On the other hand, however, there is an issue with Mesmer’s attempt to bring various figures directly into the text and, in effect, boil them down to the substance of their names as further tactile words in the poem:

your head, your mask
your worshipper and your Sumer
your eucharistic dove, your Georgia M. G. Forman
your altar and
your panel
your granite Brahma, your Mrs. Seymour Knox, Sr.
your Artemis
              and your stag (‘Largesse’)

Despite this apparent attempt to strip away their personalities, to make them just another ele-ment of the poem’s soundscape – note, for example, the prevalence of the ‘r’ sound in the quoted passage, and whether ‘Georgia M. G. Forman’ is a real person or a play on the name of the boxer, George Forman – the figures as they are known externally to the poem inevita-bly comes to shadow the meaning of the poem itself. The reader has to ask if their presence is a hint, a directional clue – a kind of library classification system – about what to read to un-derstand the rationale of Mesmer’s ideas and poetic forms. This is particularly prevalent in the first stanza of the first poem in the book:

anyone who says Foucauldian
who had wanted to say Foucault
and then Foucauldian said to have
said “d” instead of not saying “t” (‘10 Kinds of Quiet’)

I have never read Foucault and even in the writing of this review I found no desire to (at the very least) Wikipedia the general outlines of his philosophies. I do know that he is French, credited as a poststructuralist (with all the vagaries and eliminations of author, text, language that come of that field), and has written on Raymond Roussel (a poet, like Mesmer, invested in a poem’s construction over its content ((at any rate according to John Ashbery in his lecture ‘The Bachelor Machines of Raymond Roussel’ (((collected in Other Traditions ((((2000)))). Otherwise, my interest in Foucault is limited. Yet, there he is, immediately pre-sented by Mesmer in terms of pronunciation and spelling, which should ideally make his presence one focused around how a word changes in its usage as either an adjective (‘Foucauldian’) or a proper name (‘Foucault’). But, even in my extremely limited under-standing of Foucault and my assumption of what Mesmer is doing with his name-as-object, I increasingly found myself throughout Of Monodies and Homophony engaged in a kind of dialogue with Foucault, knowing nothing of his theory, yet always second guessing Mesmer’s poetic fractures and playful way with words as derived from his philosophy. The sense was one of perpetual nudging, of a voice emerging from the scattered forms of the po-ems, suggesting in whispers that underneath it all lurked Foucault, pointing towards some kind of grand meta-meaning that would bring Mesmer’s techniques into theoretical relief – oh, it all makes sense now.

This is exactly the problem of the collage evident in Of Monodies and Homopho-ny, mentioned earlier. Should the presence of the collaged object (who in this case re-mains a distinctive and, for me, unknown subject) be too strong, attention begins to waver. This includes the presence of Loy, amongst others, as influence. Indeed, this is an issue with so-called ‘non-fiction’ poetry in general: should the reader not have, or choose to evade, access to the non-fictional entity being explored in the text, does the poetry lose some of its impact? In a sense, I believe it does: the reader who approaches the poem without knowledge of the concrete concept or figure that should (ideally) directly inform the shape of the poem, misses some of the broader meaning considered important enough by the poet to prominently feature. This is despite the non-fiction becoming inevitably transmuted in terms of the apparent fiction(s) of the text and language in general – and when does fiction begin and end anyway, particularly in the world-making of poetry’s language? But, on the other hand, in a whole other compartment of sense, should the poetry be strong enough – not in the Bloomian sense of the ‘strong poet’, but in the delivery and impact of its craft, in the reac-tions it elicits from the reader – then the non-fictional aspect of the poem is made mute, irrel-evant next to and within its language – ironically, even as this language is in part crafted from a base of non-fiction. And although Of Monodies and Homophony is not a non-fiction book of poetry, at least as far as I can see, it does precariously operate on this line be-tween knowledge as a pre-existent necessity, and a poetic effect gifted to the reader by the insinuations and strength of its poetry despite any lack of such a priori knowledge.

Resolutely, Mesmer’s book falls into the latter. The reader need only read the book’s final poem, ‘Delphine’, to appreciate Mesmer’s skill, as his unrhymed, but beautifully controlled, couplets unfold in ten parts:

x

—and what say you to heroes?
gone in to tides

like thunder, their
thighs sparked mercury

—the gorgon’s comb
a trove to each—

finding a deity in every minute,
all the mute

suppositions of material
come back from

Poseidon, for a swim,
still unkissed

Although the title appropriately refers to the festival of Apollo, and, in its prevalent oceanic setting, to dolphins, the necessity of knowing this is lost to the sibilant musing of the speaker, the happenstance of wondering what to ‘say … to heroes’, the image of sparkling, explosive ‘mercury’, and the quiet regret of the ‘unkissed’. Of Monodies and Homophony, true to its Loy heritage, operates in such spaces of poetic assurance and splendour, finding a flexibility of meaning in the material of language as it exists between the poem and the world, even as Foucault continues – ‘in every minute’ – to cackle inaudibly and (for me) in-comprehensibly in the background.