Title: EVERY QUESTION BUT ONE
Author: Pierre Martory
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, Hudson, New York

Not surprisingly, Martory's poetry doesn't seem to derive from any of the various modernist (or post-modernist) French schools, though there are echoes of fringe surrealists like Reverdy and the chameleon-like Raymond Queneau, whose wicked, witty and wistful novels of French lowlife are the perfect antidote to existentialism and must have affected Martory's own writing. The austerity of Jouve's poetry and the other-orldly fantasy of Supervielle's also come to mind. There is a touch of the gaiety of Rene Clair's early films; of the blues of his favorite singers Florel and Piaf and the song Sombre Dimanche (Gloomy Sunday), which seems to sum up the thirties. (As a child Martory and his brother were forbidden to listen to it by their stepmother, who had heard it could lead to suicide.) Both the humor and the sadness in his poems are always rendered with an unemphatic clarity that is certainly Mozartian.

All of which may be a way of saying that there is no very easy way to describe Martory's poetry. It is sui generis and it deserves to be read. And reread.

John Ashbery