August Kleinzahler

The overtones drift out over the lake from the direction of the east-facing pavilion,

gathering themselves into a tree of tiny mirrors, mirrors and gold foil,

suspended above the water’s surface –

late sun through heavy foliage,

the clangorous exhalations dissolving into the low sounds of wind on water, on nearby lalang grass.

Frangipani and incense – the gods have been...

Tony Blair came over to the US, where some people still like him. He’s getting to look more and more like Steve Bell’s caricature. I liked it better when he was feeling more himself – the evil head boy, half-sadist, half-sycophant. Bush is clearly the better man these days, even if he looks as clueless as the Channel 5 weather lady. The Blair/Bush press conference was revealing. The press, in this instance two members of the British press, laid into Bush, not like our boys here do. You could see the sneer starting to take shape in the corner of his mouth, but he’d left the smirk at home. This was for international consumption. Bush isn’t as stupid as the press, especially the British press, makes him out to be. He looks stupid, certainly, and sounds stupid, but he’s a clever man in his way, and much underestimated. Blair looks and sounds almost hysterical. If one were gently to strike his forehead with a sugar spoon his face would break into ten thousand tiny pieces.

The long-beleaguered home team, black hats and orange piping, is eliminated on a cool night, the very end of September, with the phlox zerspalten by rain, as Benn wrote, and giving forth a strange animal smell, seltsamen Wildgeruchs.

While the neighbouring team from across the Bay, the ones with green leggings, younger and more brazen, were finished earlier still, after the clamour attending...

I went to see McCarthy

with cardinals rattling in the boxwood and pecans suffering their convoluted slumber in the heat, taproots humming deep underground;

from a parched, bare plain of yellow ochre to a green place, hilly and moist.

And a great sleep overtook me upon crossing Nacogdoches.

Until next I knew we were dropping, dropping down through the clouds, into the rain and old quarrels,

low...

In a 1979 review of Roy Fisher’s collection of poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and Hughes enjoy; it’s not clear he has aspired to much of a readership at all. Astringent in tone, the voice denuded of personality and with all the warmth of a lens, exploratory, restless, difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm. On first learning that his work was being read outside a small circle of poet friends, Fisher froze up for an extended period of time, as he would periodically throughout his writing life. There isn’t much in the poetry that would provide fuel for the more significant engines of reputation. It is too heterodox in form and method, and too various to characterise or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ‘experimental’.