Tom Pickard is a poet from the north of England who may be best known over here as the former bookseller who once tracked down Basil Bunting & got him reinvolved with the literary world, an event that not only brought the old spy back for public readings, but caused him to write Briggflats, the work many think of as Bunting’s finest. That was a long time ago & Pickard has spent the ensuing decades writing a quiet precise poetry that at times feels like the perfect conjunction of Objectivism, the Beats & some third thing I can’t quite identify (but which I hesitate to call “the North”):

 

Ancient Stone Dressed With Lichen

 

now the mushroom season is here

I remember – she has the basket

but I have the knife.

 

Or

 

Your Recent Chill

 

cold Atlantic blasts

make warmer company than you

these recent months

 

asleep in a nest of icy

inquisitorial winds

I turn to cover you

and wake alone

 

Now Flood Editions has published The Dark Months of May, part of its ongoing efforts to become the most well focused independent press in the United States.

 

Not all Pickard poems are as spare as the ones above – indeed the center of this dark book* is a long prose series entitled “Fragments from an Archaeological Dig in Gallowgate” – but all have this same intense sense of focus & precision even when Pickard’s being boisterous, as in the excerpts from his libretto on the outlaw musician Jamie Allen.

 

Like Tom Raworth, Pickard has an ear that enables his work to move easily across the Atlantic. With a book that’s readily available, at least by poetry standards, and a reading tour coming up across the U.S., hopefully more folks in these environs will come to know & appreciate this work.

 

Pickard’s schedule:

·        October 20: Brown University, Providence.

·         October 22: SUNY-Buffalo.

·         October 26: Harvard University, Boston.

·         October 28: University of California, San Diego.

·         October 30: San Francisco State.

·         November 4-5th. University of Colorado, Boulder.

·         November 8: Drake University, Des Moines.

·         November 9: University of Chicago.

·         November 10: Woodland Pattern Bookstore, Milwaukee.

·         November 11: Lake Forest College, Illinois.

·         November 13: Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Public Library.

·        November 15: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

·         November 17: St. Mark's Poetry Project, New York.

·         November 18: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.

 

 

* Its cover follows the spirit of the title to such a degree that reading the blurbs by Fanny Howe & Annie Lennox will cause eye strain.