Dear Rob Withers
I like to think of myself as a fair-minded man, and it's good to have that confirmed by someone who doesn't see eye to eye with me in other respects. Your abrupt termination of our correspondence left me in a dilemma, since you didn't at the same time withdraw your request to have your reply to Huw's letter published. Anyway, I welcome the opportunity for dialogue.
Before responding to Huw, you rap me over the knuckles for using the words 'repellant, amoral' as a pointer to the transcription of your review that appears on this site. Lighten up, Rob. It was perhaps a bit naughty of me, but anyone momentarily misled by those words would have been put right by reading in full what you actually said. The object of your indignation is a signpost, not a manifesto, and it isn't appropriate to attack it with "futile bi-polar logic".
If Huw is naive in thinking that a review should be "about covering a book", then I share his naivety. A reviewer has an obligation to the writer not to misrepresent a book, and to the potential reader to convey honestly whether or not he thinks the book is worth reading. I think this is what you refer to as "a traditional lens for examining reviews". Your approach fails to distinguish between a review, which has these obligations, and an academic essay, which deals with established texts and therefore doesn't to the same extent.
You use the term "evaluate" in a way peculiar to you or your school of criticism. It seems that by this definition evaluation can only be overt and explicit. Even so, the claim that your denial of evaluation in my work is not pejorative doesn't stand up to a re-reading of the review itself, which begins by stating that the use of filmic techniques is "trite and banal" unless it adds insights, and goes on to say that my technique in "Stop-Frame Sequence" fails to make "any kind of point about the violent act". The phrase "without evaluation" is then applied to the collection as a whole. And there is a strangely personal animus in your description of the book's cover, although you now seem to claim that you were praising it for avoiding soft-focus nostalgia. D.A. Prince, reviewing the same pamphlet in Links, adopts an approach theoretically similar to yours in focusing on its cover, but describes the interplay of themes and images in a way that doesn't convey aversion and hostility.
A fairly complete list of the adjectives you associate with my work is as follows: trite, banal, repellant, amoral, violent, unappealing, poor quality, tatty, off-putting, crude. The descriptions of the poems and the cover spill over on to each other. If this doesn't represent your full response to the collection, then your review fails in the double duty I mentioned earlier.
Although you now claim to be my kind of reader, or even (God forbid!) my ideal reader, I don't know of anyone who has read your review as a favourable one - that troublesome pi-polar logic again. I think the key to this is your theory that reviews don't have to be about the work under review. My poetry was the raw material of your piece, not its raison d'etre. Graphic artists as well as writers would object to having their work treated in this way, but it's particularly galling for a small-press or self-published poet. Not having much in the way of publicity and distribution networks, we rely on intermediaries like you to make potential readers aware of us. For a reviewer on a large-circulation poetry magazine to adopt such a cavalier attitude to his responsibility is a serious matter.
Your own sensitivity to criticism is surprising, since someone who has been described as "a recognised authority on post-structuralist criticism" must be higher in the literary food-chain than the little-known author of one pamphlet, whose only platform is a personal website. Despite your professed admiration of my intelligence and technique, you say in your most recent outburst that you find having reviewed my poetry "an unexpectedly unpleasant experience". I interpret this as the discomfort of a predator who finds himself attacked by the meal he thought he had successfully digested.
Brian Fewster