In time for a weekend of musing and browsing comes a good-sized hardback by a poet, William Wantling, known mainly to the few and some readers of his old friend from the little mags, Charles Bukowski. Tangerine Press have made a lovely job of it, almost 200 pages, red cloth bound, acid-free paper, handbound in the editor's front room, a hunk of a book, collector's item, the works of a bard who in his day knew mainly the glorious flimsiness of the small press mag and Roneo Revolution chapbook.

It's a sort of 'Collected/Selected Books of Bill Wantling', with extracts from the volumes printed in chronological order. Seems he even had a book, From the Jungle's Edge, issued by Anais Nin's publisher, Alan Swallow (guyed by Bukowski in a story as 'Alan Swillout').

The world of Wantling's poems (and prose too--see the extract from the Korean War novel Hunched in its Belly) is vivid, raw, cruel and exciting. The man had an angle of vision all his own and this he put over. His mature style is more conversational than talk itself, also extremely readable, silkily so--bare thought emerging out of its sheath.

It's a thrill to see old favourites here, such as 'For a Girl Who Doesn't Like Her Name' or 'Poets Are Sensitive', but then there are the ones not read before. New to me for one is 'Evening, Ocean, Sky, History' (p.137) though a couple of tags from it appear elsewhere in his works. It seems Wantling often shuffled lines and stanzas around and they appear like patches. He was not the most prolific, but when he is on form and spills it he spews everything.

Some of the new poems here are a bit weak or fragmentary, and suffer from a feeble or non-existent resolution. This makes you realise what a good job Penguin did in 1968 for example in the Penguin Modern Poets series, #12. Most of the real classics are there. Even so, everything in Only in the Sun is worth a read.

Wantling has a great way of shuffling reminiscences of San Quentin and the drug world with allusions to Troy and the Bible that still sound contemporary. The hippest slang goes along with the capitalisation of concepts to be found in a Victorian hymnal. He's just so convincing. One of the old-style poets who were like the shaman and could give access to the spell of the other world. No glooping on with boring themes. Wantling burned with life and consumed it all up. Get on this running board and you're bound for heaven and hell.