Cheesespreadology

Ian Sansom

Garbage by A.R. Ammons
Norton, 121 pp, £7.50, February 1995, ISBN 0 393 31203 8
Tape for the Turn of the Year by A.R. Ammons
Norton, 205 pp, £8.95, February 1995, ISBN 0 393 31204 6
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow by August Kleinzahler
Faber, 93 pp, £6.99, April 1995, ISBN 0 571 17431 0
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs by Charles Simic
Michigan, 127 pp, £30.00, January 1996, ISBN 0 472 06569 6
Frightening Toys by Charles Simic
Faber, 101 pp, £6.99, April 1995, ISBN 0 571 17399 3
The Ghost of Eden by Chase Twichell
Faber, 78 pp, £6.99, April 1995, ISBN 0 571 17434 5

In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’:

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Vol. 18 No. 5 · 7 March 1996 » Ian Sansom » Cheesespreadology (print version)
pages 26-27 | 3487 words

Letters

From Christopher Reid

Why the gratuitous ‘self’ in Ian Sansom’s allusion (LRB, 7 March) to ‘what is clearly and self-consciously a re-establishing of what Faber is calling its “American Connection” ’? What is so ‘modish’ about the ‘modern art’ which appears on the covers of the books in question – widely different and, I should have thought, rather off-beat works by Max Ernst, Red Grooms and Bill Traylor? How does Sansom justify wasting space on a reading of jacket photographs which he himself declares irrelevant to an understanding of the poetry? Does he have a purpose in confusing the way books are presented with ‘editorial policy’? The snide and itchy tone of his remarks really does need explaining. What’s his problem? Apart, I mean, from his inability to get to grips with Charles Simic’s Frightening Toys. ‘Simic’s is a poetry which invariably takes place on dull and damp afternoons,’ he says. Literally and demonstrably untrue, this is typical of his style of hazy critical impressionism. But then the whole paragraph seems less concerned with throwing light than with getting in the mood for the anti-Faber gripes which follow.

Christopher Reid
Faber