"With sleights learned from others and an ear open to melodic analogies I have set down words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes, I hope, be pleasing."
          --Basil Bunting, from the Preface to his Collected Poems(Fulcrum Press, 1968)

     It seems somehow appropriate to begin a single review of these three recent books by three very different poets with Bunting's words primarily because two of the poets in question (Britain's Tom Pickard and Devin Johnston, an American) are linked, albeit tenuously, via a common interest in Bunting as well as the sometimes-incestuous ins and outs of publishing. In 1965, Bunting's "rediscovery" was made by Stuart Montgomery, the founder of Fulcrum Press which published both Bunting's Briggflatts(1966) and Pickard's first book High on the Wall(1967) for which Bunting provided a generous Preface. Pickard's most recent offering, Hole in the Wall(2002), has been published by Flood Editions for which Johnston--who recently published his article "Basil Bunting" in Scribner's British Literature--serves as co-editor. As for the inclusion in this trio of Kevin Prufer, who is also an American poet, one can only say that his poetry, like that of the other two, is especially concerned with what Bunting calls "melodic analogies"--it is conspicuously musical. Thirdly, Bunting seems one of the likeliest links in the chain connecting American and British "postmodern" poetry given his close association with--as Pound and Yeats respectively would have it--fellow "struggler in the desert" and "one of Ezra's more savage disciples," Louis Zukofsky, the father of Objectivism and godfather of Projectivism. Finally, each of the poets in question shares a thematic concern with the other which one might call 'urban dislocation,' the physical subjects of which are explored and arbitrated through psychologically- and metaphysically-charged language that aspires to the pure conjecture of music.

     Tom Pickard was born in Newcastle in 1946, left school at 14, and in 1964 organized with his wife Connie the Morden Tower poetry readings--Morden Tower in Newcastle being the site of Bunting's first reading of Briggflattsin 1966. Pickard proved to be a great supporter of American experimental poetry, and gained a reputation as something of an ally among such poets as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsburg, and Charles Olson. When Ed Dorn traveled to Britain in 1965 at the invitation of Donald Davie to teach at the new University of Essex, he arrived already aware of Pickard's work, which then, as now, explored in an almost epigrammatic simplicity the perennial themes of love, sex, politics and war. His sexually-candid "First of May" is not only reminiscent of Dorn's styling, it is also dedicated to him:

the sky is full of flying fannies
she sits on my face
I eat an apple from her cunt
she laughs
my mouth full of cloud
her hair
dark
as the day before dawn
may-day today
may-day

     The blunt emotion of Pickard's poetry is matched only by its stark lyrical quality. It owes as much to the austerity of Anglo-Saxon gnomic verse as it does to various American "postmodern" poetic movements. Take for example the title poem from High on the Walls(included in Hole in the Wall),which reads as though it might have been equally inspired by a Michael Alexander translation of an Old English riddle poem or something from Creeley, perhaps "Like They Say":

strange to be higher
than a bird, to watch
them eat

when startled (the only
defence to be above
take flight, and land
at my feet

     Much of Pickard's style appears to be a combination of the innate and the derivative. Allen Ginsberg recognized this when he wrote that Pickard's poetry was the product of a "lineage joining William Carlos Williams and 'Geordie' lyric vernacular." To the contrary, Bunting was not so impressed by Pickard's "reflections of transatlantic lights." And though he felt that while the young poet's having "escaped education"--not necessarily a great sin among his American admirers__had given him a "fresh voice, and skill to keep the line compact and musical," he still managed, in his Preface to High on the Walls,to appear admonitory, even disturbed by the fact that Pickard had "yet to read most of the English classics [a shortcoming] which must change his writing more or less, perhaps not always for the better." And while Bunting seemed poised to accept Pickard completely if he followed his elder's concluding advice when he wrote "If he...enlarges his scope and learns to sing with a longer breath, I believe he will provide a solid addition to the corpus of English poetry," Pickard seems to have responded by turning Bunting's words into a personal list of "a few don'ts" for the kind of poetry he would choose to write for the next three and a half decades: one that was equally indebted to Newcastle and Patterson: simple, direct, frequently crass, and nearly always arrogant about being unschooled.

     Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poemsincludes selections from every book Pickard has published over the past thirty-six years: nine from High on the Walls(Fulcrum Press, 1967); six from The Order of Chance(Fulcrum Press, 1971); nine from Hero Dust(Allison & Busby, 1979); fourteen from Custom & Exile(Allison & Busby, 1985); twelve from Tiepin Eros(Bloodaxe, 1994); and eighteen from Fuckwind(Etruscan Books, 1999). Of the book's eighty-three poems, only fifteen first appear in Hole in the Wallincluding "First Poem this Century" which serves as a testament to Pickard's persistence and dedication to taking his brand of poetry into the twenty-first century. Appropriately, it is an exercise in resistance to all of Bunting's advice and criticism, employing neither a longer breath, an enlarged scope, nor a more scholarly theme:

a riff
adrift in air

your slick rig

rifts awake
to make

each morning
new

     Though some of the older poems included in Hole in the Wall have been revised, the revisions are slight. There are no major thematic or philosophical revisions à la Auden, but only the addition of punctuation where punctuation once did not exist, and the occasional change in linear formatting to give certain poems a less dated appearance.

     Rather annoyingly, the poems--many of which have been recycled and repackaged from Pickard's most recently published 'new and selected' Tiepin Eros--are not arranged according to any chronology, nor are they arranged by book as they are in the Bloodaxe publication. They do appear in sections roughly fifty pages in length which are divided by black & white photographs or "ornaments" by poet Tom Raworth who is also responsible for the frontispiece collage. Nor do the poems appear to be arranged by any apparent theme, though one is tempted to look long and hard at Raworth's abstract photos for some clue. Rather, the poems seem only to be arranged in deference to Pickard's musical aspirations; i.e., roughly by sound, the way a collection of contemporary rock songs might appear on a collection of greatest hits. While such an approach is interesting, it is not necessarily a successful means of arranging poems. Incredibly, in one stretch of twenty-five of the book's one hundred and thirty-nine pages, poems originally appearing in seven different books written over a thirty-five-year period appear for all intents and purposes back to back. And even then they follow in no chronological order.

     Still, the poems are charged with emotion, and even the most disturbing hold the reader's attention. "Shag," for example, is an account of a gang rape written in the 'Geordie' dialect. Even at its most violent, Pickard's interest in the music of language is unmistakable:

pull a doon
rip a skort off
hurry up an stuff it
am next
are man quick
stick it in the get
howld a doon
she winit keep still
a winit be a minute
gan on man gan on

"Roach," a new poem commemorating a tragicomic event involving several U.K. poets and a controlled substance is interesting not only as a commentary on the social and political repercussions of illegal drug use in Britain, but gives real insight into Pickard's sense of humor. A tongue-in-cheek reprisal-in-print, the poem is a counterjab at the irreverence displayed by another well-known contemporary Northern poet and Bloodaxe compatriot who at the time satirized Pickard's arrest by playing the concerned 'activist,' making and distributing badges which read wryly TOM PICKARD IS ALMOST INNOCENT.

Ken Smith passed me a spliff,
down to the roach, but enough for a pull.
I was arrested forty five days
figured the odds on smuggling tack into jail
and how.

Stripped and stood against a wall
by a nurse who invited me to a lecture
on the significance of the cell

How are you spelling that?
I asked her.

All in all, Hole in the Wall is an excellent introduction for the first-time American reader of the work of a British poet who has been a long-time supporter of American poetry and poetics.

     Devin Johnston speaks of a theme important not only to his book but to all of poetry when he writes in "Belated Songs" "I haunt that pastoral / 'space for exchanging song' / redolent of wild onion--." His book, Telepathy, consists of thirty-five poems spanning nearly a decade of Johnston's writing life. Despite this, the work, as poet Forrest Gander observes, is "intensely focused." It functions well as a collection, and belies the broad expanse of time falling between the earliest and the most recently written of the poems. As if to emphasize the chronological breadth and scope of his own work, Johnston frames the six sections of Telepathy with two poetic quotes: one classical, English and seventeenth-century: "There let our secret thoughts unseen / Like nets be weaved and intertwined, / Wherewith we'll catch each other's mind" (Thomas Carew), the other a product of twentieth-century America and bucolically avant garde: "There's still a smear / Across the mirror / That I have been / But it won't / Reflect on me / Again" (Terry Allen). These are placed obversely from the way they appear above with the Allen falling at the beginning of the book and the Carew appearing at the end in a clever manipulation of tradition and chronology. It is as though Johnston were inviting the reader to step through the mirror of self consciousness and accompany him in reaching back in time with the intention of discovering that in the space created by poetry time itself is of little importance. If one were to take Carew at his word then one must conclude that this is so because time is secondary to the phenomenon of the intertwining of thoughts (no matter when they may have occurred or been recorded) to form a "net" wherewith poet and reader might "catch each other's mind." Furthermore, in choosing quotes by Allen and Carew to frame his work, Johnston is calling attention to the importance of music to poetry. Both poets are considered to be equally at home in writing poetry, drama, and music: much of Carew's poetry was set to music, and songbooks played a major role in the publication of his work. Allen comes out of the West Texas country-rock tradition and frequently touts the salvific powers of music, once claiming that "no one with access to a convertible, an empty highway and a good radio station ever should need a psychiatrist."

     Johnston seems to echo this sentiment in what might be considered the heart of Telepathy,a poem called "Thunder Road." This is an affair of couplets and tetrameter in which he writes

A chevy's mill sounds `thunder road'
with moontank sloshing; time stands still.

Its head-lamps slash through cereal arcades
where sings--ensconced--the whippoorwill,

since dusk transformed into cliché.
Distilling flames of coal restore

carbon forms to frozen skies--
the pasquinade our fathers bore.

Electric power brings its own
rewards, I guess-- 'far from the sea.'

I should have seen how it would end,
and warned them--telepathically--

     Hidden not far beneath the surface of what appears to be a lament for the ailing environment is a tribute to the car culture of the upper South that has long had a hand in harming it. The words "thunder road" invoke immediate associations for the contemporary audience. They have become the stuff of pop culture legend__perhaps especially for someone like Johnston who grew up in the piedmont of North Carolina__inevitably conjuring images of Robert Mitchum as moonshine-runner Luke Doolin in 1958's "Thunder Road" or the rock ballad by the same title which the film inspired Bruce Springsteen to pen. Like Terry Allen's take on the redemptive powers of fast cars, lost highways, and good music, Johnston sings the virtues of a big-block Chevy, a dark road, and the music of the radio fired by "electric power" all of which combine to make "time stand still." This is the space of poetry. Even if the experience is uniquely American, it finds a way of transcending physical space and linear time to meet with the words of Thomas Carew: the elements are "weaved and intertwined" creating a poetic moment in which minds may communicate through telepathy.

     Telepathy for Johnston appears to be a major export emanating from that "space for exchanging song." Beyond that space it derives its power from the peripheral or the tangential, both of which play a major role in Johnston's vision. Like the mysterious union of opposites in "Thunder Road", many of the poems in Telepathy appear to be concerned with the difficulty of the ephemeral-i.e., that which is present and yet unperceived unless it is experienced via the unexpected agency of the tangential. Images that expand upon this phenomenon abound in Johnston's writing. In "The Shifter" Whitman speaks, declaring 'My book and the war are one;' a sailor in "Vacations IV" appears 'weeping of thirst in the midst of water;' in "Translation" heat draws "clouds from water, / sudatory / warnings from inchoate clay;" in "Bats after Celan" the "dark speaks of nothing / but the light." But perhaps the most powerful example of the revelatory power of the tangential occurs in "Vacations III" in which we confront the lines

     All sense
entails this consequence:
     'an owl
     is known by songbirds' silence.'

Here the predator owl, likely a metaphor for the condition of life's unforgiving aspect, is revealed in the silence of the otherwise singing birds. The implications of this are staggering. One must ask if there is an implied parallel between the songbird and the poet, and if so, might one assume that as long as there are poets singing the owl is hunting elsewhere?

     Kevin Prufer's poems appear to answer this question and the answer is a whispered 'no.' Like Johnston, he holds that songbirds become silent in the presence of the owl, but he qualifies that theory asserting that they stop singing only when they perceive the presence of the owl. In other words, Prufer maintains that the owl is always hunting, always present; it just isn't always noticed. Furthermore, Prufer contends that the owl is necessary to a certain kind of poetry, that such silences born of fear and discomfort are frequently poetry's very source. The poems appearing in The Finger Bone, Prufer's first book since 1998's Strange Wood (he is also the editor of The New Young American Poets (2000) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing),might be understood as the type of poetry contingent upon encountering the unsettling. They are very much translations of a quotidian suburban experience into one much more haunting. They are transformations of the raw and often horrific mundane into compositions of terrible beauty that thrum with a singular musical intensity. Many exhibit the disturbing qualities of Sprechgesang lilting uncannily in the manner of a Schöenberg arrangement. Radiant with the glow of the inner world of the imagination, Prufer's poems outshine again and again the dull tarnish of the outer world, and yet their brilliance makes no attempt to mask the rust and ruin of the real.

     The Finger Bone consists of fifty-nine poems arranged in four sections each of which might be thus thematically classified: section one, psycho-sexual nostalgia and the nausea of guilt; section two, the anthropomorphization of machinery and the destruction of the physical; section three, technophobia and the uneasy pairing of the rational and irrational; and section four, strange comfort in the certainty of death, which Prufer views as an echo of life.

     The poems in section one are united by an intense yearning for second chances at living voiced by characters already in the mouth of Chronos. In "The Boys," two old women sit on a river bank and watch a parade of rafts on which "sharp-shouldered boys / boys with wide smiles and perfect hands, wet legs and sand in their eyelashes" drift past out of reach. As they lick their ice cream, the women lament the passing of carefree youth, inspiring one to voice a desperate prayer for a return to physical vigor:

                                        ...I am aching
all over, but now, more than ever, carry my thoughts back
to abominable things, the sins of my youth, sweet flesh, how I cared
nothing for the breakable
                              love that arcs between two people, fondness
or the pure-of-heart, but coveted instead the love that chains the weak
waist-to-waist and thigh-to-thigh, that shackles us.

     Conversely, a mind shackled by sexual guilt in "What Is This Ship" gives voice to its agony and speaks of floating "like a tired raft in a slow tide" towards a distant sleep while pondering his sins and the words spoken by Jesus in Luke 17:2: "It would be better if he were cast into the sea / a cross about his neck [than that he should offend one of these little ones]." "Guilt, guilt a distant formast says / in its creak and gutter," the speaker wails. But his body turns "like a raft at sea" and time moves on devouring all but the memory of experience. The implication is that there are no second chances, only firsts, and these fall to time and feed the family of Chronos--and Prufer observes, ominously, in "Nancy Drew and the Secret," that "the family must eat."

     Section two contains perhaps the most disturbing imagery. "Sad Song," "Death Comes in the Form of a Pontiac Trans Am," "From the Auto Wreck," and "Helicopter Wreck" contain graphic if not Gothic images of human suffering and mutilation. This continues in "Ars Poetica" in which a finger bone, "blade-like / at the edges" is discovered in the "thrill of rivulets" in a carton of ice cream. Such horrific contrasts, Prufer implies, are occasions for poetry, especially when transformed by the music of the imagination: the bone, the reader discovers, is "hollow as a flute / and playable." Prufer offers an explanation for such imaginings but makes no apology for his observations in "Things Are Inherent in Things." He claims, echoing Rimbaud, that the ability to see the inherent cracks in reality if not the beauty in the terrifying is a kind of derangement different, perhaps, from that infecting average persons who swarm

                ...in the street, faces lit, eyes dilated,
in each pupil a single orange spark--also deranged.

     Derangement, perhaps a derangement closer to that of the poet, one that compels the scientifically-inclined to theorize, hypothesize, excavate, catalog, classify, etc., finds a place in section three, as well. Poems like "Technophobic Sonnet," "The Astronomer to His Telescope," "Lab Nightmare," and "The Archaeologist's Evening Prayer" all attempt to marry the cold and calculating mien of hard science with the irrational aspect of human nature. "Neanderthal" echoes "Ars Poetica" by revisiting the image of the finger bone 'excavated' from the striations of melting ice cream. This time the bone in question is fossilized, belonging to a long-dead cousin of Homo sapiens. As an archaeologist flags the site of its discovery and places the bone in a box bound for the lab, his brother, who has been looking on, dreams that night that the stars are speaking, questioning the scientist:

                         What will you do
with that box of bones? they ask Are they
good enough to plant, those very white seeds?

What color will the flowers be?

The repeated image of the finger bone begins to take on real significance: like Johnston's telepathy, Prufer's finger bones emanate from that "space for exchanging song." They point at the living from out of some dark echo of life and demand not so much an explanation for their disinterment as a simple acknowledgment that they, too, once existed. They point to and demand poetry.

     In the final section of the book, among the many poems dedicated to the dead (three entitled "For the Dead" and two others titled "For the Dead: Adoration" and "For the Dead: A Clearer Song") one, the final, called "Trompe L'oeil," stands as a reverberation of all that precede and as a caveat to the living observer that everything, including life, is but an illusion, and that nothing, perhaps, but the finger bone of the imagination, can ever hope to point and click with the dead. He writes:

The dead are as an echo resounding off a wall
on which someone has painted the shapes of stars...

...Someone painted them a perfect bottle blue,
traced over them with the outlines of stars which, later,
he gilded--so even in the weakest candlelight

they shone as though they were real. I stood, head tilted,
and looked into an unmoving sky. I whispered my name,
and heard the echo come back to me.