NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

THE POETRY OF EARTH is an essay, or rather a series of linked essays, dealing with theology, politics, ecology and poetry. Its argument seems to be that the visionary poetry of outsiders like Blake, Coleridge, Hopkins and Ernesto Cardenal will change the world.

DINAH LIVINGSTONE hates global capitalism, the cultural dominance of the USA and the way urban living cuts us off from the rhythms of Nature. But instead of engaging with the complexities of post-modern Western culture, she looks for solutions in other places and times. She answers Don Cupitt's celebration of post-modernism with a chapter on Liberation Theology. This is interesting in itself but nowhere explains how an ideology rooted in peasant Catholicism can be made to serve the needs of a post-Christian, post-socialist society.

The book is a muddle of tenuous links, wobbly arguments and unsubstantiated political claims. It also contains much sensitive and informative writing on individual topics.

Buy it for its analysis of Hopkins or the Sandanista poets and you won't be disappointed. Where it falls down is in trying to turn a catalogue of my favourite things into a blueprint for a new society.

Although advertised as "Down to Earth" (katabastic) this is exactly what it is not. It is humourless, bookish and sealed against the reality of the street.

This is Dinah Livingstone's sixth collection of poems since 1987, and she is also the author of nine poetry pamphlets, editor of several anthologies of prose and verse, and translator of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Alongside this prodigious achievement, she is the editor/publisher at Katabasis, which in recent years has produced a number of impressive volumes that have received good notices in leading journals. Following the success of her 1999 volume, TIME ON EARTH: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS, it is not surprising that PRESENCE is a work of maturity, grace and assurance.

The book is divided into three major sections, LONDON AND COUNTRY, MEXICO, and PEOPLE AND OCCASIONS, and the style shows considerable variety, with a mixture of very strict forms and controlled (that is, never loose) free verse. Throughout her poems, Livingstone maintains a balance between her sense of quiet dignity and an appreciation for small details which neither inflates nor trivializes her subjects. An outstanding example of this comes in the concluding stanza of her poem ZAPATISTAS RETAKE SAN CHRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS. Having retold incidents from this February 2001 march, she writes,

	Poor they are, but force of the forgotten heart
	whose homeliest reasons cannot be denied,
	today they are swelling as a song
	with strange polyphonous global resonance,
	for a world with room for many worlds
	for themselves, their fellow creatures and the Earth
	they know as common mother of us all.

	As you kindly visit my garden plum-tree-
	releasing a responding trill
	of kindness for my human part-
	each day you become more clearly
	an individual of the robin kind.

	I think of all those others
	I never met but whose words I have,
	particular poems that have meant the most
	and formed me as I now am.
	Lines float into my head,
	sound-coracles leaving a voice-wake
	on my mind.