Alan Halsey’s beautifully designed, beautifully printed, hard-bound Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons, 2009, and God knows how much!), is a book-lover’s dream as well as the result of a post-post-post-modernist’s eye turned back upon heroes and avatars of the language, their lives as pilgrims’ badges of the mind, to be turned this way and that under our polluted skies in a curatorial manner, and then to be thrown under the electron microscope and minutely examined: the threads of English twitched apart and mounted on separate slides. As we lift these 187 pages, plus engravings and blanks, we have the tactile experience of a great old book–the kind of book born in a room your correspondent never wants to leave when he gets there, filled with cigarette smoke, Alan and Geraldine’s bright talk, the complete works of Christopher Smart and Thomas Lovell Beddoes among many others tucked away in a towering bookcase along one wall, a David Jones print on the desk, an Ian Hamilton Finlay sculpture just outside the window.

Halsey doesn’t succumb to the itch that so many contemporary poets display, of taking a hammer to the plaster busts of our hallowed forefathers and mothers of the pen, but lovingly tattoos, pierces and appends, turning the stiff　texts gently against themselves so that the hoary tableaux, so fixed in cultured minds, roll out again, made new and backlit by digital scrims.

One of my favorites of the book (among many) is Halsey’s portrait of Thomas Chatterton, a few lines of which I give below:

For preheminence his spirits was as wroten uneven
a caterlogue of books some saterical peicis the parchments that was left
oker stained Anglo-Sexonne donne moe playne bie mee Thomas Ronlie…

These great lines capture not only Chatterton the boy genius so beloved of the Romantics, but simultaneously gives us a picture of the raw youth of the lower classes aspiring to recognition by the powers that were (Walpole in particular, the horse’s ass), the manner of his attempted rise (an attempt at the recreation of Middle English) and the raw energy of English unfettered by orthography and running free as ditch water.

I can’t say enough good things about this book, except to add that Martin Corless Smith has a run of “lives” included.