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Hemispherical Press has used two hollow copper rivets to bind the book. It's a good thing for a chapbook to be original in design, 'look' and make as well as in the writing and this, with a couple of thumb prints on the cover, certainly seems one of a kind.
As for the poems, well, Adrian Manning is a poet who never seems to be casting around for something to say. It's there; he's not just writing for the sake of it. Not playing with words--certain ideas just come to him and he sets them down directly, in the style of US poets rather than UK. Manning is a Brit though he sometimes uses American phrases and has American 'furniture', shall we say, in his poems. He definitely has more of a British consciousness of mood and nuance, and an eye for minutiae.
'Word play' is not his bag but he hits a good metaphorical stride--he sees life the way a lot of his readers love to see it, in bold hieroglyphic images that make sense to anyone confronting the problematic streets of the world in which we must today 'live, breathe and have our being'. He also knows how to keep you guessing, how to withhold and how to bestow the 'pearl'. I like a writer who can confess: 'I looked for her in the dark corners/of bars and alleyways/streets and subways/I wanted black hair/black as my heart.../the job is about to end/the landlord wants me out/the animals have taken over...'
The book is quite nicely printed, but could have been proofread better. The possessive form of 'it' should not have an apostrophe ('the devastation/ of it's rage' etc.).
The orginality of the copper fasteners soon turned out to be a drawback with my copy: the back cover came loose almost immediately after removing the book from the envelope. Opening the volume and flicking through meant that the back cover and three pages immediately became detached. Of course, anyone with some glue can put it together again, but the book's value as a collector's piece has got to be diminished by these 'signs of use'. And collector's piece it well could be, because Manning is both prolific and consistent.