Lesson in Perspective ( click image to enlarge )

Though poets might have a stack of works-in-progress, poems come into the world one by one, and I have always wondered about writing a book. Certainly, there are collections that seem to be the result of prolonged focus on a single task. I think of Stephen Dobyns's The Balthus Poems and of Craig Raine's fat and fascinating History: The Home Movie, and there are many poets—Ted Hughes, Peter Reading, Ted Kooser, Carl Phillips, and Sarah Lindsay leap to mind—whose collections one wants to read at a single sitting if possible. I can see how they might have written their poems book by book, or at least have written with a project in mind. But there are also poets who have a temporary focus and then move on.Wordsworth's Lucy or Yeats's Crazy Jane or Eliot's Sweeney inspired memorable work, but not enough to fill even a chapbook. And how many Imagist poems did Ezra Pound write?

As soon as Transit was published, though my writing was diverse, I began to think of a second book. By 1990 I had a collection, including eleven poems that had appeared in quarterlies, which I titled Expecting Little: Receiving Much. I don't remember sending it anywhere. In its next life, the expanded collection was titled Capricci. As far as my records show, I didn't send it anywhere until 1998; then, after an uncharacteristic big blitz on publishers on both sides of the Atlantic—a campaign that yielded naught but rejection slips—I thought I should rethink the book and send out single poems only. Under the new title Static, I think I submitted the collection to one contest, early in 2005.

In October 2002, I had written this to Howard Schwartz, who was editing Natural Bridge: "I have been shuffling through the hundred odd poems I've composed in the last two decades (Is that many or few? Who's counting?) in an effort to get two book-length collections published, this time in the US rather than in the UK. As you know, this is the downside of being a poet. I think it was Ibsen who said that every writer needs a nanny, and poets don't have agents or nannies."

Like the Amelia-Anne and Henut Wedjbu poems in Transit, the Captain Midnight poems in Static clearly reflect a project, and the Touching the Mirror section gathers poems that have in common a particular form, but the bulk of the poems in Static arrived as singletons. In arranging them, my aim was not to suggest a project but to put together a program—much as one would select a variety of poems to perform at a reading, the idea being not to create a uniform texture or tone but to jerk the audience around or at least keep them awake.

If someone "in the trade" would like to offer advice about book composing, perhaps he or she would like to pass it along. Authors who have excellent things to say about how to write poems have little to say about assembling and editing books.