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21st Century Poetry

'Poetry for people who don't like poetry'

As Adrian Mitchell once remarked, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

It's still a great line and it appears as the epigraph to Tony Walsh's Sex & Love & Rock&Roll (Burning Eye, £10). Walsh has been performing for a decade now - he was recently poet in residence at the Glastonbury festival - but this is his first collection.

Bristol-based Burning Eye Books, whose mission is to promote "poetry for people who don't like poetry," are committed to proving that performance poetry can work on the page as well as the stage.

As Walsh argues, the distinction is increasingly irrelevant. "It's about communication - between poets, between poetries, with other artists and with new and strengthened audiences," he says.

"It's about passion. It's about poetry not boring us to tears."

There are certainly lots of good jokes in this book - "She caught his disease./But not his name," "Tonight I'm gonna party like I'm nearly 99," "In the 'Ten Items/Or Less' queue with twelve items/thinking: "Punk's Not Dead!," "Last night a DJ shaved my wife."

On the other hand, crowd-pleasers like Rock&Roll, Take This Pen and Why Glastonbury look long and repetitious on the page without Walsh's high-speed delivery.

A refrain anticipated by a live audience can read like a lame conclusion to a poem in a book. A list can read just like a list.

But Walsh has a very good ear for the rhythms of ordinary speech. It is worth buying the book just for poems like Spangles, Someone Warm To Hold, Let's Make A Love and Always There. Best of all are Repeat After Me and A Girl, Like, Y'know:

"And he - hits me, and that/And he's - kicked me, and that/But - I - I - I love him, and that, like, you know?/And - sometimes - I feel, like/I've - ruined my life, like/But then I'm like - 'What life?' You know?"

John Hegley also quotes Adrian Mitchell in New And Selected Potatoes (Bloodaxe, £9.95), adding his own distinctive brand of Luton surrealism: "I would add that most porcupines ignore most putty because putty is usually quite high off the ground and porcupines usually aren't, and they tend not to notice things unless they're of an edible, threatening or sexually attractive nature."

Fans of Hegley will find many old favourites here from books like Beyond Our Kennel and The Sound Of Paint Drying plus a dozen new poems featuring his manic over-rhyming, Zen-like non sequiturs and trademark abrupt endings.

There are some nice jokes - "not waving but window cleaning," two artists destined "2B together," the Beatles putting "a hum/into the humdrum" and a bad teacher defined as someone "with severe teaching difficulties."

But, as Adrian Mitchell always knew, a good punchline can also pack a punch, as Hegley does in Greed:

"Once, when I wanted my sister's sweets,/I pretended to be a hungry dog,/and each time she dropped one on the floor,/I amused her with my comical scavenging./And when all her sweets had gone,/I stopped and got on with my own,/taking no interest in the hungry dog/that looked very much like my sister."

Interestingly, Benjamin Zephaniah also invokes Adrian Mitchell on most poetry ignoring most people in To Do Wid Me (Bloodaxe, £12).

No publisher has done more to abolish the stigma attached to what was once called "light verse" than Bloodaxe has.

And not many poets have taken poetry to so many new audiences as Zephaniah.

To Do Wid Me is a brilliant selection of some of his best-known poems, plus a two-hour DVD of the poet on stage in Newcastle, London, Lincolnshire, Ledbury and at his mother's house in Birmingham.

It's a stunning combination, relaxed and intense, serious and wise, angry, funny and radical.

Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should know poems like Dis Policeman Keeps On Kicking Me To Death, What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us, Rong Radio, I Have A Scheme and the brilliant Money:

"Money mek a rich man feel like a big man/It mek a poor man feel like a hooligan/A one parent family feels like a ruffians/An dose who hav it won't give yu anything ... some gu out to fight for it/Some claim dem hav de right to it/And people like me granparents live long but never sight it."

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