Wednesday 7 December 2011

breathless in Bloomsbury

Last night’s Shearsman reading, the last for the year, featured Anna Reckin and Richard Berengarten. Reckin’s Three Reds is a fine first book with an objectivist’s sense of space and sound. Berengarten’s much longer career includes work published as Richard Burns. He read the beginning and end of a long section from one of the books of the Balkan Trilogy: Under Balkan Light. The particular piece owed much to notions of breath and the sense of the oracular in poets like Whitman and Ginsberg (the entire section consisted of a single propulsive sentence against which a second reader intermittently voiced names of places in the former Slav republic). Thankfully friends and relatives made up for the depradations of seasonal flu (an affliction that cause me to miss a couple of other readings myself).

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