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Two Poems: Flammigère & The line the loss by
Anne-Marie Albiach
ISBN 0-907562-41-8, A5, 24pp, £5.00

The Anti-Orpheus: a notebook by Robert Sheppard,
ISBN 0-907562-46-9, A5, 16pp, £4.00

Both from Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road,Exeter, EX4 4LD.

I was flummoxed by the first of these. Its translator identifies within it ‘semantic entities performing...tense and startling theatre’, whatever they are and it is. Even he needs the help of three other people to elucidate that much. Flammigère (no help from any dictionaries in Google, but I think it is intended to mean ‘incendiarist’ - it was 1967) contains lines like - ‘...and coiled on the sand is reborn in the sterile fibres of / the trinitarian androgyne’. The line the loss is more recent (1999), and it is easier to discern a theme running through it, though I am not going to risk stating what I think it is. Maybe I need another lifetime to ponder this. Maybe it isn’t worth it. Pages 5, 6, 19 and 20 are repeated. Was that intentional?

The Anti-Orpheus is yet more writing - sorry, text - on writing, and borrows from the already well overdrawn myth kitty, which makes it - sniff - doubly closed. A mix of different forms of poetry, mini-essay, allusion, aphorism, quote and story, it reads like an exercise in literary counterpoint, the themes being poetics, praxis and, I think, parallax. It is all impeccably postmodern, archly ironical and distinctly professorial. Yet it occasionally hits you like a fist - On finding a famous quotation from Adorno and realising that it was Holocaust Memorial Day ‘ Verse after Auschwitz? - / Each word blackens on the page; / I don’t sing: I croak’. Nonetheless, decidedly one for the literati.