Encounters, Dannie Abse
Looking for You, Peter Phillips
The Exile, Anthony Edkins
At Cross Purposes, Raymond Geuss

Hearing Eye. Various prices from £6.99 to £8.99

For some years now, a man called John Rety has gamely tried to manage a noisy bunch of poets who meet, most weeks, at 99 Torriano Avenue in Camden, North London. The Torriano Meeting House is a mixture of a Quaker quiet room, but not quiet, and a Spiritualist Church, but with the spirits alive rather than dead. There are readers from the floor in the first half, lots of them, and the place gets very hot, with a little air blowing through the Virginia Creeper that festoons the one window; and in the second half, two ‘known’ poets, though as everyone in the audience is a poet too, it can be more of drama than two solo performances, and there can, on occasion, be some very intelligent heckling. John Rety, as master of ceremonies, is very strict. If the poems from the floor are no good, he shouts at everybody and tells them they should read more good poetry if they’re to avoid writing rubbish. The atmosphere is something between the beginning of an Aldermaston March and Brendan Behan’s aunt’s tea party, because everyone’s actually very nice, in a pugilistic, revolutionary sort of way.

     On top of all this, John Rety runs the Hearing Eye Press, with puts out poetry books across an enormous range, from the poems of a young Roman girl called Sulpicia which were first thought to be by Catullus, and which show how little young girls have changed when it comes to defying their parents and going off with their boyfriends (my own daughter nicked it, so I couldn’t put the details at the top) - to Peter Phillips’ Looking For You, which contains some moving love poems, to his mother, who is drifting further away with Alzheimer’s, to his wife, to parts of London, and to various foxes.

     A common theme is the faraway. Faraway people, places and times. Raymond Geuss's translation from a tenth century manuscript housed in the Vatican Library contains this dialogue between monks, both in Latin and in a language which is an ancestor of modern German.

A: Cur uomuisti in ecclesia?
(C: Guarumbe hastu erbroche inni kirihhi?)
                            Wherefore hast thou
                            desecrated this holy place?

B: Undes ars in tine naso.
(C: Canis culum in tuo naso.)
                 May thy nose suffer close proximity
                 to the south end of a
                 dog who is facing north.

Dannie Abse’s Encounters are nine literary encounters, with Pushkin, Rilke, Brecht and others, which vary between close translations and complete reworkings. Anthony Edkins’ The Exile- Spanish Notes 1964-2000 catches los anos negros, the wasteful deaths and exile of Spanish poets and the recovery since Franco’s death, that still needs to fully acknowledge the forty terrible years.

     John Rety has an eye for all things counter, original, spare, strange, so thank the Lord Hearing Eye exists and, what’s more mysterious, that the London Arts Board actually gives it support.