalist collection, rather it ponders the mysteries of experience, particularly those of time and memory, and is grateful for the small consolations life has to offer. Two Lights, for example, contrasts a youthful preference for ‘an angled lamp for reading’ over the evening light, with the speaker, now older, preferring the dusk and finding “It’s the light among the trees that beckons’. The allusions to Yeats and Larkin on the poet as solitary night-worker enrich the texture of the poem beyond mere anecdote.

Bladderwrack is a fine poem which seems to start out as a contemplation of the way people drift apart, but turns into a subtle exploration of the differences between a photograph and memory, for having evoked the reality of the bladderwrack, ‘the brittleness of each fat/ Bubble, the sharp popping beneath my feet’, in a way that seems inspired by the factual record of the photograph, the poem goes on to reveal that the bladderwrack does not appear in the picture, though it lives as central in memory and poem. Even poems which seem to be moving towards a positive ending, like Improvisation, which contrasts winter weather and thoughts of failure to the speaker ‘improvising music round a log fire’, end ambivalently. It is only ‘as if the notes might blossom/Into summer trees’, not that they will, though perhaps there is still consolation in art, both musical and verbal.

The final poem in the volume finds peace in the memory of a stonechat seen on a windy day. It’s one of the few poems where memory is not unsettling, perhaps because in this one it, and the experience, are shared, the speaker emphasising what ‘we’ saw, and the relationship, for once, endures, ‘...and yet you remark/ Still on the stonechat whose peace was/ Ours ...’. It’s typical of the subtle word-play at work in these poems that ‘still’ is ambiguous and that the the word ‘stonechat’ contains the opposite of what that bird evoked. The poems often evoke the sea, and Caws is skilled at creating undercurrents like these. There’s nothing flashy about the poems in The Blind Fiddler : they are quiet, meditative and profound. Subtle and well-made, they should stand the test of time.

                                              Malcolm Povey

Journeys, uncertainties,
landscapes
Three Voices. The Frogmore Press, 42
Morhall Avenue, Folkestone, CT19 4 EF,
£3.95.
Peter Easter is a middle-aged poet of the refreshment on journeys (like Chaucer - no disparagement) who sometimes also looks into the dark night skies. He writes of street cafes and railway bars and the journeys which have driven him into these places and the ghosts who have linked arms with him.

In some poems the ambiguities are surreal (not just because they are set in France) or they expand into expressionist confusions. There’s plenty of fun, especially in the naughty Shower which is a tour de force of poetic form and I bet he has a lot of fun reading it aloud to gatherings of the Kent decorous.

Also in Easter’s selection (that’s an enviable surname for a poet) are poems of reflection, sometimes on children and parenting. What makes Easter a Real Poet is the wonderful use of stanza, metre and rhyme, usually in his travel and refreshment poems. You don’t complain about being held in this swaying packed railway carriage of technique because the energy and discipline are so finely held in tension.

It’s only a short journey to Brighton and to Rachel Playforth in her mid-twenties who writes mainly on the explosions and uncertainties when edging in and through and out of intimacies. Some of the best poems are short, and the striking imagery and language can be very sensual, as in Fisherman: 
   I want you to be the kind of man who goes
                                                    fishing,
        The kind of man who holds his bait inside
                                                his mouth,
        Who keeps the minnows warm
        With breath and spit and a delicate,
                                                 pointed tongue.
         The kind of man who can keep something
alive.

Ayala Kingsley, now living in Oxford, intelligently combines  elements of both the others - family life and death with urban and rural landscapes - and handles well some formidable rhyme schemes. Some readers won’t mind that Kingsley seems just a little
less searching and paradox-ridden but this may mean less tension in the poetry and less interest.

There’s an attractive cover to this volume, but I was put off by the  blurb about the poets - too much about competitions and prizes and
not enough about the poetic intentions.                                                     Giles Darvill