Prose poems by Peter Anderson and Robert Whyte. Planet Press Poetry Ltd, no address listed, no country listed, no price listed, no publishing date listed, 30 pages, offset.
I am hesitant to recommend this collection to anyone, since the scanty identification of this book would seem to make it nearly impossible to obtain.
Nevertheless, this is an often intriguing collection of brief prose-poems that deal cleverly and often wisely with metaphysical and cosmological matters. The drawings interspersed in this collection are actually most interesting to me, and I don't know who to praise for them, since they go unidentified. There is one drawing of a molecular model, entitled "Exploding Galaxies", and subtitled elsewhere on the page: "think what you might do with a material that's 97% nothing". That particular page, and sentiment, sent me into a purely poetic visionary state for about 10 minutes.
Some of the other prose-poems have and equally superb sense of wonder, and those who like to contemplate the macroscopic, the microscopic, and the sense of "everyday" enjambed into some intriguing moments may wish to try to locate this work. It is dedicated to the late German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, but the authors seem quite British (e.g., the frequent "British" spelling of words) and I suspect it may be located somewhere in the British Isles, or Australia, or? Good hunting.
-- H.M.
This review was written by Hank Malone for the American magazine "The Smudge". The book could have course been located via its International Standard Book Number (ISBN). The book was 64 pages, to comply with the minimum for the Australian Book Bounty, and Published by Planet Press, not Planet Press Poetry, who were at that time located at 100 Bowen St Spring Hill, Brisbane and run by Dan Van Blaken. The drawings, (actually re-drawn collages) were appropriated, (well before postmodern discourse made this fashionable, but not strictly legal, to do) from Herge's Tin Tin books, Scientific American and similar magazines.
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