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From the Debris by Tony Dash. Migrant Press. £1.00

     Today, after the revolutionizing precepts of Modernism and subsequent luxuriant poetic growths of such writers as Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, one doesn’t demand that a poet adhere to the evocation of people and things in their fixed logical and spatial relationships, and, heaven forfend, compromise his “necessary angel”. While some poets are apt to become literal realists of the imagination, dissolving, diffusing and dissipating in order to recreate, some are apt also, in the words of Marianne Moore, to become literal realists .. of nature, and to repeat, endlessly, each hill and tree and stone lust as and where it occurs, without a flicker of re-creation. Obviously, though, for most writers there normally has to be a way between the two - unless one aspires to reside almost perpetually, like Blake, in Paradise, or to tread the thin tiun ice of mimesis. From the evidence of the poems in From the Debris Tony Dash appears inclined towards the former

One side of the Taj Mahal overlooks the river Jumna.
This is possibly incorrect. There is likely more than
one building resembling the Taj Mahal in Agra.
It is not necessarily Agra
nor the Taj Mahal, still less, the Jumna.

(from One Side of the Taj Mahal)

while, at the same time, neglecting the latter.

     I should not complain of ‘neglect’ if only Dash possessed the imaginative fecundity to sustain a fiction, a wholly new union of objects, that really satisfies. Unfortunately, from the evidence of the majority of these poems, I don’t think that he does. Many of them seem oblique and in need of precisely that kind of ‘situating’ that only a poet much more resourceful than Dash could possibly afford to frown upon. Swallows, for example, because it is neither really authoritative as an abstract or ‘realistic’ poem hovers dissatisfyingly, and awkwardly, between the two, with a limp air of pretension :-

They say that some people eat swallows’ nests.
I have a flock of swallows in my drawer.
I keep them to prolong the summers.
When they twitter at night they k-ep me awake
preventing me from dreaming, like you.
Last August I lost a watch and after four months
I have lost all track of time.
There is no beginning or end to all I do.
The swallows mate in flight
across the dove-tail joints and behind the handles.
Soon they will want to be buiding nests.
I spend a lot of time building friendships that fly away.
Last August I lost a watch and after four months
I have lost all my friends, like you.
I find this hard to convey but with a mouth full
of leaves and twigs and feathers, I do.

     On a more positive note regarding the collection, though, here is the remainder of One Side of the Taj Mahal which does, in its humorously brackish way, succeed, where Swallows fail, as a product, literally, of the imagination :-

Cast upon a bank of the river is a drowned man.
It is definitely a man, bloated and white.
A mongrel dog is sniffing in his groin.
Three vultures nearby wait for its departure.
Along the walls of the building tourists
take advantage of the view across the river.
The dog, which might be a bitch, still sniffs at the groin.
Oddly, the man’s posture is that of someone taking the sun.
The tourists on the wall are taking the view.
The dog is taking a vital organ.
The vultures are taking their time.

From the Debris is available from the publisher at 61 Belmont Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 1PN, England, or from Nick Kimberley’s or Alan Halsey’s mail-order service. When ordering books please remember to include enough to cover postage.