The following are micro-reviews of zines and chapbooks that were intended sometime in 1997 to appear in Taproot Reviews, but the issue they were intended to appear in has not yet come out. So I thought I'd start off with them.

Tim Allen: Texts For a Holy Saturday--The Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High Park, Oxenhome, Kendal, Cumbria, England LA9 7RE. 60 pp., price: 4 pounds. The source of Allen's epigraphs: Blake, Hejinian and Brunuel, neatly situate his work. The first four stanzas of his "hieratic" exemplify his zip, wit and quirkiness: "What to think?/ Think poetry.// Undetermined?/ Think momentum.// Insoluble?/ Think.// Inconsolable?/ Thinky fish." Elsewhere he writes, "destroy the imagination/ (and) then celebrate it"--his parentheses. He's occasionally unusually deft infra-verbally as with "between diction/ aries," a wonderful sudden opposition of careful communication and War . . . I also liked "meteorligically."

Clark Coolidge: Registers (People in All), Avenue B, Box 542, Bolinas CA 94924. 72 pp., $9.95. A pre-commercial press book, as its price ($9.95 rather than $10) makes immediately clear. But what it contains, a poem in fifty cantos (or whatever), is otherstream, for sure--befuddlingly so, in fact. To this point, I've found no unifying narrative, mood, subject (Coolidge's earlier A Geology was beautifully unified by its subject), scene, philosophy in it--it's all disjunct lines and phrases ("For the lending I come out of log-roll hiding. Why not/ a wasted wing?"). But continual returns to certain elements, like blue, red, rocks, red rocks, balloons, sharpening, trees, maps, suggest it will grow whole for me if only I read it as much as I'd listen to it were it music. (And in it are wonderful moments like, "But I love to/ practice those trees.")

Light--(#15 & 16, Autumn/Winter, 1995-6), Box 7500, Chicago IL 60680. 48 pp., $9. Lots of hits and misses in the humor department, my favorite of the former Kenneth Leonhardt's "Greetings from the White Cliffs": "Although I had always been a rover/ This poet had never been to Dover./ Now--here at last--my couplet runneth over." Among other good things here (at least for nuts&bolts poetics-freaks like me) is a report on a new verse form that literary magazine editor Gail White is trying to popularize called the "brocket." It uses a hyphenated words to produce rhymes where none were possible before, as in Willard Espy's "The four eng-/ ineers/ Wore orange/ brassieres."

M. Kettner: Infrared--Juxta, 977 Seminole Trail #331, Charlottesville VA 22901. 24 pp., $3. Short poems inspired by the idea, and a few times, actual specimens, of infra-red photography--or, shall we say, "meta-spectral poems?" In any event, Kettner's poems achieve an inimitably effective combination of richly haikuic ordinariness and burst-sense strangeness in passages like "suede lawn in mother-of-pearl sunlight" and "wind, that camp follower/ with the stone-blue eyes of an unknown father . . ." and poems like "Concert Hall": "audience green with light/ exhaling a beige mist/ like soil releasing nutrients into the air."

Sticks (#3, February 1996), Sticks Press, Box 399, Maplesville AL 36750. 32 pp., $3. Three personal reasons I deem Sticks Editor Mary Veazey A Great Editor: (1), she sent me not one but four proof-copies of my two mathemaku in this issue; (2), said issue is printed on super-deluxe paper, with splendiferously royal green ink; most important, (3), she took pains to compose the issue, following my burstnorm mathemaku on boyhood rafting, for instance, with a terrific albeit orthotechnical poem by William Conelly on a boy's tree-climb toward possible treasure . . . which reminds me of (4), her unusual openness to poetry of (nearly) ALL species, which allowed her to print not only me and Conelly here but Kostelanetz and X.J. Kennedy--and "Plain Dealing's" limerick about a flasher's lack of respect "for a God/ Who'd allow (him) free will/ For such a cheap thrill . . ."

Hartmut Andryczuk, ed: Visuelle Poesie aus den USA--Germany. 67 pp., price unknown. Work by 16 American vizlateurs (composers of verbo-visual art or "vizlature") representative examples of which are a landscape-sketch/map by Marilyn Rosenberg with, among other vizlaturical subtleties, a Q and an A (for "question/answer") placed strategically on opposite sides of a tilled-field/lined-page; and John Byrum's "Transnon," which consists, simply, of "TRA/ NS/ NON" in large white conventional letters against a black background. With two of the cardinal directions in it, and black & white . . . and an anagram for "art," this work seems almost monumentally engaged with ultimate dichotomies.

Ray DiPalma: Motion of the Cypher--Roof Books, 303 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10009.; 99 pp., $10.95. Ray DiPalma starts off with four gnosticisms from Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno concerning the substantiality of nothingness, or "cipher," then in his poem "21 Down" says: "I continue nothing/ I Am the author/ I sit in front/ Of the last and the lost/ I offer/ No distinct images glinting steadily/ And bending closer and closer/ Their wet rhythmic torpor/ Making a bid for landmark status." Later he speaks similarly of avoiding focus in favor of "the turned-to/ culled from/ the eliminated/ and balanced a perjorgraph/ of choice and/ limn.// The sprawl/ before/ and the sprawl/ after balanced/ outside/ of language/ and inside/ the pattern." Masterly reflections on being and nothingness in a diction that at times equals Stevens's.

Modern Haiku (Vol. 27, #3, Fall 1996), Box 1752, Madison WI 53701-1752. 88 pp., $5.75. A sample of one of the dozens of mostly traditional haiku here is Anthony J. Papello's "she passes me/ the downstairs key/ the moon between us," the moon adding all kinds of new downness to where the speaker is. The magazine has, as usual, much in the way of reviews of haiku chapbooks and prose discussions of haiku, among the latter two somewhat opposed, penetratingly detailed, absorbing readings, by Dave Sutter and Robert Spiess, of a single haiku by Basho. It's cheering to find so many people taking a kind of poetry so seriously in so many ways.

Michael Lally: Cant Be Wrong--Coffee House Press, 27 North 4th Street, Minneapolis MN 55401. 125 pp., $11.95. Lally has a McKuenish regular-guy-but-poet-too stance but he's somewhat better than McKuen. The following passage about a young woman's asking the poet after love-making how old he was seems to me a fair sample of his work in this volume: ". . . & I told her--38--(his age)/ and she said 'that's/ amazing' and I said, wanting to hear her say how/ good I was--how young I/ looked--how whatever it was/ that amazed her about my/ being that age that time,/ so I said 'what's amazing/ about it?' & she said 'a/ guy your age, still sleeping/ on a mattress on the floor.'"