E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is pleased to publish a new translation of a great poem by Mandelstam , by Alistair Noon in Berlin. This is probably one of the first poems on the cinema.  Vachel Lindsay , of course, had written on the subject. Cinema Three benches. A projector. The fever of sentimentality. An heiress who's been trapped in her evil rival's nets. Hands off this love's true flight, our heroine's done nothing wrong! So pure it's almost platonic is her love for a lieutenant of the fleet, collaterally conceived by a grey count and now wandering the desert wastes. This, for the pretty countess, is the way her picture-adventure leaves the ground. She starts to wring her hands like a gypsy gone insane. The lovers split. The demonic sounds now follow of a hounded piano. Her trust's not hard to abuse. She possesses sufficient bravery to swoop on some crucial papers of interest to an enemy HQ. Along an avenue of chestnuts, a black motor car lumbers. The film reel rat...

Catherine Woodward reads five recent pamphlets There is a strain of poets I call lexiphiles whose joy of language has at some point become completely subsistent on itself. They are a strange bunch, very passionate, particularly about phonemes and sibilance and glottal stops and I’ve read a lot of their poetry which is, suffice to say, heavy. It’s often hard to find the exact image that is being smothered by the exotic, word-horny enthusiasm that is meant to evoke it. Lexiphiles are important to a review of Ruth Larbey ’s Funglish because it is a pamphlet that walks the line between lexiphilia and excellence, and with a fantastic display of skill, manages to remain consistently on the side of excellence. A clever, creative, intuitive lexiphile can indeed be excellent and I believe that’s exactly what Larbey is. Clearly her masterful understanding and control of language are only surpassed by her love of it.             ...

Two new pamphlets from the indefatigable Alistair Noon , based in Berlin! In People's Park , from Penumbra editions, is only £4.00 and is beautifully put together, both as a physical object, and a series of texts. This is excellent poetry. Someone should give Mr. Noon a full collection soon - Salt? I love the last line: "Around the toppled reptiles ran the gnawing rats". He has also translated Sixteen Poems by Monika Rinck , from Barque. "Absolute romantic zero" indeed! Excellent writing from a German into English. These are both stocking stuffers for the poetry buff in your linguistically-innovative home.

Alistair Noon reviews Collected Poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson This collection of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s curious, witty, observant, crafted, exploratory poems includes, as your average Collected might do, a section entitled ‘Uncollected Earlier Poems’. But unless you’re a reader able to put a restraining order on all prior biographical knowledge, it’s hard not to read all of these poems as early work: Forrest-Thomson died at the age of 27. The obvious question is what another fifty-odd years of writing might have produced. Though one shouldn’t make too much of this of course: when Hendrix died, at the same age, he had demonstrated that rock can be art. Some people just get it all done faster. Forrest-Thomson’s first book Identi-kit (1967) gives, in places, a sense of having being written by a young person. Late-teen/early-twenty-something cynicism comes through in the imagery of stasis and decay, the themes of banality and theatricality in conversation, and the use of psycho...