Clean & Well Lit: Selected Poems, 1987-1995

Tom Raworth is one of the most widely respected British experimental poets: he's as fine a poet as JH Prynne, Allen Fisher, John Wilkinson & c but has got more visibility in the US, Canada & Europe. He's often loosely associated with Language Poetry but that's only a very rough indication of his style: Raworth's work is indeed sui generis. His earlier work showed a kind of pop-modernist sensibility, similar to that in the work of his friends Ed Dorn & Ted Berrigan. In the 1970s his work moved from minimalist lyric to long-form work, written in a pared-down line (often no more than a word or two to a line) with an extended, multidirectional syntax. Its apotheosis was in the fine _Writing_, a book-length poem published in an uncannily beautiful format by The Figures in the early 1980s._Clean & Well Lit_ collects more recent work that represents several of Raworth's styles. There are many short poems, but the most important poems here are either in the long strip-of-words format--"Blue Screen", "The Vein", "Out of the Picture"--or in modular sequences--the quasi-sonnet sequence "Survival" or the syllable-count stanzas of "Emptily". What's most noticeable is how the poetry has since _Writing_ shed the perceiving "i" (Raworth prefers to put the pronoun in lowercase), for a panoramic, constantly shifting view of contemporary culture. Its wiredness & sense of everything-connected-to-everything can suggest Burroughs or Pynchon ( & indeed Raworth's fondness for pulp fiction & spy stories can often suggest Burroughs), though their hot paranoiac vision is cooled down to a more oblique take on postmodernity:no image concealedfrom the realm of materialaccumulation and circulationin part as would be trueenduring timeby herself he touches hersurrounded by modelsable to pass unrecognisedin the stream of moneyimplied by a photographwhere the sun never seencan be constructedcrashing through layer after layeron a depthless screenThis is one of the essential poetry books of the 1990s. Those further interested in Raworth's work should also consult his _Tottering State_, his selected poems, just out in a new edition with the entirety of _Writing_ included in it.