Send no postcards, take no pictures

John Redmond

  • One Train by Kenneth Koch
    Carcanet, 74 pp, £7.95, March 1997, ISBN 0 18 575426 0
  • A World where News Travelled slowly by Lavinia Greenlaw
    Faber, 53 pp, £6.99, January 1997, ISBN 0 571 19160 6
  • A Painted Field by Robin Robertson
    Picador, 98 pp, £6.99, February 1997, ISBN 0 330 35059 5

Kenneth Koch ends his fine and amusing collection, One Train, with a sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, of jazz, of moss, of air and of being the youngest of four sisters. In tone, the sequence is something like a cross between Auden’s ‘Academic Graffiti’ and the Private Eye scribbling of E.J. Thribb. Often, the line-breaks are deliberately clunking, as in ‘Aesthetics of the Outdoor Opera’:

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