New British Poetry: 15 Some Visible Poets

Last month in this column I reviewed two new books from Arc Publications, featuring titles published originally in English. This month I want to highlight an important and handsomely-produced series by Arc, entitled the Visible Poets, which aims to produce high quality English translations of some of continental Europe's finest talent.

Number 9 in this series is SCENT OF THE UNSEEN by Mila Haugová, translated by James and Viera Sutherland-Smith (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003). Haugová was born in Budapest in 1942, and today is one of Slovakia's leading poets. SCENT OF THE UNSEEN is an anthology of her work collected from six of her most recent titles. Her work achieves its power through a sense of its having been refracted many times in her own mind, its inadequacies forever altering their relationship, so that her expressions-however much she seems to want to say more than she says-are constantly shifting their balance. Line by line, the poems come across as having the capacity to be read with changing emphases, with each possibility held in suspension by syntactical ambiguity. For example, the literalness of 'Siblings' is beguiling, and yet its figurative charm is derived in part, I think, because it remains somewhat elusive.

in the garden for distant sleepers/ offering a gentle poppy will draw/ october mist beneath eyelids. look here in the place/ where nothing grows. look at the light casts/ where perhaps )between garden and wall( / your face grows with the mask of an angel

This curious use of typographical characters is typical of her style, and it reinforces the impression of the poem as descriptive of a momentary staying in the flux of impressions-that is, a giving body to something that is otherwise transient. A similar note is struck in 'Lady with Unicorn', which also seems to perform part of its meaning through juxtapositions and mimetic patterning:

Pre-silence, layers of agate/ in shadowless being (hair flaring),/ touching, the double-sided dark.../ red: chinks in the wind,/ blue: the bar of a mouth.

Growing out./ Witholding/ the breath/ of the/ word.

SCENT OF THE UNSEEN is a serious and sophisticated book, and its controlled and always-variable style is a rewarding read.

An altogether contrasting work is ABSURD ATHLETE by Yannis Kondos, translated by David Connolly (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003). This is number 11 in the Visible Poets series, and it translates Kondos's tenth collection, published in Greek in 1997. Kondos is a stylish, urbane writer, interested and amused in the goings-on of the people who surround him, and his poems make no secret of the extent to which he feels implicated in the triumphs and embarrassments of his countrymen. For a Greek, more than for most of us, the power and burden of an illustrious literary heritage is something that must be met with squarely, and Kondos manages this with a frankness that is very winning. In 'Fruit and Man' he writes,

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