The long poems and unified sequences are further divided along thematic lines into three subgroups, and I'll describe the last two first: the second offers biographical sequences concerned with celebrated personages the third includes variations on the genre of topographical poetry. The difference between the collection and the unified sequence may at first seem slight but is still, I think, a real one, and I've tried to allocate 'borderline' works to the most appropriate category.
The lyric collections are further divided into five subcategories, four stylistic (formal verse, free verse, 'hybrids' of various 'conventional' and 'experimental' modes, and more clearly 'experimental' verse) and one thematic (a conglomerate of diasporic, post-colonial, and so on).
I've split the books into two broad categories: first, lyric collections second, long poems and strongly unified book-length sequences. I've organized this year's review a little differently from the previous two. I hope that what follows will fulfil these intentions. Furthermore, those words from part of a sequence of 'found' poems in his new collection, The Watchmaker's Table, and I like to include as much of the 'found' as I can in my reviews I try, that is, to let the poets' words speak for themselves, and then let my words, harmless or not, speak for me. This is not to say, of course, that I'm wholly out of sympathy with any of them, and I'd like to think that my opening quotation shows at least that I'm on Bartlett's wavelength : Bartlett himself borrowed 'his' words from Strange Partners, 'a children's book of natural history,' and now I have borrowed them again.
I definitely won't claim that I've achieved any sort of symbiosis with the poets I've reviewed this year. In 'First Lessons in Symbiosis,' Brian Bartlett offers a sympathetic portrayal of the 'harmless protozoa / in the human alimentary tract / earn the food and warmth given them.' I don't know for certain whether Bartlett would extend his sympathies to so parasitic a creature as a literary critic, but I hope that I'm not wholly unjustified in finding comfort and support in these lines.
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