Effigies Against The Light. (Poetry).(Book Review)(Brief Article)

JOHN WILKINSON, Salt (www.saltpublishing.com), $15.95 paper (212p) ISBN 1-876857-38-2

This extra-long book by Wilkinson (Oort's Cloud), one of the most intellectually demanding and politically engaged of contemporary English poets, suggests that the differences between some versions of modernism and postmodernism might be nil. Presenting five discrete works composed of mostly two or-so page lyrics (along with several notable longer poems, such as "Sarn Helen"), the book embeds the language of T.S. Eliot and Basil Bunting in high Latinate rhetoric, while threading in clinical, scientific and pop cultural terms with equal ease: "snap crackle & pop/ Deliver us from …