Three Bell Zero

Each page of this young English poet's first stateside collection (Compositional Bonbons Placate was published by Carcanet in 1996) is brimming with the conflicts of intentionality and chance, design and improvision--or perhaps simply work and fun. Champion takes his lead from the American Language poets (often pointedly and knowingly mirroring them page-for-page), yet brings forth a unique sensibility that, for all its completeness and near-lyrical coherence, resists closure with an elaborate system of fakes, double-pumps and swishes: ""Signs the ever/ Water & wine to form an oblong cut-off/ Or baffle at social what's/ That is, in Hegelian terms, the scarf cigar/ A man is than made/ I think ex-Parisian liver suit or difference/ Perfumes the harder focus/ Road or dog brains rise/ Light is eat/ You is in pellet-type pole/ The clearing colour sort of adding the twig/ & I found a kind of digital dried dill/ Stick."" Champion's rigorousness, adeptness with staccato effects, and learnedness (particularly in the lovely mock-epic ""Clovis"") make a very difficult thing seem simple: getting readers to see and hear words. For all of the graceful maneuvering among the most difficult postmodern practices, the book's faith in that project can even bring on a Symbolistic, quasi-religious undercurrent: ""The nod/ dis-/ members the/ tactile/ echo of/ a solipsistic/ gesture. Diffuse/ summa-. I/ mean, to/ provide you/ with layers. (Target/ fit/ mists.) I/ was in/ the twenty-/ four-hour/ metaphor, laundering/ an intense/ & crystalline/ hush."" Each poem here can be read as a specific assay into some quality of language or poetry, making the whole a tour through the possibilities in perfoming language--with excitiment, belonging and purpose. "" `That,' says Kazimir Malevitch, `makes a soap man.' "" (June)