Travellers

John Kerrigan

• Archaic Figure by Amy Clampitt
  Faber, 113 pp, £4.95, February 1988, ISBN 0 571 15043 8
• Tourists by Grevel Lindop
  Carcanet, 95 pp, £6.95, July 1987, ISBN 0 85635 697 2
• Sleeping rough by Charles Boyle
  Carcanet, 64 pp, £5.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 85635 731 6
• This Other Life by Peter Robinson
  Carcanet, 96 pp, £5.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 85635 737 5
• In the Hot-House by Alan Jenkins
  Chatto, 60 pp, £4.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3312 0
• Monterey Cypress by Lachlan Mackinnon
  Chatto, 62 pp, £4.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3264 7
• My Darling Camel by Selima Hill
  Chatto, 64 pp, £4.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3286 8
• The Air Mines of Mistila by Philip Gross and Sylvia Kantaris
  Bloodaxe, 80 pp, £4.95, June 1988, ISBN 1 85224 055 5
• X/Self by Edward Kamau Brathwaite
  Oxford, 131 pp, £6.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 19 281987 9
• The Arkansas Testament by Derek Walcott
  Faber, 117 pp, £3.95, March 1988, ISBN 0 571 14909 X

August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical ‘instrument or engine of torture’ now known as the ‘chartered jet’ or ‘transcontinental sleeper’. Driven by some collective urge, we flock abroad and return two weeks later exhausted and ready for a holiday. Why post-industrial man should display such ritualised migratory behaviour already seems mysterious. And future archaeologists will find our tourist networks as baffling as the Songlines which stretch across aboriginal Australia. At which point, they should turn to the poets. For just as the Songlines are, to use Bruce Chatwin’s image, ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” [is] readable’, so the quick and shallow tracks of tourism retrace our oldest myths, revisiting ancient holy sites, seeking out a palm-fringed paradise, ploughing in hydrofoils across the wine-dark Aegean.