Alpha

Alpha, with Paul Bond's horned crow posing as a "Roadside Shaman" on its cover, is an eclectic selection of Mike Di Placido's poetry. He clearly loves to imagine meeting Alpha males in unusual settings and aims to be one of them—if they will let him.

After having a tense breakfast with Attila the Hun (toast and coffee and a smashed chair, in case you wondered), he sees Ghengis Khan, with his retinue, horses, ponies and women, ambling down the station platform of a new railway branch-line to Scarborough in his home County of Yorkshire.

Not all his famous males are so fearsome. There are actors, singers, musicians, film stars, poets (of course!), and footballers, too. He even ventures into myth and meets Tiresias at the Bottle Bank:

He was sitting on a bench in the sun, tracing a crack
in the path with his stick. Tiresias, he announced,
when my last bottle was posted, was there anything
I'd like to know?

Global warming? Nuclear destruction? The Higgs boson? Tiresias knows how it all turns out, but I can't tell you his answers, because it would spoil the fun.

The tone of many of the poems is ironic, especially those offering the poet persona's presentation of himself. And his aspirations for fame are frequently undermined by self-doubt. In his parody of Masefield's poem "I must go down to the sea again," he goes down to his shed so often that his children, he says, "told me their names yesterday." "Pity I have forgotten mine," he adds. And admitting to "shamelessly stealing" a stylistic technique used by James Joyce in chapter 17 of Ulyssses, he tells a nameless questioner why he loves his shed so much.

In two poems I really enjoyed, he speaks in the style of a great poet and of a philosopher. "As the onset of rain threatens the barbecue, he adopts a Shakespearean persona," is a beautifully crafted semi-serious poem with a final line that made me laugh out loud.

"Chow Lung's Penultimate Talk to His Son, Ling Po" is very different. This is a serious poem, borrowing the style and the Taoist philosophy of an ancient Chinese teacher:

Come, now, hold my hand. Gentleness is a strength—
never be ashamed to show it. Like the riverbank reed,
bending in the storm, or the humming-bird's wing, fragility is a thing
we are stupid about and know little of. And Truth? Truth exists,
but is located in the still heart.

I don't know anything about Chow Lung, but Li Po was a gifted poet born in 701 and still revered in China. His poems speak of nature, solitude, and the joys of "Drinking alone in the moonlight." Li Po seems to be a more likely candidate for the "son" in this poem, than the 20th century artist Ling Po, who was born Chow Yi Hsien but given the name Ling Po by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Ling Po became famous for his renderings of Wright's creations. Identities in this poem, however, are less important than the poem itself, which is a fine imaginative creation and a pleasure to read.

The most serious piece in this book, and perhaps the most interesting for poets, is an imagined exchange of letters between the 19th century "Romantic" poet John Keats and the renowned "Postmodern" 20th century poet, John Ashbery. Written in poetic prose, these two letters are warm and friendly as the two men discuss "the magical linkage of poetry." Keats explains his idea of negative capability—the state he believes we must be in when, with our limited knowledge, we "try to fathom the enigma of existence." Ashbery tells Keats about the "postmodern and avant-garde poetic" in modern poetry and of his own preference for "highlighting the movement between moments of reality." No matter what we think we are doing, Ashbery tells Keats, "we are all categorised!... you, Keats, are a Romantic alongside Blake, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth."

In Alpha, Mike Di Placido skillfully uses a variety of poetic forms and the result is a collection of lively, enjoyable, thoughtful and often funny poems.