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It’s always good to come across a poet who isn’t afraid to take chances with technique and subject-matter and who is prepared to even be a bit outrageous with what he says and how he says it. Alan Dent’s Corker offers some fast-moving and at times almost startling work, including two long poems which ought to be better-known than they are. In ‘Memoria Technica’ Dent presents what is a kind of political statement with autobiographical elements, though the politics are general rather than specific and the autobiography is similarly adapted to the requirements of the poem. It isn’t a work that lends itself to easy analysis and British readers, used to small-scale political comments when the subject crops up in poetry, may well find it slightly daunting. Perseverance will pay dividends, however, and if it takes several readings to get to grips with the poem then those readings are encouraged by the sweep of the language and the constant onward thrust of the writing.

     The other long poem, simply called ‘The’, is a remarkable tour-de-force, a chant in which each of the several hundred lines begins with that word. Here’s a short extract from it, though it can’t possibly indicate the power of the whole thing:

the violet the blue the brown the pink
the white the teeth the collar
the smartness the instant the past
the blank the reaching the rejection
the aim the end the aimlessness
the smile the kiss the withheld
the ache the lack the ease

Again, this isn’t easy to understand in terms of straightforward declarations and tangible messages, but within its complex barrage of words lies a real anger that is all the more powerful for not being so literal in its identification of problems.

     In between the two long poems are sections of shorter pieces, many of them bawdy and angry at one and at the same time. And they all display the love of language, and the liking for wordplay, that the longer poems have. I think anger may be a constant in Alan Dent’s poetry but it’s not the petulance of a poet annoyed because his girlfriend has left him or he’s failed to get an Arts Council grant. It is, rather, a very real anger that derives from running up against the hypocrisy and corruption, and the political failures, of the contemporary world. Dent is a highly-individual voice in the complacent world of British poetry and his best work is shamefully neglected.