on Emma-Jane Arkady, Arjen Duinker and Kevin Hart

Two of these poets approach the world from the outside, as it were, and the third from the inside out. At its best, Emma-Jane Arkady's technique is almost cubist; taking a situation and viewing it from a number of angles. She encodes those angles in a variety of registers often within the same sentence, and is unafraid to attenuate the syntax in the process: `An age seemed to pass/tied up in the white car/all the flower girls/and the cute page/lining the way in/a guard preventing the escape/ /Father Michael frowned/and that faint smell/of urine/the blade nicks/red on the dog/do you take let close/the hint of last night/Bell's and a Chinese' (`A Sacrament for Annie'). Not `language' poetry, not stream of consciousness, but a deft exploiting of the resources of both. In performance this is quite exhilarating; a helter skelter ride around the angles while bobbing in and out of the poet's consciousness.

The necessity to make the language unadorned and conversational is perhaps a price worth paying when what emerges, interestingly, is a sharp, focussed and often poignant view of the world. Particularly, the urban world. And the rhythms that drive the poems are usually taut enough for the `plain style' to work; injecting a nursery rhyme quality that sustains the fairy tale aspect that some of these poems have: `Up from up from up/from where I just don't/but so and so and so/mother called out too late/as we scattered off/into my wood (`Anna and Clara').
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