Brian Patten’s brilliant BBC radio essay on lost poets – and the one whose poems astonished me the most was Rosemary Tonks – made me think of the poets I like who are – not lost – but difficult to get hold of. In fact, getting hold of Rosemary Tonks’ two poetry collections has proven, for me anyhow, impossible. Currently unavailable on Amazon, I haven’t found any library copies, couldn’t locate ‘Badly Chosen Lover’ online or in an anthology and had to transcribe it from the BBC recording of her 1960s reading, in her cool-as-you-like voice, opening with the sock-it-to-them lines: ‘You took a great piece of my life / and you took it under false pretences, / that piece of time.’ Wow. This woman isn’t fooling around. ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ I could at least track down, with its electric, compelling nakedness. People are crying out for this kind of stuff! Some clever publisher should buy the rights for Iliad of Broken Sentences and Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, and publish Rosemary Tonks.

About three years ago I went to a tanka workshop, and there encountered the poems of Machi Tawara, who I had never heard of but who sold – wait for it – two and a half millon copies of her first poetry book and who is so famous in Japan she has her own tv show. Japan is apparently a strange country where poets can sell enough poetry to make a living. Her tanka delighted me, and at least I have been able to get hold of Salad Anniversary, after three years, and at considerable cost. But it had to be the Jack Stamm translation: that is the best one, I am advised.

So, given these difficulties with accessing wonderful poetry, I am glad that I bought John Adlard’s The Lichfield Elegies, published by the Aylesford Press in 1991, before it disappeared from sight forever – the dumb idea that is touted around that good poetry will survive merely by virtue of it being good I think is nonsense, it is a matter of luck, even in the digital age. So I am even more pleased that Jenny Penberthy has gathered together all of Lorine Niedecker’s pieces which before had been only here and there – like stray pieces of cut grass – into the beautiful Collected Works. Everyone should have a copy of this edition, available from the University of California Press. Niedecker’s poems are witty, warm, sharp, epic, epigrammatic, experimental, formally rigorous, for the voice, for the page, humorous, surrealist, realist – often at the same time and with tonal unity:

Ah your face

but it’s whether

you can keep me warm

Richard Lambert