BY WAY OF A BLURB
A Chide's Alphabet is also available as a freely distributed e-zine in .rtf format from the Editor. Below is an appraisal of the e-zine, originally posted to the Imitation Poetics List by Candice Ward, on the day of its debut, May the 26th 2001.

Apologies for cross-posting (don't you love the way everybody apologizes for this, then goes right on doing it?). But I want to tout the first issue of A CHIDE'S ALPHABET on account of its spectacularly consistent spectacularity--not a ringer in the lot unless it's one of mine (how would I know?)--and to encourage listees to order it from David Bircumshaw so that he doesn't get depressed and stop putting it out. After spending a couple of hours pleasurably immersed in its 40-odd pages, I think it would be a bargain at twice the price (even free-squared!), if only for the dazzling arrays of Emma Lew and Trevor Joyce poems--a nice big chunk of each, and Joyce's brilliant, sustained use of repetition in the 3 "lattice" poems invites their repeated rereading--plus a good-sized, well-varied selection of lyrics and longer poems by Alison Croggon. The Robin Hamilton sampler here displays his trademark wit, and I was pleased to make the acquaintance of Welsh poet Ian Davidson, whose work I didn't know at all. The issue is nicely framed by editor Bircumshaw's "Modest Introduction" (with an amusingly breezy acknowledgments statement) and a nice mix of poet Bircumshaw's new and older, cryptically encrypted poems.
The single, relatively brief poem by Randolph Healy here is one on which I could spend hours happily puzzling out its fittings: 5 senses, 7 locks holding 7 broken keys (a chromosomal image with an allusion to the Seven Sleepers?), 4 tastes, 4 odors, a robbery, a birth, a case of lordosis(?), and a race with time--all contextualized to a right triangle sided by difference and identity, "joined" by a dying star. The poem's entitled "Flight." Go figure.
Well, I could go on, but won't, and just hope I've whetted your appetites for A CHIDE'S ALPHABET.

Candice Ward

david.bircumshaw@ntlworld.com

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