Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Paradise Construction Company by J.G.Nichols,
94 pp, ISBN 1-84391-778-5.

A Modern Bestiary - Ars Poetastrica by Allesandro Gallenzi,
translator J.G. Nichols,
110 pp, ISBN 1-84391-777-7, 

both from Herla Publishing, Hesperus Press Ltd., 4 Rickett St., London SW6 1RU, A5, 2004.

J.G. Nichols is your man for the classics, writing one minute in the style of the Odes of Horace, the next in perfect Petrarchian sonnets. Even while situating himself with the great, using Heine's "All the angels, arranged in all their orders / Singing of Heine", Nichols advisedly calls this particular poem "Everyone to his own Taste". His own taste is for a lost Golden Age. The Paradise Construction Company opens with "A Plain in the Land of Shinar", and if you don't immediately recognise this plain as the site of the building of the Tower of Babel, then you are going to be stuck. Nichols yearns for "the clarity again / Of that sunshiny effortless domain ...". Does he mean childhood? His baby daughter is playing on the floor. Or is that sunshiny effortless domain the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates where a blissful communal effort by early builders was wrecked by a jealous God causing chaos and all the babble of languages? Well, both, of course, and more. The ur-babble translates seamlessly to modern-day slipshod habits of thought and language, where "Room for my runes with your bric-a-brac!" the poet pleads, even while lamenting that his reader will be bamboozled by "scores of subtleties".

   However, Nichols is saved from unbearable pomposity by his consistently readable poetry, and his light, often self-deprecating touch. A series of Italian-style cantos to his home-town Liverpool and its environs is, you might say, a posh "Dirty Old Town". If he seems at times to overdo the alliteration, he knows what he is doing and the effect is, if anything, ludic. Words play in the mouth, as when "... the west wind ... / Stirs up at times in the most lubberly / A yen to sail...". For me, the juxtaposition of "lubberly" and "yen" is like a gorgeous mouthful of Freshmint chewing-gum, he would be horrified to know. "A Tuscan Year" is an impressive crown of sonnets, one for each month of the year, plus a dedication and an envoi to make up the fourteen. "A Guide to the Gods" is a lovely funny romp in his Olympic intellectual home, rhyming "mighty" with "Aphrodite", and other joys. In "Draconian", St George does his stuff as expected, but look out for that plaintive "smallest dragonette". You never thought about her, did you?

   If Nichols feels constrained to temper his rage with humour in order to rein in his chagrin at loose modern mores, Allesandro Gallenzi is not shackled by any such scruples. Imagine the liberation for Nichols of being let ... er ... loose on translating Gallenzi's A Modern Bestiary - Ars Poetastrica from the original Italian. I read the second half of the book first, saving the Bestiary as a reward. So, Ars Poetastrica: the art, not of the poet, but of the Poetaster, is one long damning indictment of bad, i.e. "modern" poetry, castigating the kind of writer who will cite Heraclitus in the same breath as Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is apparently a translation of one De André, who is, Google informs me, "Songwriter of Italian Protest Movement", though what sort of an accent to place over the final "e" of his name seems to be up to personal choice - modern lack of constraint, I suppose. The creative invention required by translation renders "castrato" as "capon" - quite good, I thought; Robert Frost is diluted to "a great American" in the interests of metre, and, handily, the Italian for "serial killer" is "serial killer", rhyming with Henry Miller (a bad writer, of course). If not much is lost in translation as far as vocabulary and invective are concerned, I am sure that the style suffers, becoming as prosy at times as the poetry it castigates (this could be a dimension deliberately added by the translator - see what you think). Finally, after 719 lines of unremitting abuse, line 720 unfurrows its brow and hopes for "a new humanism, a new dawn". Not with this tongue-lashing as a model, one assumes.

   Gallenzi's A Modern Bestiary, wittily illustrated by Luis Fanti, is a collection of sonnets translated by Nichols with perfect precision. The intention of the original Mediaeval Bestiary was to inform and educate, rather in the manner of the BBC, but relying on its readers' grasp of allegory to apply the lessons of the beasts, real and imaginary, to their own behaviour. Gallenzi's beasts keep to the tradition of the original, except insofar as they are very transparently human indeed, modern humans requiring these things to be spelled out for them. Read about the Earthworm, the Dog, the Asshawk and the rest, and you will recognise people you know, writers you know, even yourself maybe.

   The Mediaeval Bestiary described the Catoblepas - a beast with a head so heavy it could only look down. For creatures only capable of looking backwards, may I present the writers of these two clever, entertaining volumes.