Judy Gahagan, Ambit magazine, issue 181

Here you open up on a poetry of moments between, the "spaces without names" ('Borders') in an "afterwards she died into" ('The White Place') in a 'History of Doing Nothing'. Thus you open onto one kind of domain in poetry that demands great poetic resource if it's not to become anaemic or even irritating. Here though is a master of such moments:

Events?
no; the gaps that separate events,
the hungerless white dreams between
awakenings,
slow afternoons that ran aground on boredom.

Opening in this way leaves you quite unprepared for the ferocity that begins to announce itself in 'A View of Pasadena from the Road':

and the shadowless earth
is as thirsty as Mars. In the distance,
the soft porch light of the good life.

Some pages later we find the title poem (already announced here) which, based on a 19th century notion that Martian civilisation died in a great drought, transfers an image of such extinction to us: "it could be us but not yet". For some reason I found this metaphorical account less than compelling. In fact the most compelling violence waits for us in the poem 'The Shuttle', a memory of serious illness: "a half-hallucinated rain-forest."

This poetry seemed to me to thrive best on the extremes of either nothingness or violence. Excursions into less intense visions and the power of his writing is not sustained to the same extent - the Belgitude poems, for example, are more poetically conventional though acute in observation and his wonderful Erik Satie poems are only occasionally let down by an over-intrusive wit, the first of these is exquisite but maybe a bit too studiedly so. Some odd images, but powerful writing!