same identical sun

Oh, we had a lovely time in Italy. We basically ate all the time we weren’t sleeping or driving. I might post some pictures if anyone’s interested.

A little burst of interesting books have come my way – some from abebooks, some from amazon, some from good old fashioned secondhand shop trawling. Here’s a list of what’s falling slowly off my lap as I sleep on the train home:

Rachel Blau Du Plessis: Drafts 1 – 38 Toll. A difficult long sequence of Pound – style cantos about memory, writing, what poems are for, bits of Stein and HD, actually very readable for this sort of thing, full of sometimes rather gauche and self conscious wordplay, occasional bursts of intensely visual lyric stuff. Good to finally get to grips with this US heavy-hitter. Something to go back to for a long time to come I think.

Lark In The Morning: An anthology of translations of Troubador Poetry. 12th Century poetry from Provence and the Languedoc, including the bafflingly fantastic and beautiful poems of Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the sestina and wrangler of stanzaic form second to none in all of history. Truly there’s nothing like him before, and after him it’s next stop Dante. Interesting speculation in some notes about the possible Arabic roots of some of these forms dating from the 11th century clearing of the moors from Spain. Follow the line of european verse back far enough and you end up in an Arabian tiled court, fountains plashing, plates of sherbet.

Marianne Moore: Poems. Shameful that I did an English Degree and no-one ever mentioned Moore in the whole three years. A lovely big hardback edition, Penguin Viking. Those American-made books are so much better than ours – better paper, better boards, stay open on the table, often UK editions are disgraceful when directly compared. I bought a US copy of Dylan’s chronicles in NYC last year and it makes the UK edition look like a vanity published autobiography of a provincial mayor. Any way, a lovely big book of Moore. I’m slowly working through it. Early poems bright and enchanting. She’s got that Bryn Mawr thing going on – think of a cross between Wallace Stevens and Katherine Hepburn.

Tom Raworth: Lazy Left Hand and Heavy Light. Picked these up in a bookshop in Brighton run by Paul Brown who published these two little books out of his Actual Size press. Charming guy – slight air of an old cowboy living a quiet life these days. The Raworths are delightful – sequences of short bright kind of day-book notes in his trademark inventive light fast direct but odd style. Also picked up a little book of Peret translations by Mr Brown, which seem good to me, but what do I know.

Faber Anthology of 20th Century Italian Poetry. Holiday reading. I really wanted to get a bilingual edition, but this is all I could find in time. I don’t like Faber books much. They seem to have page size, font, margins, point size all set by committee so they’re not elegant or flowing. They’ve got weird plastic coated covers that feel greasy and have a kind of fake card endpaper which keeps flicking the pages out of your hand. Anyway – I knew next to nothing about Italian poets, apart from a few names and that ‘M’illumino d’immenso’ thing. I now know that Eugenio Montale is a kind of Italian T S Eliot mini-me, even going so far as to write a kind of ‘on Margate sands..’ poem, except about Eastbourne. And that my favourite of the lot is called Quasimodo. Dunno though, I don’t really trust this anthology.

Also the last – but – one Ashbery, Chinese Whispers, and Carcanets excellent New York Poets Volume 2, especial delights of which have been a proper look at Barbara Guest for the first time, Harry Mathews and Kenward Elmslie. I’m off to NYC later this year if all goes well and plan to bore Amanda stupid by making her look at insignificant landmarks rather in the way that Japanese tourists look with awe upon Camden Town’s Good Mixer pub as evidence of a time when Menswear walked the earth and all was well.