Martin Stannard likes to start his poem a considerable distance from where he’s going. Eliot said the meaning of a poem was like the piece of meat a burglar gives the dog when he wants to break into the house. Stannard’s strategy is to sidle up with a series of inconsequentialities before dropping his apparently irrelevant paradox on you. After rambling about the physically “far away” he arrives at:

All I am trying to get around
To saying is distance is
Neither a good thing nor
A bad thing it is just a thing so
I will be your friend
I will not be your friend
And I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference.

But of course friendship like that implies another kind of “distance”. The difficulty of friendship is defined elsewhere: “as soon as they give us Their lives we give them All our rubbish”.

     ‘On the Art of Carelessness’ is about how minor miracles can happen because “the imagination is bigger Than anything we can think of”. Yet the poems rely more on monologue than imagery in their evocations of the problems of being yourself, and a poet, in a mass-media culture:

The only good reason for writing poetry
Is for joy which is the joy that comes
From making something I think I write
Only for myself but I can hear that cry
Of ‘Liar’ again...

     These twelve poems - with their sudden infusions of wit (“I thought the philosopher’s stone Was the one you threw at Someone who only pretended To be thinking”) are, in spite of the title, an oblique way of reporting amusingly on one subject: desperation - on “turning an empty room in to The world getting scared”. The title’s from Coleridge, and there is other evidence of studying the past; yet Stannard has created an eccentrically new dead-pan language, rhythm and structure, though the flow does recall the “stream of consciousness”:

I can’t think as other people I am not
Somebody else I am not other people other
People may think this is not a good thing
I don’t think about it at all if I can
Help it when I do think about it I think
I should not be and immediately call
A halt to it with all my strength...

     As cummings said, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people”. These are a good example of how tradition and the individual talent generate originality; and now that the best poetry comes from small presses, the Shoestring, with its quality poetry and paper is one to keep an eye on.