Reviews Round-Up

Credit crunch - maybe it is affecting sales of poetry but it certainly isn't affecting the publishing and material has been pouring in since the beginning of the year with all the big poetry publishers and many lesser known ones churning the stuff out. Ambit somewhat illogically has reviewed poetry for years, which means that we pay critical attention to a third of our content - prose, artwork and other areas of Ambit's activities get no critical attention. Logically it seemed to me years ago that poetry was getting very little attention in any other publications apart from the poetry magazines so we have given it ten to twelve pages in each issue for many years. We only review very small quantities of poetry we now receive and it is hard to find a rational way to approach the problem. The books too vary in size from small and modest to huge. Ambit's new editorial member Emily Berry has an eighteen-page pamphlet, Stingray Fevers, out from Tall Lighthouse publishers which is Arts Council backed, dedicated to new poetry from young poets. The poems are technically assured and the subject matter often surprising. Try 'A Short Guide to Corseting'. Then two real blockbusters from Carcanet whose output continues to be very seriously respectable. What to make of Christopher Middleton's Collected Poems (over 700 pages)? Carcanet have been publishing his single volumes over many years. In early collections one enjoyed jokey poems like 'Nudes' (in Our Flowers and Nice Bones), but he is basically a serious and indeed scholarly writer whose complexity is sometimes daunting. In the poem 'Enigma' there is a discussion of a possibly erroneous identification of a coin in a poem by Cavafy (which is hard to trace). There is an obscurantism in some of his poems which makes one wonder how accessible his work will seem in the decades to come.