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Desperanto – Mike Wilson; Smokestack Books, £7.95

According to the jacket, “Desperanto is the language of despair”. The on-line Urban Dictionary definition is somewhat different. I’ll concentrate on what is in the book, you can research the other.

Desperanto is made up of 20 poems: 5 longish poems; 14 average length; 1 haiku – a slim volume then. The jacket mentions Larkin and Thackeray amongst others and these are definitely on display in some of the poems, but I’m not sure that they have anything new to say in the ‘stealing’. In fact, the ‘new’ in the collection appears to relate to the failure of 12 years of New Labour; 'What’s left' using the sestina format to rue the fact that the media have replaced fascism with Islam and done nothing about capitalism.

The title poem’s a villanelle. There’s a school of thought that argues the villanelle is a hard rhyming line too many but I “do not go gentle…”’ with that view. The trouble is, for the all the art and wit deployed in re-working those repeated lines, it almost supports that school of thought.

I found too many of the poems had to spell everything out for me. 'Cryptic Diptych' even comparing a rhyming-accessible poetry reading with the failure of the left. I like poems that rhyme and are simple. I don’t like poems that tell me, “…we get entrenched in haughty wars/ about if poems should or should not rhyme/ and should they be impenetrably cryptic!”

However, Wilson is at his best in 'Everything that lives', a reflection on the real world interacting with art. Blake’s words put to music, “‘Bright as fire, spreading into azure wings…’ / A rainbow’s perfect arc above me/ touched either side of Ilkeston.” No other explanation necessary, nor provided; that’s my kind of poetry.