Covers

As the title suggests, Covers is a deeply derivative book in which the poet, without even any pretence of originality, takes other well known literary works and makes his own versions or mashups, splicing them together with unlikely partners to create something unexpected, even monstrous. Imagine lyrics fashioned out of terror, displacement, anguish and fear. Any old slogan or newsprint or piece of linguistic junk is worked into a new engine set to orbit in virtual space. It is as if Marcel Duchamp and Damien Hirst were abroad in the poetry world and had met up with Kurt Schwitters: these dispatches are as literary as Charles Olson or Wendy Cope, radical as Kit Robinson and Rosmarie Waldrop and English as Philip Larkin or Denise Riley. The poems are cranky, obsessive, humane, unstable: `Are we not all Palestinian?' `Is this Art history or mass immigration?'


`In Photographs' sees news stories of the late Blair era bear down upon a haunted and garrulous knot of anxiety that stands in for the recently vanished postmodern subject, as we search a blasted landscape of derailed trains and sliced-open transits for Kim Bauer, heroine of 24. Situationism filtered through 9/11 starlight, picks at a blister in public trust: Jack Straw, hung up by his thumbs, `looks worn out but handsome in Arab dress'.


A holocaust-memorial Talk Poem `Not Reading "After"', homage to David Antin, revisits the premise trailed in Society of the Spectacle and enlists the ghost of Douglas Oliver to satirize the vacant publicity-hunger of the British royal family, still clinging-on in a deranged fancy-dress party we call democracy. Meanwhile the western allies begin to strafe Iraq and bulldozers flatten refugee camps in Gaza.


We catch glimpses and echoes of Ezra Pound's impossible fascist epic The Cantos (of which the author himself famously wrote `I cannot make it cohere') in the Raworth-style self-replicating minimalist stanzas of `Sequel Lines', an anti-epic freighted with unscalable detail of modernist catch-phrases, contemporary theory and non-sequiturs. `The unified subject / was out of a job'.


Chief Seattle finds no resting place in `The Chief' but is stumped on the stump, and has to contend with George W. Bush, rail privatisation, TV penalty shoot-outs, anti-social behaviour, The Priory, American and European genocidal history, and late echoes of the British poetry wars of the 1970s. MacSweeney lives on as lead guitarist for Van Morrison's Street Choir, whose number one fan is in the White House.


In `Unfolding' Ted Berrigan's 1960s Sonnets, themselves collaged reworkings of would-be Keatsian love tokens and star-struck O'Hara fan mail, are reloaded with traces of London IRA terror, Brit Art chancers and impresarios, sampled insurance ads, the Srebrenica massacre, corrupt Labour politics, and England's tourist industry conceived as screen-saver heritage kitsch.


Covers is a manifest treasure of the nation.