UK poetry magazines

Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)

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This review of Charles Tomlinson’s The Change of Light, published by Dare-Gale Press in 2025, first appeared in Acumen magazine, commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary. Many thanks for the invitation to write about these fine, posthumously published poems.

Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.

Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.

It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.

The quality of observation in ‘Trout II’ is likewise as freshly peeled as to feel Edenic. The fish’s ‘wirey curvature’ is held as the water’s currents ‘caress, shape, swerve’ past it. The narrator contrasts the ‘Choice’ the creature has to ride the flow with the lack of choice possessed by a rock in the same stream. The trout has an agency, deciding to hang in the water, and is ‘Willing to be no more than weed / That fluctuates beside him like his shadow’, and in so choosing, the fish transforms its environment into ‘aim, discernment, dance’. Tomlinson imagines the creature acting with ‘pleasure’, a pleasure surely also felt by poet and reader, a pleasure derived in part from the trout’s willing abandonment of its body to the water’s flow.

Tomlinson valued chance in both life and creativity (a 1969 poem is called ‘The Chances of Rhyme’) and to take advantage of chance we need to yield up control. He wrote of embracing possibility, achieved only when the ‘self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’. This self-forgetfulness, the laying aside of individual personality, is key to Tomlinson’s work (and in passing, it is what makes him a great translator). ‘Raindrops Reconsidered’ contains a pun on the seeing ‘eye (an I)’ which observes best when the ego does not bring with it ‘fable’ or the preconceptions of our daily lives and language. ‘Views’ insists that the genuinely ‘realist’ perception questions the ‘bland misprisions of the day’ so that the everyday world suddenly ‘bursts into wing, flame, flights’, into a perception that is ‘festive’.

This ‘festive’ quality refreshes our acquaintance with the world, but it also opens up vistas in which the diminishment of the self becomes not decrease but an access to something greater. In ‘The Infinite’, sitting on a hillside, beside a hedge, the narrator finds an unnerving tranquillity. The wind in the trees contrasts this, opening up a sense of ‘eternity’ and the individual self vanishes into a wider sphere: ‘In this immensity / my own thoughts drown / and it is sweet to shipwreck in this sea’. For such a poet, the loss of any access to his senses would have been devastating. In 1997, a routine cataract operation went awry and deprived Tomlinson of the sight in his left eye. The loss of binocular vision means judging distances is difficult and Tomlinson here laments the ‘flat projection’ he now has instead of full sight (‘The Accident’).

The poems in The Change of Light would appear to be late work; in ‘Courteous Death’ Tomlinson senses his own mortality. Channelling a little bit of Emily Dickinson, the personification of a surprisingly polite Death advances to greet the poet. In a sudden change of mind, Death offers complete blindness rather than demise. Tomlinson’s ‘one good eye’ refuses (at least for a while). Yet like the rock in ‘Trout II’, there comes a point at which ‘preference has no power’, no choice, though up till now, the poet says, he has expected it to ‘tip the balance / Always in my favour’. But Death allows the poet a little more time, time spent perhaps, in part, on these really fine, pleasing and profound last poems.

Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

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Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). To celebrate the appearance of the book – and do please go to the Shearsman website and buy one (or a signed copy directly from me) – I’m reproducing below the Preface I wrote for the collection. And below that, one of the poem’s from the book, which happily appeared recently in Poetry Review.

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann).

I first encountered Becker’s work while translating an essay on the poet by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). Seiler reads Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps, as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range.’ I am very happy that permissions have been granted to enable Seiler’s brilliant essay to stand as an Introduction to this volume.

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

My heartfelt thanks to Tony Frazer at Shearsman Books for his enthusiasm for Becker’s work and ensuring this book came to be.

In the wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop

in the snow, when along with the snow

comes a piece of news that, this morning,

is absolutely essential. Or how

do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it

(the pear tree) responds to the wind (to the

wind). This morning, once again, the

decision has been taken. War

between magpies and crows, simply this war,

no fuss, just this clear understanding.

Another voice, the next remark; it’s all (again)

a matter of the whole. Are you standing

in the garden? Then you know, tuck tuck, the blackbird

warned at first, you know it, I’ll say it

again, in the war, in the fresh snow, in the wind.

Another Review of my recent chapbook ‘Walking Away’

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This brief review of my most recent chapbook, Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025), has been written by Debasish Lahiri and recently appeared on the website Everybody’s Reviewing, Dec 2025. Many thanks to the reviewer for his close reading and enthusiasm about the poems and to Jonathan Taylor who edits the wonderfully lively and interesting site at Everybody’s Reviewing.

Only participles here: their ghosts fill the passing of present and present pasts in Martyn Crucefix’s latest pamphlet Walking Away. One does not need to stand in the mere of biblical lore to realize that the “end” is a process. To be witness to our parents – their touch growing cold upon the warmth of our grasp, often desperate grasp, and their memories slipping like wind through the parapet of our fingers, or sand – is to be in the arc, or archetype, of the end. Crucefix’s poetry talks as much of us who are left behind as of our parents who grow more distant, more alien, without being able to go anywhere. 

           You hear cars hiss along the road
           Cars hissing along the road

           Only present participles

In writing about his parents, and their misted lens of time, where everything is either disconcertingly different, or befuddlingly the same, Crucefix unravels the tyranny of that continuum called the Present. With the deftest of touches he paints a time, the only time where we can be partakers together, but also a cruel time with no recall or hope for a future recognition. 

           Mother of your brother and sister
           Mother of your three sons

           The same car speeding away

Reading this collection one can’t but feel that it all stands up or falls apart depending on the miraculous presence or absence of that hand or arm in the precipitate moment when the mind is afraid, limbs waver on the verge of a fumble and a silent swipe at balance comes up with aether. It isn’t merely furniture that has moved. Care-givers move through the house. A flux of children, wives and kin sweep through. The house turns out to be a Care-Home.

           Dining chair and coffee table 
           Shifted here and there


           Losing you. Your balance too

Walking Away has three shorter poems – “Video Call,” “My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)” and “In This Quiet One-way West Country Town” – along with the eponymous long sequence of tercets, measuring the calculus of change in human life. Crucefix adapts the Japanese form of the Haiku brilliantly in his long sequence “Walking Away.” This is a sense adaptation of the form, not necessarily a servile conformity to the 5-7-5 syllabic fiat, but a reinterpretation of the dynamic, emphasizing the break (after two lines or one), and corresponding to the idea of the Kireji or the divide in Japanese. Strictly speaking these are more akin to Senryu, poetry that speaks of human life rather than the natural world. 

Crucefix reminds us that living is a one-way road (not just in West Country towns). There’s no way back. Living is a walking away from the consolations of Time, an inexorable moving away of people dearest to us, our parents. His poetry stands up, unflinchingly, to this bruise.

About the reviewer: Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.

John Greening reviews my new chapbook ‘Walking Away’

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John Greening has recently reviewed my new chapbook of poems, Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025), a review which first appeared on The High Window website. Many thanks to David Cooke at THW and to the reviewer for his kind and perceptive comments about a set of poems for which I feel (an obvious) affection. Mum and Dad would be bemused by it all I think, but pleased to be so remembered.

Martyn Crucefix has come a long way since his remarkable Enitharmon debut, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). Learning, no doubt, from poetry he has since translated or adapted – notably Rilke, but also Peter Huchel, Rosalía de Castro and the Daodejing (more familiar as the Tao te Ching) – he has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled. This was especially evident in his 2017 sequence A Convoy and in the beautifully illustrated Cargo of Limbs from Hercules Editions (2019), itself a version of Book Six of the Aeneid. 

Walking Away is more straightforward and in some ways a shift towards a major key, though the subject matter might make it appear otherwise. Even the tranquil landscape on the cover reminds us that Crucefix has always had a pastoral streak: he was, after all, brought up in the West Country, which features here a good deal, if elegiacally.  The book is dedicated to his parents and it opens with a ‘Video Call’ full of tragi-comic touches (the camera is ‘angled so I catch only the crowns // of grey heads then a giant hand/reaches forward to re-adjust’) and ends with gracefully formal stanzas evoking a ‘provincial market town’ (Trowbridge, perhaps, near the Wiltshire village where Crucefix grew up?).

Fourteen of the pamphlet’s pages are occupied by the remarkable title sequence of four-line poems (drawing on ‘the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form’, as the blurb puts it, but each of a different syllable count) about the decline of the poet’s elderly mother, whose state is addressed more directly in the penultimate poem of the four in Walking Away: ‘My Mother’s Care-home Room (as Cleopatra’s Monument)’. She is portrayed unsparingly with ‘an Easter Island profile / gaunt and beaked’ but becomes a regal presence by the poem’s end as her son keeps his vigil with a final flourish of rhyme:

with all the helpless-
ness of a Charmian
at the cooling feet
of her brave Queen
the asp flung down
beneath the only chair
there has ever been

The title sequence, however, is the book’s great success, a brilliant series of vignettes, like theatre music without the play, set largely, it seems, during a period when the poet’s mother was in her own home. Some of these don’t feel like haiku, but others have that unmistakable, indefinable quality – perhaps to do with awareness of the seasons:

Turning in at your mother’s front gate
Eighty years at a stroke

Swifts no longer nesting

Crucefix knows how to find the Imagistic essence of a situation, as the form demands; and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable:

This week’s new dosette box
Grey windows not yet broken

Twenty-eight channels nothing on

Once you work out what a ‘dosette box’ is (one of those compartmentalized containers for daily tablets), the image here is potent and at least as good as ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’. For their full effect, these fragments do need each other, and they don’t often need such glossing. Take the next one, only the third in the sequence:

Telephone numerals are big and bold
The size of Scrabble pieces

A language you once knew

The brevity is fitting, since that’s often the way one communicates with those in decline; there is tea, a shared remark, more tea, a view of a lawn, knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, a car passing, a nap, a scratching mouse, ‘The clamour of carers / A microwave ping’. And while nothing connects with nothing, we are embraced by an intense emotion and a sense of an approaching end.  Walking Away demands to be read.

‘Walking Away’ – reviewed by Ian Brinton

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This review of my recent Dare-Gale Press chapbook, Walking Away, has just appeared on Litter Magazine website. Many thanks to Ian Brinton for his insightful observations on what he calls ‘this important little volume’. Any kind of proximity to Ben Jonson, Vladimir Nabokov and WS Graham is good with me!

‘Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind’

Ben Jonson’s prose Discoveries was first printed in 1640 and the shining clarity of what these words offer is central to what we understand about the importance of language. No one person can read the mind of another and it is language that permits us to recognise what is going on in another person’s vision of the world. As Martyn Crucefix bids a farewell to his parents he recognises in the title poem to this deeply-moving sequence that ‘Walking Away’ leaves a world behind:

      Chaos of a dissolving township
      A vacant heathland

      I’ve no map to your mind

The twenty pages of poetry in this beautifully produced chapbook are dedicated ‘in memory of my parents’ and open with an epigraph from Masaya Saito’s Snow Bones which had been published by Isobar Press in 2016. Saito’s four narrative haiku sequences had also been dedicated to his parents and far from being lamentations of stasis they were delicate records of movement as the poet prepared to leave a landscape in which much of his past had resided:

      In the snow country
      my parents gone

      a pendulum swinging

The print on the white pages of Saito’s volume appears like footsteps in snow and there is a quiet seriousness in the sound of one of the seven different voices as it outlines

      A misty night

      I exist
      as footsteps

In Martyn Crucefix’s volume there is a humble awareness of the passing of time which does not resolve itself into an easily achieved sense of regret. If the connection between the Then and the Now wavers with time’s passing and ‘faces split to stained glass / or cubist fragments or fairground mirrors’ those human figures so close to the poet are ‘still talking blithely asking me still / if I can see these crocuses.’ The repeated use of the word ‘still’ conveys both a settled sense of the past being beyond us, unmoving, and the enduring quality of its presence.

The central poem in this sequence is made up of fifty-eight three-line haikus and the ironies of absence and presence are held with a quiet sense of the bowed head:

      Something where nothing was
      Nothing where something stood

      Ten thousand nothings

In the riddle of all riddles nothing is an actual something and if you look at zero you will see nothing but if you use it as an eye you will see the world. The circular hollows of nothing may range from an open mouth to the faintly outline dark of the moon and from craters to wounds. As it was suggested by Nabokov ‘Skulls and seeds and all good things are round.’

      A large print calendar
      Days crossed in black have passed

      No footprints mark the snow ahead

As W.S. Graham’s ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’ puts it ‘footprint on foot / Print, word on word’ is ‘always a record of me in you’ and in ‘Walking Away’ Martyn Crucefix questions his dead parents

      Why show me these photographs?
      You point to strangers

      Once upon a time I was there

In the final poem in this important little volume, ‘In This Quiet One-way West Country Town’,  the vivid sense of loss is caught as ‘your hand slips mine before I’ve the chance / to say I’m sorry I was not there to help’ and the poet is left

      under cloudless skies a gull driven too far
      inland to return now it’s closing time
      all across this quiet provincial one-way
      west country town turning for home before dark

Home is where we live and the footprints left in snow, marks upon the page, remain as a reminder of who we are in relation to how we got there.

Review of ‘Vanishing Points’ by Lucija Stupica, tr. Andrej Peric

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This review first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.

Vanishing Points, by Lucija Stupica, is a translation from the Slovene (by Andrej Peric, published by Arc Publications in 2024) of the poet’s fourth collection, published in 2019, and is her first book to appear in English. Like Krisztina Tóth, whose book My Secret Life (translated by George Szirtes) I reviewed here, Stupica began publishing in the early 1990s, after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and Slovenian independence. Also like Tóth, this book suggests a searching restlessness, perhaps a carrying of deep scars that continue to affect a life. The book’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, ‘Questions of Travel’ (1965): ‘Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?’ The Vanishing Points Stupica seems to have in mind are those to do with distance, diminishment, travel and perspective. This has been stimulated by (or has itself provoked) her leaving Slovenia to live on the tiny island of Oaxen, near Stockholm, in 2012. This experiment in ‘island living’ proved unhappy and short-lived, as she and her family moved to Stockholm itself three years later and many of these poems explore this experience.

Of course, ‘home’ is partly temporal: the past, our family, our childhood. The book opens with memories of old Yugoslavia, what might be Stupica’s parents’ experiences in Zagreb in 1941. But memory itself is uncertain: ‘I try to breathe through some other time, / some other life [. . .] I feel I can touch it. Then I let go’ (‘The Blue Gondola’). Her mother’s recipe for ‘Chinese Cake’ gives a different sort of access to the past and perspectives through time (more than place) is important in ‘The Last Photo Together’ where two children are photographed with their old grandfather. The young girl gazes out of the image ‘towards a different place’, towards the future. But the book’s fifth poem is already called ‘The Point of Leaving’ and the sense of deracination is powerfully apparent: ‘Instead of the old plum tree, a house, / instead of the apple tree, a fence’. Perhaps like all such moves, there is optimism at the start (‘serenity in the eye’), but subsequent poems tell a different story.

Lucija Stupica

Bishop (like early Lowell) manages the trick of making personal experiences resonate far beyond the merely autobiographical. I don’t think Stupica has the same magic for the most part. In ‘North’, there is something more narrowly personal in the differing wishes of the man and woman. He wishes for a lake, darkness, spruce trees, while she wishes for the sea and light. The re-location to Oaxen seems to provoke a divergence of views. The woman experiences boredom, a sense of death (the demise of a beetle in one poem, a toad in another) and a brief prose poem evokes a stultifying routine: ‘You’ve become heavy as a rock. Move it. Eat up your meal. Do the cleaning. Talk to the neighbour. Smile. Brush your teeth’. A more extended meditation on the fascination with islands, ‘Islomania’, presents some of the more attractive aspects of the wintry landscape, the wild orchids, seal spotting, but the midnight sun and the summer’s tourist invasion, convince the narrator that those who bear the ‘affliction’ of islomania have contacted a rare disease, an intoxication, even a ‘sort of scar until the end of time’.

Andrej Peric

One of the best poems here is an ekphrastic piece in response to Bosnian artist Safet Zec’s painting ‘The Bed’. Stupica’s neat narrative manipulation means we have the couple’s response to the painting first. They find its image of rumpled sheets ultimately dispiriting, reading ‘the anatomy of an absent body’ in them. This is followed by the couple’s earlier excited approach to the painting, ‘all fired up in the fresh promise of love’, momentarily to be disappointed and in the context of the collection as a whole, we must read this as a comment on the optimism in advance of a geographical re-location which leads to disappointment.

This poem does manage to make the shift from the personal to the more universal: it’s a little mythos, an illustration of life’s disappointments. One of the most devastating disappointments of Stupica’s move to Oaxen seems to have been the withering of her creativity, as ‘Things as They Are’ expresses it, her growing ‘incapacity of putting things into words’. We don’t hear much about the family’s move to Stockholm in 2015, but a couple of poems suggest the poet’s return to form. ‘On Beauty’ appears to be set in a health spa of some kind and is a piece of satirical observation of others, not unlike TV’s The White Lotus comedy-drama, unlike most other poems in Vanishing Points. It is women’s obsession with beauty that is the target here, the mantra to ‘Fix the body. Pull it tight. Clean it up’. The narrator takes a distanced, sceptical view of this and in ‘The Fortune-Teller’, another ekphrastic poem, Stupica’s more characteristic, feminist outlook emerges in her portrayal of the artist figure, gazing into the future, engaged in a process of self-creation, perhaps escaping the past, past mistakes, the malign influences of the ‘wrong’ place:

and there are no words anymore, just the strokes on the canvas,

and herself, liberated in a world, deprived of home,

pasting them on the stretched linen surface,

changing the colours, the contours, playing with her life,

in herself, on herself, always.

Review of ‘My Secret Life’ by Krisztina Tóth, tr. George Szirtes

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This review first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.

As a female writer, talented in a variety of genres, living in a difficult political climate, Hungarian born Krisztina Tóth shares a good deal with Huch (my review of Tim Adès translation of Huch’s final book was posted here). Coming to the fore around the revolutionary year, 1989, Tóth has written poetry, children’s books, fiction, drama and musicals. My Secret Life (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) is her first sole author publication in English, ably translated and introduced by George Szirtes, presenting an overview of her poetry from 2001 to the present. Szirtes tells us that Tóth is no longer living in Hungary because of unbearable frictions with the Orbán regime. Like Huch she is drawn to poetry as personal expression, often to the formal elements of the art, both perhaps offering a redoubt against values she finds unacceptable. If there is little redemption to be found in her poems, there is some consolation to be had through the twin imperatives she expresses, to remain compassionate and to persist in trying to articulate human experience. Neither goal is easy.

Szirtes argues Tóth’s style is conversational, plain, precise, offering ‘a kind of kitchen-sink realism’. The personal also features and in these self-selected poems we get glimpses of a barely affectionate mother, a father who dies young, children, lovers, and a difficult grandmother. It’s not clear if these are genuinely autobiographical portraits and, anyway, they are most often absorbed into Tóth’s emblematic writing. An example would be ‘Barrier’ in which a couple are crossing a bridge, seemingly discussing ending their relationship. With the river below and trams thundering past, ‘the pavement was juddering’ and the poem is really about this instability in relationships as much as the (social/political) world, concluding there were ‘certain matters that couldn’t be finalised’. Such uncertainty drives roots even into the self: ‘I’m somebody else today or simply elsewhere’ (‘Send me a Smile’). Tóth uses the image of the ‘professional tourist’ in one of the major poems included here. With little background given, the narrator visits town after town, apparently hoping to be joined by a ‘you’ who never appears. Obviously a ‘stranger’, she wanders aimlessly, haplessly, buys a few things, the poem inconclusively ending with an image of a used toothbrush, ‘like an angry old punk, / its face turned to the tiles, / its white bristles stiff with paste’ (‘Tourist’).

Alienation, expressed through a profound sense of homelessness, is Tóth’s real subject. With the irony turned up to 11, the poem ‘Homeward’ ends quizzically, ‘But where’s home?’ In such a world view, the ability to remain compassionate is important to the poet, however hard it may be. The painfully brilliant ‘Dog’ presents a couple driving at night, seeing a badly injured dog at the roadside, and the woman wants the man to stop. I think they do, but the poem’s focus is on the powerful impetus to help versus the powerful sense that whatever can be done will prove futile. More weirdly, in ‘Duration’, the narrator finds a Mermaid Barbie doll stuck in the ground outside her flat. The childhood associations, the vulnerability of the frail figure, seem to compel action, but ‘what’?

Should I pull the thing out of the ground so it

sheds earth every night, because however often

we wash it, or wrap it in a tissue or leave it

on the radiator we’ll only have to bin it in the end?

Tóth’s wry, highly original lament, on deciding not to buy a universal plug adaptor, perhaps suggests what is being wished for in many of these poems. It is a way for a feeling human being to feel more at home in a world of suffering: ‘how to adapt the world / and its gizmos to the pounding of so many hearts’.

‘Song of the Secret Life’ pulls together many of these strands with the life as much the inner life of the self (the heart) as the life kept hidden in an unsympathetic personal or political environment. In the case of an artist, it is also the creative life, and as much ‘an utter mystery, a puzzle undone’, to the writer herself. But in order ‘to survive it needs telling’ and – like Huch’s creative figure in ‘The Poet’ – even if current conditions do not welcome such efforts, the individual must continue to write, to use language, to affirm the validity of the individual viewpoint. This is the burden of the magnificently hypnotic long concluding poem, ‘Rainy Summer’, in which the long-lined, rhymed couplets, express an unrelenting haunting of the speaker by ‘a sentence’. The latter phrase opens many of the lines, and it goes talking, throbbing, pulsing, dancing and rushing through the poem itself, though as much as the sentence might prove to be some sort of ‘home’ we are never told what it expresses. This is largely because it is a ‘rhythmic unit without words’, it is ‘the bodiless body of language’, it is the ‘speech that knows no speech’, it is ‘a sentence that contained you, gone yet here, some of each’.

Szirtes’ emphasis on the political backdrop to Tóth’s poems might lead us to expect more obvious political engagement and subject matter. That’s not what we get here, though no doubt her surroundings have determined many aspects of the work. Hers is a profound voice, finding in the menace, alienation, and instability around her emblems of more universally shared experiences of rootlessness, troubled self-questioning, of sensibilities that find the world as it is a painful and difficult place to navigate, of the pull of pity and compassion versus an overwhelming sense of the futility of individual action. ‘Sleeper’ addresses what might be a transmigrating soul or spirit, a ‘little pulse box’, asking question after question about where it has been, what it has seen, the mysterious passage from life to death, or vice versa: ‘what’s it like to step into such cold, unlit fiefdoms, / does anything remain’? Tóth’s poems ask such questions and like the best modern poems offer us equivocal answers only, consolatory but not redemptive.

Here is the whole of one poem included here:

Where – Kristina Toth, tr. George Szirtes

Not there, on the tight bend of the paved highway,

where cars are occasionally prone to skidding,

chiefly in winter, though no one dies there,

x

not there where streets are greener and leafier

where lawns are mowed and there’s a dog in the garden

and the head of the family gets home late at night,

x

nor there in front of the school where every morning

a man is waiting regular as clockwork,

nor inside the gates on the concrete playground,

x

nor in the neglected, dehydrated meadow

where a discarded dog-end hits the ground and glows

for a moment, it doesn’t begin there

x

but at the edge of the forest, in rotting humus

where somebody once was buried alive,

that’s where the poem begins.

Review of ‘Autumn Fire’ by Ricarda Huch, tr. Timothy Adès

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This review is an extended version of the one which first appeared in Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews editor, Andrew Geary, for commissioning it.

Considered by Thomas Mann as ‘the first lady of German letters’ and as the first woman to receive the prestigious Goethe Award (1931), Ricarda Huch (1864-1947) was a literary superstar of her time, yet remains little known in English. She was an historian who published novels, philosophy, drama and poetry. With the rise of Hitler, she made her rejection of Nazi doctrine clear, remaining in Germany as an ‘inner émigré’, but surviving the war years. Autumn Fire (Poetry Salzberg, 2024) is her last collection, published in 1944, and powerfully reflects her lifelong fascination with the Romantic movement. As Karen Leeder’s scene-setting Introduction explains, this is evidenced in the poems’ formal choices as well as imagery, ‘a repertoire of sprites, flowers, scents, birdsong, gardens, moons, fairy tales, and love’. An English poetry reader would initially place this work in parallel to the least challenging of the Georgian poets of 1914.

There is frequently a faux medievalism at work, as in ‘The trees of autumn murmur’ which tells the story of a Prince who wanders into the woods and is bewitched by ‘fairies wild’ to live a sad, unloving, unhappy life. Other poems remind us of Hardy’s folkloric, time-obsessed lyrics in similarly challenging stanza forms:

On far-off floors the dancers face the middle,

The hems swing stiffly to the threshers’ drum.

Accordion and bass and fiddle

Ethereal hum.

                                                (‘Autumn’)

Also from the stock Romantic image bank comes the isolated, tortured figure of the poet who, as spring days arrive, remains unmoved by them because mysteriously ‘troubled’ and when called upon to sing his songs (this is Huch’s own masculine gendering), finds that his creative efforts are ‘unwelcome’ to society at large (‘Morning of twittering birds’).

However, a closer reading of Huch’s poems clarifies their curiously hybrid effects, as in ‘The Old Minstrel’ in which the violent early years of the twentieth century come forward dressed in medieval garb. The narrative voice encourages the minstrel to sing and play his harp: ‘songs of golden treasure, / Times of playfulness and pleasure’. But the final lines of the poem are spoken (we must assume) by the minstrel who warns that what may come from him demands powerful trigger warnings:

Woe betide ye when I call

Forth my lions, every string,

Dumb in dusty ambuscade,

Torpid now, glistening

Thick with matted blood!

Huch boldly leaves the poem there, without any return to a possibly moderating, narrative voice. ‘The Heroes’ Tomb’ also makes use of familiar images (a tomb, a blustery November day, an old man, a passing shepherd, a youngster asking questions) to address a distanced ‘wicked war’. This poem similarly ends bloodily (though note, we are still in the era of swords rather than machine guns), as those who are inclined to stoop and listen at the tomb, can ‘make out far below the clash of swords, / And tell the drip, drip, drip, and hear the sound. / Can it be blood?’

Such lines contrast the lark’s song, the perfumed jasmine, the poplars and lime trees inhabiting so many of these pages and Huch herself seems to shuttle between a religious-based optimism and a much more modern sounding despair. In ‘Moonlit Night’, an owl flies through a wood and takes a mouse as prey. The moon seems to be portrayed as looking on, wholly indifferent, as it picks its way through the branches, ‘twinkle-toed and light’. Only the form and language here makes the poem feel less than genuinely Modern. As for the owl, it becomes proleptic of technological advances in air warfare as she sweeps off through the wood, ‘the murderess, / whose claws the victim hold, / airborne above black treetops’ emptiness’. Another predator image later provides the reader with a further shock. In ‘My heart, my lion, grasps its prey’, the latter is identified as ‘the hated’. And the passionate nature of Huch’s antagonism – though the object of her hate is never named – is startling, and she uses repetition, shortened lines and rhyme to make her point:

My heart hates yet the hated,

My heart holds fast its prey,

That none may palter or gainsay,

No liar gild the worst,

Nor lift the curse from the accursed.

Almost inevitably you feel, the elements of modern warfare seep into Huch’s poems. In the midst of another Hardyesque stanzaic poem, between the ‘honey-brown’ buds on the trees and the lark’s ‘music-making’, more familiar ‘war poem’ sounds provide the base notes: ‘The earth shakes with battle, the air with shellfire heaves’ (‘War Winter’). The ABAB quatrains of ‘The Young Fallen’ mourn those taken by war by first evoking the innocence of their childhoods, schooldays, their unfulfilled worldly ambitions. Then ‘War came’. And though much of the detail and imagery could be applied to wars fought anytime in the last few centuries, there are moments when the realities of the mid-twentieth century cannot be denied. The young men’s hands are a focus, as they ‘Not long ago reached out for toys and fun. / Those hands, conversant with the tools of murder, / Control the howitzer and grip the gun’.

In fact, Huch was living in Jena when the city was bombed by the Allies and ‘The Flying Death’ comes closer than any other poem in conveying her experiences of modern warfare. Though the Flying Death is an old-fashioned personification, its modus operandi is up to date: ‘The chimney reels, the roof-beams groan, / By distant thunder he is known’. Even as the air bombardment is imaged as approaching on ‘iron steeds’, its impact is plainly conveyed as ‘A whistling, hissing din, and more, / A jarring shriek is heard, a roar, / As if the earth would burst.’ This Poetry Salzberg publication unfortunately does not give the reader the original German, but Timothy Adès’ translations are quite brilliant in their preservation of form and rhyme, while at the same time conveying both the sweetness and the violence in Huch’s curious, powerful, under-appreciated poetry.

Excerpts from Autumn Fire, tr. Timothy Adès

Stralsund

The old grey town that blue sea girds:
The swell of rust-red sails,
The squawking, tumbling salt-sea birds,
The flash of clean fish-scales.

On this church wall the pounding wave
And tempest waste their fire:
Though organ-thunder shakes the nave,
No foe hurls down the spire.

The clouds with tender beating wing
Caress its head, that dreams
Of fierce-fought battles reddening
Its foot with gory streams.

The dead are sleeping, stone by stone,
The sounding bells request:
Eternal memory, my son,
Be thine, eternal rest!
 

Music

Melodies heal up our every smart;
Happiness,
Lost to us, they redress;
They are balsam to our ailing heart.

From the earth where we without respite
Toil enslaved,
As on wings of blessed angels saved
They transport us to a land of light.

Sound, sound forth, ye songs of mystery!
Worlds fly far;
Earth sinks down, our red and bloodstained star;
Love distils its essence from on high.

Jeremy Reed’s ‘Collusive Strangers: new selected poems’ (1979-2016) reviewed

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An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.

As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.

Even Reed’s earliest work arrived fully formed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the urban, neurasthenic wanderer appears in ‘Claustrophobia (Kings Cross)’, the narrator’s need being ‘so strong it might involve the police’. In contrast, ‘Dwight’s Brother’ is an early stanzaic, sci-fi piece, a character from the future obsessed with Manson’s and Nixon’s careers, and ‘the monomania that burns planets’. And the magnificent ‘John Clare’s Journal’ ventriloquises the nature poet’s concerns for the natural world of Helpston, his stumbling literary repute, and fear for the future of his children, ‘laid / out as corpses’. Reed’s ambition is clear from the start, and in a poem like ‘Visit to George Barker’ he evidently empathises with the older poet’s withdrawal and seclusion, his writing contemporaries being harshly judged for a lack of ambition as ‘poets whose very aim is minimal / gesture, earning [Barker’s] dismissal’.

My own first acquaintance with Reed’s writing was in the two volumes from Cape in 1984/5, By the Fisheries and Nero, when James Lasdun edited him. These particularly highlighted the Nature poems, for example ‘Conger’ which outdid Ted Hughes: ‘They’ll shave a finger off with precision, / clean as a horse bite, or close round a hand / and leave it as taut gristle strung on bone.’ In a quieter poem, the narrator is fishing in a harbour, near a ‘desalination plant’, the tautly strung reactions of a shoal of mullet seemingly reflected in the fisherman’s own alertness and nerves (‘By the Fisheries’). ‘Spider Fire’ plays brilliantly with perspectives as every sort of tiny beast and insect flees a wildfire, while the narrator, at a distance, observes ‘a black hoop / ironed into the shire’. Though the first-person pronoun recurs in many poems, Reed is usually not much interested in self-revelation. One wonders, if he was/had been, he might be more widely appreciated, because it’s not that he can’t do it. ‘Visiting Hours’, for example, is enough to make a grown wo/man weep as the narrator visits his father in hospital, economical with the truth that this is ‘terminal’, the child compelled to play the father, the father, ‘like a diver gone on down // to find an exit that was always there, / but never used’. In characteristic ABCB quatrains, ‘Changes’ perhaps records the poet’s re-visiting Jersey and a brother, or boyhood friend, who stayed behind as a farmer, both recognising ‘our youth survives, the present is a gap’. And Lindop includes two remarkable poems from the Nineties collection, in which we seem to get close to Reed’s own autobiographical difficulties, when personal survival seems ‘to be the question’ (‘Samaritans’), and, in ‘Prayer’, Reed addresses a divinity of an uncertain variety, pleading for illumination, for help, a hearing, a pointing of a way out, from guilt, dread, self-injury, poverty, ‘the unappeasable, involuntary / inheritance of lucklessness’.

But Reed deals with topics, rather than ‘issues’, and his work is descriptive in character, never preachy or judgemental, so he seldom offers us his ‘views’. The work is driven by his ‘curiosity’, which both ‘holds us to life and feeds us to the flame’ (‘Moth-Trapper’). His praise of the artist, in ‘Cezanne’, is revealing of his fascination for the ‘ordinary’ and for the shared knowledge that ‘the beautiful / is inherent in all that lives, / and once externalised in its true form, / remains as that’. Over and over again, Reed captures – hence externalises – the true form of things in the colourful, vigorous, unblinking poems selected here. And as the millennium approached, Reed extended his range even further towards ‘all that lives’. There are uncharacteristic political poems (Tony Blair is a particular target), but Reed also writes of the experience of AIDS, and with a Baudelairean dwelling on sexuality, in poems like ‘Transsexual’ and ‘Brothels’, and is drawn closer to popular culture, its fashions, music, and iconic figures. But many of the poems on Madonna, Billie Holiday, Elvis and The Rolling Stones drift to looser forms of summary and the decade from 1993 to the early 2000s contains less brilliant work, though 2006’s Orange Sunshine with its evocations of 1960s London marks a return to form.

Reed as elegist, as in This Is How You Disappear (Enitharmon Press, 2007), was perhaps unexpected, but poems like ‘Paula Stratton’ and ‘John Berger’ (not the art critic) must rate amongst the finest in that genre produced in the last 100 years. The honesty, attention to detail, the empathy extended to his subjects (Stratton was a drug addict; Berger a difficult Jersey friend and Nazi-collaborator), and the apparent ease and beauty of the writing, mean these poems ought to have been anthologised everywhere. The elegiac note is hardly surprising as Reed moves through his seventh decade and poems about socks, potted plants, tea, honey, and cupcakes seem to mark shifts in focus though Reed remains true to his repeated maxim that ‘everything I see [is] poetry’ (‘London Flowers’). The poems retain the vigour and speed that he admires in Plath’s work: ‘her fast ball imagery / on speed-trajectories [. . .] her plugged-in dare-all energies’ (‘Re-reading Sylvia Plath’). As he puts it in an extract from ‘White Bear       and Francis Bacon’, Reed has remained true to his early ambitions ‘to kick poetry into near sci-fi / [. . .] like dirty-bombing the dictionary into my face’ and there are thrills to be had by any reader on every one of these 300 pages in which Reed makes so many contemporary poets look sluggish, mired in virtue signalling, lumbering in form, and monotone compared to his vivid technicolours.

Here is the whole of ‘Elegy for a Polka Dot Shirt’ from Orange Sunshine (2006):

Unreconstructed 60s
ostentation snowed on blue
labelled Jacques Fath, tailored fit,
fished from Retro on a simmmery
cloud hung-over August day,
bought for pop connotations –
high collar with flouncy points,
cotton married to the skin.
Medium size:
              38 cm:
structured for a defined waist
sexless to the vanity
of ownership.
Affordable at £15,
the item begged me to retrieve
its showy staginess.
             Outside, airless haze,
W11 backpacking crowds
random like footage spilled
into a documentary.

Later I tore a fragile seam
tracking towards left underarm,
the fissure sounding like hot oil
pronouncing itself in a pan.
The tear backtracked through history
to the anonymous wearer,
who bought sensation, sold it on
into a chain, the onion skin
thinning from use;
              the scar re-sewn,
but evident, a little glitch
caught in the fabric like a blues
lament,
the singer head-bowed on a stool,
cooking up trouble, while the club
tug at his vulnerability
and modulate applause from hot to cool.

Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?

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The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process. Indeed, Meta does seem to have taken some of my own writing – more critical than poetic – for its dubious purposes and it has done so without any kind of indication that this was happening, nor any request for permissions after the event, and – the harvesting of material being so vast – it’s hard to anticipate any after-the-event compensation or successful legal action. Even though, as The Atlantic‘s link has shown us, there ARE records of what has been done, a footprint, a guilty fingerprint, an undeniably smoking gun.

It’s hard not to feel that the horse has bolted on this one and – with the peevish idea of being able to mock at the anticipated results – since some of my own creativity has been stolen, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of me. It was horribly polite in response and within a few seconds had produced a piece of writing it said was in the style of my own work and which it briskly summed up as ‘contemplative and precise [in] style, often rooted in quiet observations of the everyday, nature, and memory’. I posted this on Facebook – indicating the way this had come about – and wondering what people thought. The results surprised me as there was a mild round of applause for ChatGPT: it’s true, it did sound like a poem, it wasn’t utter nonsense (as I think I’d hoped). I don’t think anyone felt it sounded like me, but observations were made along the lines that ‘plenty of worse pieces of writing are submitted to magazines on a daily basis’.

But there was also a strong kick back against the whole process (even at my engaging with AI at all – though I really do think that horse and rider has bolted, in talking to friends (by no means all writers) and my own kids, AI has already made its way into the mainstream of work and study). There was also a strong reaction insisting that AI cannot write creatively because it does not have the human qualities out of which true (true?) creative writing emerges: the flaws, the emotions, the relationships, the memory, the history. I’m inclined to this side of the argument – though I’d also suggest it’s a kind of Doctor Who argument.

I thought it’d be worth spending a few moments looking at what ChatGPT actually produced for me. The title it chose, ‘The Last Light’, is inoffensive enough, if more Edward Thomas than Martyn Crucefix (in my view) and the form of the poem – free verse – is rather well done, though the line lengths are shorter than I think I’d have used myself. The opening stanza runs:

The hill is a shoulder—

pressed up against the sky’s slow retreat.

Beyond it, something waits:

not death,

but the unspoken

name of a tree I once knew

before its bark peeled

like old paper

from the spine of a life

I’ve half-forgotten.

That opening image is quite intriguing with its personification of both the ‘hill’ and the ‘evening’. The use of the long em dash after line 1 is something I think of as one of my techniques (though I’d not have used it there). In context of the ‘last light’ the ‘sky’s slow retreat’ is an effective phrase I’d be happy to own. I’m less happy with the next few lines, with the rather grandiose (overdramatic) ‘something waits’ (though I again hear some Ed Thomas in there) and ‘not death’. Is the latter a response to the possible (though here denied) metaphorical reading of ‘last light’? I think to suggest ‘the unspoken / name of a tree’ is what waits there is silly because it wouldn’t matter if it was spoken or not, because the ‘name’ is a thing known (it seems) and the tree bark peeling like ‘old paper’ is a poor image (what do you see there visually? compare bark to old paper?). This is compounded by suggesting the bark/paper is being peeled from ‘the spine of a life’. For a moment I see (distractingly) a human spine, then it’s replaced by the spine of a book (surely what is intended?) but this book spine seems to be from a book of ‘a life’ – or the life. Ugh no no no – the imagery there is all of a muddle which is not countered by the slightly emotive indications of ageing, loss, the past etc. To then say – as the poem does – that whatever has been said in the preceding few lines is actually ‘half-forgotten’ makes a mockery of the whole thing so far – this is like a bad poet attempting some elusive suggestiveness without really understanding (or being clear – poetry has to be clear in itself) what is being said. There is – AI critics would surely say, and I’d agree – an inhuman muddle going on in the opening 10 lines. But that is not to say that a not-very-talented human poet might have done something similar.

The poem proceeds…

A bird—

small enough to miss in motion—

cuts across the field.

x

Not for me, not even for itself,

but for the thread

it must continue.

The parenthetical ‘small enough to miss in motion’ doesn’t work for me. Again it seems to be yearning as it were for a sort of liminal effect – just on the edge of sense – but either it has been missed in which case it’s not been seen at all or it has been caught sight of in which case it has not been missed. The latter sentence is what I’d be arguing with myself were this actually my poem. I’d cross it out or re-write. The negatives of line 13 (‘Not for me, not even…’) again seem to be reaching for an edge of perception sort of impression, something is not known. I’d accept this as one of Crucefix’s recurrent ideas but (I hope) I don’t do it like this which is not so much a struggle to perceive, more a double blocking negative: if it’s not this and not that… then what is it? To go on to suggest there is a ‘thread’ being followed (by the seen/unseen bird? really?) And that the continuation of this ‘thread’ is something the bird is compelled to do (‘must’) is verging on the ridiculous. There are suggestions of motives, compulsions, but looked at more closely they make no sense whatsoever.

The poem’s final two stanzas are as follows:

I place my hands in the grass.

It is cold with what the earth

has kept secret all day.

x

I wonder

if this is what love is:

a silence left

after something essential

has flown.

The placing of hands ‘in the grass’ is rather good and the finding of ‘cold’ there is ominous (again ‘last light’?) and indicative of a death of sorts and to suggest the earth has kept this ‘secret all day’ is also a phrase – even an idea – I’d be happy to acknowledge my own (it’s not). But I can’t recall ever using the phrase ‘I wonder’ in a poem (no doubt I have) and I don’t like it. It seems to be AI’s attempt at a sort of ‘poetical’ tone and mood. In this context it feels rather cheap. And that is cheapened even further by what is wondered: ‘if this is what love is’. Where the hell did that come from? AI is using tropes which it thinks evoke the poetique…. love is a surefire winner of course…. But I can’t see how it forms any kind of ‘whole’ with what has come before. I find myself insisting this is what AI cannot really do – which a live human can potentially – create language in forms which achieve some sort of integrity, a wholeness, even out of contradictory materials, and the glue that binds them together has to be feeling, an emotional experience which lies at the root, powerful but usually not articulated in any other form than in the form of the poem itself.

The AI poem’s last fling is the colon which may or may not suggest that what follows is ‘what love is’. I think the AI mind will mean this. Once again I hear Edward Thomas more than me in this conclusion (see what ET remembers at the end of ‘Old Man’: ‘Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end’) but the muddling of metaphors occurs again. There is a ‘silence’ left after something ‘essential’ has flown away but my reader response is straining here at the flighted thing (a motion) which is somehow abandoning an aural experience (the silence) and in leaving it something ‘essential’ has been lost (with wings?). Again AI is picking up the way poetry wants to get to the ‘essence’ of things but the words written here are merely an indication of that wish, not at all a real live accessing of it, or even a genuine gesturing towards it.

Having written this I have convinced myself – even more than I had been before – that what AI has written is a ‘hide’, a cover for a poem, making use of words and ideas that it has found associated with poems (perhaps even my own poems) but which it doesn’t itself ‘get’ (how could it?). On the other side of the desk sits the reader. The question for the reader is: how well do we read any poem that comes before us? Do we accept its (often) feeble gestures towards significance as the real thing? Out of a hundred poems we read in magazines and on-line, how many of them ARE the real thing? I’d bet my AI generated poem would find its way into a UK magazine (eventually). It has the aura of a poem, it has many of the familiar gestures of a poem, it doesn’t really make proper sense (which some think is the mark of a real poem), it doesn’t have the heart of a true poem (but lots of poems I read don’t either because they too are copying, mimicking tropes and phrases from other poems).

My astute friend, fiery critic, and fine translator, Will Stone, was kind enough to comment at length on my original Facebook post. I’m with him. I’ll leave you with his thoughts:

Martyn…. your own poetry is born of time, experience, tragedy and celebration, as well as from the inner harvest of your accomplished literary translations. This collection of admittedly impressive sounding images has been reaped from a database in nano seconds and cobbled together in some deceiving facsimile which claims to be your style. And like the macabre chitty bang bang child catcher with his tempting lollipops, it’s ‘all free today’. Like a painting let us say by Edvard Munch reconstituted by a skilful fraudster based in High Wycombe, it may appear in every way to be Munch, but it isn’t Munch. For it was the process of creation (which is unique to every individual and cannot be rationalised by densities of data capture or meticulous replication) that was invested in the original painting and by implication your poem, which counts. AI is not a creator out of inwardness, it is a skilful and persuasive designer, an artisan. It only wants to succeed and aims almost grotesquely at perfection. Genuine poets aim at expressing authentically from a deep point, and are explorers who cling to the cliff face of their poem’s construction… failure is quite possible which is why only a human can be an artist because humans alone with their insufficient organs (see Maupassant le Horla) are shaped by fear, doubt, failure, wild joy and excess. What I am trying to say is that it is as much about what we miss in a work of art to make it complete or perfect that makes it unique with its beautiful imperfection!

Related Links: Nesrine Malik’s recent Guardian article on AI: ‘With ‘AI slop’ distorting our reality, the world is sleepwalking into disaster’ plus several interesting discussions of AI and translation on the Goethe-Institute website.