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Raphael Urweider’s third collection, “Alle Deine Namen”, names eight seasons, when we have four, twenty six girls, when girls don’t come in alphabetical order and ten drinks from his cabinet filled with the small lyric. He moves from being consumed by time in early and late seasons to partnering plants and girls in an ordered dance and he ends consuming gin, vodka, whisky and more. His collection is prefaced by a quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes,”Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them: I kept my heart from no pleasure and found pleasure in all my toil and this was my reward for all my toil.” The Barthean “jouissance” implied by this has a writerly audacity which is often born out in the subtle, shifting language in which the named entities are expressed. In ‘nachherbst’, Raphael rings changes on the named, unimagined tree that echoes unseen in the wind. A name without an object still somehow existing “the given with nothing ungiven.” gegeben…dagegen.

The poems are about the pleasures of existence and inexistence in landscape, love and labels. A Round Dance with the ABC of love has Antonia counselled not to wake the dogs, nor mar their dreams, nor arouse the cicadas and thus she mutes into the page. It has Caecilia mimicking the impermanence of flowers and so on. The diction of the poems is narrow but exact with a sophisticated play on words which is both rhythmic and visual. The third part of the collection is called selbstversuch, self-attempt, though “for personal experiment” would be more exact. The word rings of versuchung, temptation. Raphael’s verbal dexterity is brilliant in these word-paintings of the feel, the allusions and the effects of the alcoholic tastings he explores. His “whisky” puts this Scot to shame. The book is published by the Cologne firm, Dumont (www.dumont-buchverlag.de). ISBN 978-3-8321-8055-3.

Raphael read recently at the Solothurn Festival and here in Bern in the Raum (info@kulturraum.ch) to packed audiences. In Bern his reading was shared with music from Isaac Biaas who dazzled with his guitar style Afro Swing, especially, Ca Fait Mal.

Raphael translated Lavinia Greenlaw’s Minsk (2006). His two earlier collections are “Lichter in Menlopark” and Das Gegenteil von Fleisch. He won the prestigious Clemens-Brentano-pries and he is co-director of the Schlachthaus Theater in Bern.

Harry Eyres often writes about poetry in his column The Slow Lane on the back page of the Life & Arts section of the Weekend Financial Times. This week, for example, he argues for the publication, or republication of individual volumes of poems (in preference to collected works) of poets such as Yeats and Robert Frost, praises Poems on the Underground as often supplying the right dose of poetry, and ends with a brief appreciation of Historia del Corazon by Vicente Aleixandre, which he acquired as a give-away with a copy of El Pais. Harry Eyres’ columns also appear online at www.ft.com/eyres. [Recommended by Leona Medlin.]

Almost by Oliver Reynolds - his 4th collection - has on the cover a Rembrandt drawing about which I once wrote a very small poem, so I was immediately drawn to the book. In Reynolds’ book, it is the very fine and not in any sense small title poem that references this drawing. As for the rest, many are also love poems; there are references to Cardiff, where I live now, and to London, where I used to live; there are many felicities of form and surprising turns that turn out to be just exactly the right way to go. Published by Faber in 1999, today it gets ranked #57 in popularity amongst books of love poetry on amazon.co.uk. [recommendation by Leona Medlin]