DIVERTIMENTI : VLEESKENS, BELTRAMETTI, CALDWELL, LEBER, SPENCE

Why wouldnt I admit it? Bored, irritated, enervated by the whole biz --what John Forbes, amplifying the Sydney/Melbourne, 1970s, 'new poetry' discussion about the mainstream, called "talented earache"! Then again, as one good poem doesnt make a summer so one bad poem doesnt herald winter. Yet it speaks volumes of one's expectation for poetry that bad writing (and I hasten to qualify : in one's own opinion, thus disposition as well as the particular education undertaken in service of the art) can cause more misery than an inadequate menu or perpetually late train.
The more important complaint is not being able to see the poems for the poetics (or less --for the method of their construction). In my head I sound-off like that 70s discussion & rail against the sound of squeaky clean construction & its inevitable decorum, regardless that some of my own (particularly '90s) production is pronged on the same indictment!
And then, out of the blue, the universe deals a delightful hand --Grant Caldwell's glass clouds, Michelle Leber's The Weeping Grass, Pete Spence's Sonnets, Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti. Or do I simply wake up on the correct side of the bed? (Surely I dont have to explain that!)

A first impression of clarity of thought & expression, as I skimmed Caldwell's new collection, had me imagining a poetry of wisdom. And the image (or proposition) was still in my mind as I read Leber's poems, that they were knowing & wise. For example, regarding the latter, the gleaming blade of the line which introduces her poem, The Boonwurrung Coast, located at Cape Paterson (coincidentally where Cornelis Vleeskens hung out for many years) --"We let all things take form in the morning light."-- is capable of cutting through anything, including the taxonomy & imagery of sea-birds & flora let alone hints of initiation into shamanistic mysteries. And the triple repetition of the pregnant phrase "In the best part of May" (in the poem of that name), is similarly almost independent of the narrative (however brilliantly inhabited by the anthropomorphised persona telling its creation tale).
In Leber, the gainliness of that combination of scientific & perceptional language evokes authority. Local Barometer, for example : "Port Philip Bay is quicksilver in a glass. / Grey beryllium dust and copper sun-shards rise above waves. / A wind-whip of a baton conducts in tricky 7/8 time. / Ordinarily, a sea-gust's libretto is sung from a silver gull, / and now a gannets' gale-force chorus carves sandstone. / Within this capsule - held up by vertical cliffs / - an interior spring prevents a cloud's collapse. / The weight of water once floating in Torricelli's tube, / now scummed on a pollution-meniscus. / As a desert licks a city's hem-line, / fever rises in pacific oceans, shifts moisture to the equator; / flash-flooding in the north, yet our backyard is cinder / - tomorrow, horizon's axe will swing at noon."
No doubt these are crafted poems --they had to have been carved & chivvied to make their particular density, and a long way from what I'm going to say about Cornelis Vleeskens... But I'm being led to contradictory propositions : firstly, that what she has to say calls the tune; secondly, that her keen observation imposes veracity regardless of subject-matter. One thing for sure : no ho-hum in Michelle Leber's Weeping Grass (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010)...

As I've flagged, something of the same's entailed in Grant Caldwell's glass clouds (Five Islands Press, 2010). The tone of 'something being said' emanates from sufficient poems to impress authority. Not the old literary gravitas (no matter 'made new') but the conjunction of writing and spoken-word's well oiled tongue. From the outset let's insist Caldwell isnt casual however relaxed --the relaxation with syntax, that is, which is the crux of modern English-language poetry, --allowing then its objectors to be eccentric rather than reactionary (except for the vanguard camp, censorial to the last). Plain-speaking, however, is only one of the founding twins; the other never ditched the richer dictionary. Thus the double spring & thrust of 20thCentury & on's poetry. Caldwell's stepping-off from that rung doesnt yet qualify as construction --it's still utterance, more or less (the how it is, the what happened). And maybe it is 'irony' which distinguishes him from numerous other common speakers, and most of them unheralded --as Vleeskens is, for example --not that he's bitching : equanimity rhymes in divertimenti with wine & good music, and what more would one want?
Further to 'wise' : as though ancient Chinese hermit or mendicant poet...! Maybe it was the haiku-like poems in the centre of glass clouds (though that's 'Japanese') as well as his serious meditations on perception (necessarily equating phenomenal experience & language representation --"the window of the past is complete / but you are blind, or a blind") --which compelled the impression. Not to say subsequent reading disabused it --more, that the amount of distress also gathered there revoked the semblance of resolution. In Melbourne, though, as any capital of the Western world, where else does wisdom lie than in the tension of normal attachment & its desired opposite? Caldwell's erstwhile persona of the wry humorist (open his last book, Dreaming of Robert de Niro (FIP, '03), at random for any example) is perhaps succeeded here by the poet following doubt's philosophical trail to a halfway house of serenity (if one accepts as influence two of these poems' dedicatees, Derrida & Claire Gaskin).
Caldwell's tour de force is the hypnotic across the sea, which begins "the sea comes / across itself / here it comes / across itself / see it coming / it comes and comes / across itself / it keeps coming / it never stops", continuing in like fashion for a further 35 lines. It is a reiteration of the fact of sea --of 'the sea' as an event --which succeeds in summoning sea's ceaseless movement whilst rendering each wave's singularity, and the poet's observation of it a definitive exhileration!

Reading Cornelis Vleeskens' divertimenti on random days (Earthdance, 2010), has me thinking of Franco Beltrametti, as occasionally I do : almost met, courtesy of Tim Longville & John Riley, who'd advised that Franco, our fellow Grosseteste Review contributor, would be visiting London in '71 --or was it shortly before the Hemensleys returned to Melbourne in '72? --but that was cancelled. Any meeting in the flesh was forever thwarted by his sudden death in 1995. He remains an exotic correspondent, then, from the golden age of hand & typewritten letters, always missed now as though a friend.
And Vleeskens' book instantly recalls Sperlonga Manhattan Express, an international anthology edited by Beltrametti (Scorribanda Productions, San Vitale, Switzerland, 1980), because of the A-4 / 210-297mm page size & the visual content --Franco's pics from all hands & lands (e.g, P. Gigli's photo of the Berrigans, poems by Koller, Raworth, Gysin, Whalen postcard/cartoon, J Blaine, G D'Agostino, et al); Cornelis' own montage, drawings, calligraphy, typography --the same mail-art internationale, Fluxus, neo-Dada style more readily recognized from Pete Spence's affiliations & practice --particularly relevant here because of the latter's regular appearance in the divertimenti.
Vleeskens & Beltrametti are both Europeans who've crucially intersected with the anti-formal (looser, casual) English-language poetry (are they 'casualties' then!), especially the post WW2 Americans, progeny of Pound & Williams, New York, San Francisco, the West Coast, at a time when Europe was reaffirming its own liberatory tradition (Dada, Surrealism & on) &, similarly, opening to new worlds. And because they're not British or North American or Australian, except by adoption, their European origins & references are never out of mind.
Not an exact match, by any means --but somewhere along the line they've both decided to riff on life & not on literature, though there is a literature of just that sort of thing, and a life that contains literature, music, painting, etc. But theirs is another reminder of the efficacy of the un-made, journal-esque writing, --as clear & direct as we reconstruct the Ancient Chinese & Japanese to be, and whose transparency doesnt necessarily prefer the naive to the esoteric or the well-known to the uncommon (take the music Vleeskens listens to daily &, therefore, records in his communiques --or his philately habit or the breadth of his correspondence, all noted).
Beltrametti's poem The Key might be credo for Vleeskens too :

What was well started shall be finished. / What was not, should be thrown away.
Lew Welch, Hermit Poems.

1 ) the place & the season : winter
2 ) somebody (myself) right here : real & unreal
3 ) what is he doing & what's going on in his head
4 ) how & why is he saying it
5 ) to somebody else (you) elsewhere
something happens?
the circle (real & unreal)
isnt closed

[27/1/72]

--published in Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973), the blurbs for which by Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Claude Pelieu, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai & Guillaume Chpaltine are fair snap of his American/European compass.
Context & correspondence, as in O'Hara, Berrigan, Phil Whalen of course, are vital here in distinguishing such notes & exclamations from the bagatelle they might otherwise be --and Jeremy Prynne's terrific comment on O'Hara jumps to mind, that unlike New York's "art gallery nympholepts", he "always has that pail of serpents in view" --: the poet's obligation, as felt, to be right here, to tell how & what it is without literary diversion, the further extent of which is selling-out, blunting if not losing the existential point. (Echoing Olson's Human Universe suit for the poem as 'one of Nature's things', Ray Di Palma hazards, "a poem is one of the almost successful / forces of nature", --in the 3rd of one of Language Poetry's more beautiful sequences, Territory (from Numbers & Tempers, Selected Early Poems, 1966-86; Sun & Moon, '93), which begins, "the desperado / and his abacus / in utopia" --the perfect cartoon for what I'm getting at?! --but that project was performed within /refined writing, albeit a stepping-up of the casual, and isnt the minstrelsy of the memorandum with which I'm ever besotted!)

Divertimenti : to amuse himself & his friends --to divert & be diverted... Diverted from what? Old cliche : the bind of daily life. But hardly, since it's all this poetry's made of. His note : "These divertimenti originally appeared as individual leaflets and were written for the poet's own amusement and that of the handful of friends who were lucky enough to receive the odd one in the mail or at a poetry reading during the last two years of his life on the Victorian coast... he now lives a totally different existence on the NSW Northern Tablelands."
How would you know? His latest Earthdance chapbook, Sandals in camel (drawings & poems), is surreal as narrative & peppered with elsewhere's place names & distinctions (New York, Parisian, Berlin, Belgian, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Italian etc), persuading one of his long assumed cosmopolitan ambit. Interesting inference though --'texts' of the life as lived versus 'poems' (importantly, formed in the cross-wires of Dutch & English).
An earlier collection, Ochre Dancer (Earthdance, '99), has the same atmosphere & tone of divertimenti or better said, the divertimenti are cut from his familiar cloth differing only in the attitude of making or framing.

That's the discussion then, in the blur of any such distinction these days... Bits of life (titles & notes of musical recordings, books, lists of food & drink bought & consumed, incoming mail) intersect with thoughts, observations, conversation.
Recalling Kath Walker (Oodgeroo of Noonucull)'s admonition not to appear like a preacher or a politician, Cornelis muses, "Sometimes I wanted to PREACH // But now I just want to share / some of the ordinary things / in the days of a retired poet..."
Diversions from the notion of retirement? Retirement from poetic ambition (craft & career)? I'd identify with that myself. Breaking the cast but keeping one's hand in, and surprising oneself when something more poem than antidote happens along. The list/letter/journal poetry of our time makes it harder to distinguish source from artefact, but found or made they provide as many pleasures as there are days.

"Ah! a new month!
So I turn the calendar to March
A Corneille arial landscape
looking like a cross between
Mondriaan's sketch of a jetty
jutting into North Sea waves
and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

The calendar was published
for Corneille's 70th birthday
11 years ago but I still
flip over each month
to show that not all days are the same"

Divertimenti is a book which can be taken up anywhere. It invites flicking because of the open-endedness of its narrative.

"Find an image
of the sun's atmosphere
in The Nature of the Universe
by Fred Hoyle (1950)
so reach for Catherine de Zegher
Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux
hardback catalogue
of the exhibition at
The Drawing Center, New York, 2000

& put on an old vinyl recording
of Peter Sculthorpe's Sun Music #1
for Orchestra (1965)

The sun sets at 5-58

Broodje haring
broodje kaas
en 'n zure bon

Enjoy a glass or two of red
& the clear sound of Marion Verbruggen
playing airs from van Eyck's
Der Fluyten Lust-Hof "


So many dates & times of day, month, year, but the book is always written in present tense, and a sense of the present, in which historical time is subsumed, pervades. All times in diverimenti are concurrent; even the different places defer to the here of Vleeskens' whereabouts.
Despite it being a kind of 'in-lieu of writing' (an 'in-lieu-of-writing writing'?), possessing the light touch of genial conversation & a journal's talking-to-oneself, it also teases one as a discourse on time & place, & of poem as its own place where, paradoxically, its own mercuriality might be traced.

Unsurprisingly, much of this has been the preoccupation of divertimenti's fellow classical & modern music afficianado Pete Spence --typically recalled by Vleeskens at one point, "I think up these lines / while walking home / after putting Katherine / on the 6.37 a.m. bus for Melbourne / but have to wait to write them / till the telephone wakes Pete at 10.35 // My pen & paper are on the desk / in the guestroom where he snores on"...
Spence's Sonnets (a co-production of Karl-Friedrich Hacker's Footura Black Edition, Germany & New South Press, Kyneton, Australia; limited edition of 50, 2009) have been with me throughout these reflections. Sonnet 9 is a good example:

" walking Planck's constant in a red shift?
great day! upwind the day winds down
squares of light are thrown about
should i feel ok now that yesterday
is the subject of these poems? better
to be quick about it like a shadow
taking shade from today's sun! when
will i have room where there's room
where i can roam variously & hang
my tantrums & other guests?
the pushbike's 15 minutes in the frame!
its the end of the terror of Perrier fever!
a mullet sidles through the air
& i'm stunned by its flight! "

Riffing off life or literature? Seems to me it's a perfect blend of voice & reference, where perfection refers to an individual's inimitable register, in this case Spence's naturalization of reference, the opposite of ornamentation, of literary embellishment. It's all become as particular as experience, and 'all' are the prime sources he's so kind to append : Ted Berrigan, Laurie Duggan, Peter Schjeldahl, plus Forbes, Satie, Beckett, Shakespeare... All adds up to "Spence"!

Looking now for the perfect conclusion I find this from near to the 'end' of divertimenti :

" That photo of Peter-Jan Wagemans
makes him look like
a well-fed Vinkenoog from the sixties
In his liner notes
he comes across
as didactic & conceited

I pull on my walking-boots
& listen to Het Landschap (1990)
played by Tomoko Mukaiyama on piano
It is not the landscape I see around me
It is not any dutch landscape I recall

He states it is the landscape
of his music - but he is wrong

It is the landscape of my writing"

Boom-boom!

------------------------------------------------------------------
[16-8-10 / 18-9-10]
Kris Hemensley

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #6, September/October, 2008

JORDIE ALBISTON


MANDALA

the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(it takes him seven slow days)
the tibetan monk sculpts the world out of butter
(to balance our unbalanced ways)

the tibetan monk sings the world in harmonics
(to synchronise the spheres)
the tibetan monk half closes his eyes
(to allay the world's worst fears)

the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(it's always been like this)
the tibetan monk knows the world is ending
(& that it won't be missed)

the tibetan monk makes the world out of sand
(he sweeps it away with his hand


*


MEMORY

everything's so fragile but it's a beautiful!
night everything's so beautiful but fragile
I am ( / ) sitting on the spot marked x & the
eyes look up whilst the soul stares down
at those dumb happy ones all a-drowning
quite happily in their 'happiness' ( / ) with e
e cummings & torch in hand I stay awhile
beneath the gums & stand like the dutiful
daughter (I was) to forgive them all their
incomprehensible state/s of bliss ( / ) I think
I recall being 'happy' myself? ( / ) in bathers
in shallows with dad calling out he'd rather
I smiled for the photo: I didn't & I blinked
(I was only 3) but I think I was happy there


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


CLAIRE GASKIN


"looking into the eye of my addiction"


looking into the eye of my addiction
he, shaking a doll's house above his head
the blue sheets' white clouds of masturbation
debt to the blind-taste of licking an egg
I climbed up a tree with a flightless hen
the wingspan of his bed's tightening sky
the sitting is done mainly for the hen
I saw the doorway and let out a cry
he will spear a fish far too heavy to lift
under water and drowned hooked to his prey
sacrifice, sometimes given as a gift
famous for his fishing skills the osprey
only ever anger or lust he speaks
a bird of prey grasping at what he seeks



*


"the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude"


the breeze lifts the fabric of solitude
spinal staircase to a balcony brow
bats blacken the flawless sky's magnitude
at the mouth saying give me your breath now
Ficus Macrophylla folding us in
pressing, revealing one breast to your lips
mozzies as close as you and you on skin
saying my head on your chest your soul trips
I pass my heart through my mouth to escape
the ideas more important to survive
breaking concrete with roots is no mistake
I'm existing to see you I'm alive
rivers go to the sea with ambition
the sea knows nothing of competition



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MICHELLE LEBER


A DREAM ON NAXOS


There is a bay inside her, where the
long-shadowed palms darken the waves.

A place where ships are whimsy
and a night heron creaks on the white sand.

She spends all time there, reading
the isobars of absence to a hiding crab.

Under a broad-leaf canopy, sheltering
from the sun's burning kiss --

the only kiss that seeks her true brow.



________________________________________________________________



JENNIFER MACKENZIE



THE VIOLINIST 1 : XI' AN


I've been ill because the railway station was so bleak; black and grey tones weighing into twilight. A splash of red fabric through the tunnels. Nirvana! I follow the woman in red out into the street. She flags down a rickshaw and glides through the city, past the city walls and park, circles the Bell Tower, heads out for the Big Goose pagoda. She buys a ticket for the tiny Tang Dynasty painting gallery. I follow her. It is dark inside; the light comes from the warm reds and ochres of the partially restored paintings of singers and musicians. In the gallery's dark tunnels, I saw her fold into the painting of entertainers; I saw her luminous skin, her gown of red silk. Her lowered eyelids raced into my bloodstream; a nausea of silk, powder and inviting flesh. I calmed, and remembered her eyes. In my hotel foyer, I saw her again, accompanying an official from the capital. In the sauna, she was there again, in the company of another beauty who was small and fair, and whose lips were pressed between her thighs. A large, massively built man, the Party official, sipped tea and barked out orders as he watched them. He remained wrapped in a towel; his eyes never left them.

I went to the massage room. The masseuse rubbed almond oil into my limbs, then climbed on top of me. When she was satisfied, she turned me over and rubbed her sex over my back. I finished with my hands being plunged into liquid-paraffin wax, then massaged and oiled. I walked to the foyer, and saw a tall woman, with black hair down to her waist, walk to the entrance with a dozen red roses. My head exploded, I was adrift in this floating world. I looked out on the grey city in winter, its purple and ashen sky, its doorways without doors, its kettles on ancient stoves. from the outlying villages the cold night of hunger fed into my delirium. Hunger, hard labour, and a wind from hell.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


PHILIP SALOM


Two Poems from The Keepers


PETE


J had overdosed. He's only a friend but they called anyone who knew him
so I went. The front door was open, people were pissed under the [overhang
brashly lighting the column of blood, low drumbeats in a back room.

I was too well-dressed for this. I pushed through to the main bedroom
where they'd dragged him out from under everyone's bare feet.
He might have been a bomb, someone said: once people saw

that he'd OD'd they ran as far from the room as possible
then carried on as if he'd already blown. He was gaunt and bare-chested
like Christ taken down from the cross in those classical paintings.

We held him up in a death position Carravagio would have loved
though lit better. We shook him as he drooled and foamed and finally
vomited down his ribs. It was repulsive. It turned me cold.

I stood feeling out of it, clean where everybody else seemed rubbed
in some more urgent substance. I thought how if I had words for it,
words that used up lines of breath not coke, words kept me safe...

The ambulance saved me. My words told me to drive home. I did what
they said. But then they said I was a health-and-safety novelist. Unable or
unwilling, devastated. Something without words had OD'd in me.


*


RE-READING FRANCIS WEBB


Tiled rooves in Orange miraging around you, the nerving
home above the park, the mad and ordinary moments
washed by the common soap. From this battered linoleum

ordinary you founded intensity and God. The poems
rhymed into the past with grace and violence, your pure impure
directions, your long wires, your inner Spinning Jenny.

Inside the pyjamas, the drugs, the chance, a teleology
was rolling through the 50s television screen, its vertical hold
there and nowhere as you sat around chomping apples,

the ones you didn't drop, alone in the rising gravity
you heard equally in Jussi Bjorling or in the mad-for-God
supplicants you saw wandering your imagination, or eating

from refectory plates on Sunday evenings, or smudging
through letters to the godofnoaddress by the poor unfamilied
schizophrenics. The after-life for itinerants.

The fruit-pickers have come to pick and the garden's
full of secateurs, like sanity, so sharp you shrink back into poetry,
or should those clarities be reversed?

God's the trick. Not the skin, the blight, the dapple and myrrh,
the impure pure and cortex-firing ecstasies we might call God
but the dogma of God. Like Beaver, the under-terror. All.

The black hole. The rifling of chalices, Eucharists, the closed
text pretending it was open. Your own, thankfully, the open
text hoping it was closed. You let God in. You let us in.



________________________________________________________________


DAVID WHEATLEY


EMIL CIORAN IN TATTERS


12
I'd rather have been a plant, you bet,
and spent my life guarding a piece of shit.

11
I'd like to devour my fellow man
less for the pleasure of eating than
of vomiting him back up again.

10
All the philosophers combined
dissolve in the tears of just one saint.

9
Approach each day as a Rubicon
not to cross but to jump in and drown.

8
My thoughts are only of God
since but for him I might
have to think about man instead
and could I sink lower than that?

7
Preposterous thought:
an impotent rat.

6
Epicurus, the sage I need most,
wrote three hundred books. Thank God they're all lost!

5
Not even a killer, I make no sense:
the Rasholnikov of innocence.

4
Never to sleep, the insomniac's curse:
heroic agonies flat on my arse!

3
Will-to-die that I eat, sleep and breathe,
you've stolen it from me, stolen my death.

2
No sleep as tight
after decades without
as the sleep of the man
they'll shoot at dawn.

1
Who more than I has embraced his fate?
At birth I was offered the world on a plate
and screamed at them, Sorry, too late, too late!


*


PROSOPAGNOSIA
after Pierre Reverdy


a little light
you see a rushlight
descend to light up your stomach
a woman is a rocket's arc
down there a shadow is a reader
her bare feet couldn't be prettier

cardiac short-circuit
flames leap from the bonnet
what magnet keeps me stuck on
this wrong turn my eyes and my love have taken

a nothing a fire we light that dies
enough of the breeze
enough of heaven
all in the end's a phantasm even
your mouth and yet
where your hand falls I race with heat
you open the door and I don't go through

I see your face and can't believe it's you
pale one the vigil we kept
that night we lay on a suitcase and wept
to the sound of men laughing
have-naked urchins stravaguing
the water was transparent
a red copper wire bled radiance
the sun and your heart are one substance



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

JORDIE ALBISTON lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1961. Has published 5 poetry collections. Australian composer Andree Greenwell has adapted two of her books (Botany Bay Document, retitled Dreaming Transportation, and The Hanging of Jean Lee) for music-theatre; both enjoyed recent seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Nervous Arcs won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of Australian poetry in 1995. Her 4th book, The Fall, was shortlisted for Premier's Prizes in Victoria, NSW & Queensland. Her most recent collection is Vertigo : A Cantata (John Leonard Press, 2007).
CLAIRE GASKIN's book of poems, A Bud (John Leonard Press, 2006) was shortlisted for the John Bray Award for Poetry in 2008. She is Victorian editor for the literary journal, Blue Dog. Contact; clairegaskin@aapt.net.au
MICHELLE LEBER has a history as a spoken word poet at many venues around Melbourne. Won the Poetry Slam at the St Kilda Writers Festival in 2006. One of her poems is traveling on Melbourne trains as part of the Moving Galleries Autumn series, 2008.
JENNIFER MACKENZIE studied at the University of Melbourne in the early 70s, where she began writing & publishing. Long standing interest in Asia, traveling to India, Indonesia, Cambodia and China. A fascination with Old Asia led to her Borobudur project, to be published by Transit Lounge (Melbourne) in 2009. Contact; jmac_cn@yahoo.com
PHILIP SALOM's most recent book, The Well Mouth, a collection of voices from the underworld, was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Book of the Year. It is now in its 3rd printing. His collections & novels have won many awards, including two Commonwealth Poetry Prizes. In 2006/07, during an Australian Council fellowship, he completed The Keepers, due to be published by Giramondo (Sydney) in 2009.
DAVID WHEATLEY recently visited Australia c/o the 2008 Vincent Buckley Prize. He has published several books & chapbooks, including Thirst, Misery Hill, & Mocker (all with Gallery Press, Ireland). He edited James Clarence Mangan's Poems (Gallery Press,'03). Included in New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books,UK, '05). Currently teaching at the University of Hull's Philip Larkin Centre.

________________________________________________________________