Just One Book

Salt, the amazing British publisher of prose and poetry, is almost broke. Last year, they launched a campaign called Just one Book to save themselves, and they are doing it this year as well. It’s a plea to buy Just One Book published by Salt. You can buy it directly from them or from your retailer of choice. Spread the word. Here are three suggestions for you:

1. Buy Just One Book by Jennifer Moxley. Moxley is one of my favorite living American poets, and Salt has published two volumes of hers, Imagination Verses and The Sense Record. Both are strongly recommended by me.

2. Buy Just One Book by Michael Hulse. I was lucky enough to once meet Mr. Hulse in person, it’s still one of my highlights. Salt has published his book Empires and Holy Lands, Poems 1976–2000, which is a great treasure trove of poetry that draws on Continental and British sources in order to produce an assured, marvelous poetic voice.

3. Buy Just One Book by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Blau DuPlesssis is both an insightful poetry critic as well as one of the most interesting American poets around. For years she has been contributing to her long poem of sorts called “Drafts”, a series of numbered poems. Salt has published at least two volumes of her poetry. One simply called Drafts, containing Drafts 39-57, which I own, and which is amazing. The other, called Torques, containing Drafts 58-76, which I just ordered and which I am pretty sure is great, since I know some of the poems.

Sinuous mind of love

Jennifer Moxley: Into the Bedroom

Certainly deluded wisdom and all

those strewn packages from Christmas,

“scholar’s disorder” keeps me covered

under this comforter thinking of us.

There there Erasmus, sinuous mind of love

in all its fibres off to Paris to see

what’s become of an antique world.

Cut me a bolt of satin Vermeer

sing deep your told conviction,

lace up trussed up laughing feet

then turn your head and listen:

the parakeet doth chirp, the Moon

remarks my memory

and I am bending draped to brass

in pain and folly trembling.

There are so many so-so poets around, highly praised, selling well. In this context it is refreshing to discover a poet like Jennifer Moxley, one of the five best poets of her generation, who is an interesting thinker as well as a brilliant and moving wordsmith. The poem above is from her 1996 debut collection Imagination Verses, where you can see her trying out words, subjects and her place in a complex world. As a poet, she is constantly getting better. You can buy the 2006 reissue of Imagination Verses here, or her best book so far, the 2007 collection The Line here. If you are interested in contemporary poetry at all, you can’t possibly bypass Moxley’s extraordinary work