Arioflotga

Surely none of us can have been left quite unaffected by the recent startling and unfortunate disaster of the disappearance of the "Great Poetic Anthology" into the electronic cracks between the major academic institutions which were preparing it - something which one might have thought to be impossible in this alleged age of unremitting communication. Of course, nothing can compensate us for a loss of such unparalleled magnitude. And yet here, however, is at last a slight alleviation.Just over a year and a half ago, a copy of what seems to be a version - evidently an intermediate one - of the opening lines of this vast welter of lost poems mysteriously turned up in a Latin American restaurant in Glasgow, and no time has been lost in offering it to a presumably still disconsolate public. It is surely not nothing that a certain slight percentage of what promised to be the greatest collection of poetical thought of all time has not been utterly lost to us. And, as it happens, such is now not the case. No. Not so. Anything, in fact, but. For here are depths, insights, provocations and astonishments. Or, at least, the beginnings of them.