eurochants |

Adrian Clarke’s most recent book with Shearsman gets a review from David Kennedy:

“The more you know about poetry, the more poetry becomes a matter of echoes and hauntings. Eliot dedicated ‘The Waste Land’ to Pound with the words il miglior fabbro, the same designation that Dante had given to the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel. Larkin’s ‘postal districts packed like squares of wheat’ triggers a memory of Auden’s ‘The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat’. George Herbert’s ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ becomes a kind of backbeat at the end of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. This sort of poetic relationship is at the heart of Adrian Clarke’s new book which, in the words of the blurb, tests ‘some possibilities and limits of cultural and linguistic exchange’. Eurochants gathers translations of Max Jacob; improvisations on Chinese love poems, Persius, Tacitus and Villon; and other recent work in Clarke’s characteristic short-lined, phrasal style. Daniel and Dante are in there too.”