The American poet John Peck's poems draw on both modernist and
traditional resources, quarrying in the large gaps among contemporary
audiences for poetry. The badge of 'difficulty' is routinely pinned to
his work. Yet it may be that such poetry makes the incoherence of taste
on both sides of the Atlantic more concretely perceptible.
This collection from six previous books provides an opportunity to frame
such a question and test claims for the work made by James Powell,
Reginald Gibbons, Clive Wilmer and Patrick McGuinness: that 'it issues
from a poetics determined to give the reader the full weight and texture
of experience and judgment, and from a poet who refuses to falsify the
presentation of his full engagement with the
world'; and then, 'rare work, and among the best we have'; and then,
'for my money, the best poet of my generation, as indifferent to
academic fashions as he is to those of the poetry
market'; and finally, 'the poems are so consistently and outstandingly
beautiful that the desire to "understand" takes second place to the
straightforward need to read
on'.
Collected Shorter Poems omits many of the translations from Hi-Lo (while
including one new one), and excludes the recent long poem M, but
collects for the first time five poems.
