This extra-long book by Wilkinson (Oort's Cloud), one of the most intellectually demanding and politically engaged of contemporary English poets, suggests that the differences between some versions of modernism and postmodernism might be nil. Presenting five discrete works composed of mostly two-or-so page lyrics (along with several notable longer poems, such as "Sarn Helen"), the book embeds the language of T.S. Eliot and Basil Bunting in high Latinate rhetoric, while threading in clinical, scientific and pop cultural terms with equal ease: "snap crackle & pop/ Deliver us from passers-by of/ accents & their affines." Yet the political content of Wilkinson's work distinguishes it from the xenophobic high modernism of the English tradition. The section "Chalone" at the start of the book begins with an examination of the continuing legacy of the plantation system; where some moderns mourn the coming of modernity, Wilkinson (in "Reserved") admonishes us to "watch things spring apart, &/ know with a blank chill/ they ought to." Yet Wilkinson also refuses a reactionary postmodernism that simply spits capital's fetishes back at it: "Here is amber, here is pitch to smear your arms, salve lips,/ tallow to stuff resounding ears. You stand like flypaper./ You hold a trowel & with it you daub every lost saying." Though bombarded, linguistically and otherwise, Wilkinson's speaker continues to self-construct, rather than destruct. (Nov.)
Forecast:Wilkinson, who completed a study of John Wieners's poetry at Harvard, is mental health commissioner and assistant director of public health for the East London branch of Britain's National Health Service. He has received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar award to work on a book on urbanism and mental disorders at the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health in New York, for a year from March 2003—expect poetic U.S. engagements as well.
