THREE REVIEWS AS POEMS / POEMS AS REVIEWS Entanglement, Allen Fisher, 288pp, £15, The Gig Tin Pan Arcadia, Robert Sheppard, 136pp, £9.95, Salt Drafts, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 235pp, £12.99, Salt
	ENTANGLED for Allen Fisher nomad skulk and undercover different models of oblivion optional song and science note held nerve-end high street curve and circuit twitter chaotic short-change signal desire to feel everywhere devoted future threshold ultimate form of healing virtuous noise asymmetry dark sedimentary layer assumed grammar's sludge lured into data theory imagination and memory many levels of found text translation's mistakes manifest never our mother tongue paradise not located here in gravity's orbit I met my match and fell in to expression trap one version of the event several days out to explore temperature and storm damage making so much of right now explanation lost in consideration shifting attraction of language a few paper petals in the gutter
	I GUESS THAT'S WHY YOU CALLED IT THE BLUES for Robert Sheppard the night had a thousand 'i's passionate threads of hidden living offstage violence partially glimpsed perverted by history's narratives the table cluttered with opinion his 'i's were Pearl's a further thread begins to reveal itself it is not an abstract process ventriloquism caulks and tightens bolts offers media images of trouble the first appearance of riot shields somewhere within the dark study protest always considered legitimate she wants him more than anything pleasure pulled from head of the shaft language lays naked under glass vault lights trimming rock with horizontal air drill a fountain on the rooftop of the casino Subway Shirt Hospital is some way off along the bombed and firelit street my 'i's adored you defensive measure against the known cut-and-cover sets a precedent presence and precipitation surveillance and subversion lines of flight through language parrot chatter in the grate subsidence's excavated spoils counterculture memories seized whoever your readers and critics are I hope the singing transmutes desire emptiness takes my breath away the inner voice finishes mid-sentence the 'i's have it to the amazement of everyone paying attention work finished months before the deadline a poem intrigued by colossal engineering the face of the storefront shorn away the petrifying talk of freedom here taken literally
	CREASE PATTERNS for Rachel Blau DuPlessis there is a place for any poem before it is written the gender question torques translation riddles solved are now more complex a coffee cup and a doughnut are the same I use standard notation plus a few arrows just rough hewn floor boards and shelves physically cut and staple it to new pages to get a workable sequence a poem in which words fail paperfolding for play was known by a variety of names the word was adopted in kindergartens I am waiting for a book from the remote storage facility some gluing and cutting may be allowed a sentence of a looping temporality fold here among the ark of random things here & here boulder is round rock a sentence of looping temporality pick a point on the crease pattern something that wraps the eye how many creases originate at this vertex? small squares of paper top and bottom is it possible to have an odd number of creases? how about the relationship between mountain and valley folds? poetry is made of words newsprint, newspaper, phone book pages, used copy and computer paper can you have a vertex with only valley folds? lay bare the fragments and displacements found flashes, fragmentations, and erasures the page is never blank how many changes will it take? a way to think and undertake understanding the page is never blank original creations and diagrams how about the angles around this point? even minor differences can be confusing memory, history, and language itself was poetry always now impossible? many secular or worldly customs require being chained to the cosmos pure information and different textual elements ears behind the head why should anything be written or not? the page is never blank regimes of complete astonishment the processual construction of a space of discourse unnerving in lack of detail playing with textures of memory a formative and generous gift none of the poems is perfect I ended up completely beguiled Beauty is in the eye of the folder © Rupert M Loydell 2004