14x14 cm, 24 pages, 250 gsm white Strata card cover, blue endpapers, hand sewn with blue twist.  The cover illustration is a detail of "No Title", 1987 by Harvey Volaine.  From the collection of Jann L.M. Bailey, Director, Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.Used by permission of the owner.    ISBN 1 903090 07 5    See below for extract. Click here to read Nate Dorward's review of 20/20 Vision Click here for information on cross of green hollow also by Pete Smith Ordering Information

from 20/20 Vision:
 

Of sorts.

Flags at half and pistols at twenty.
Beech-mast still pelts down.
The pace stretching our short days.
Evening out the stress bumps.
The tenor of morning an oratorio.
Another key where vibrato widens.
Spilt silt trickle spate estuary.
Semis, demis and demi-semis all a-quavering.
Just because there's a period doesn't mean an end.
The idea of body doesn't remove clothes.
Where there's a will there's a fisticuffs.
Way out west; way up north; weighed down.
A National Day of Morning: noon at midnight.
Mist of discharge fogs a dawn.
I half-doubt Thomas would have rhymed that.
It's bigger than a frisbee, bigger than New York.
If a poem had enough combustion.
Eiderdown. Dander up. Relaxation always a middling.
The reflexologist said, "You remind me of myself."
The twentieth line presages an abyss, of sorts.
 

For granted.

At the heart of every slogan a slip-knot of words.
A sloppy-knitted sweater of raw, wet wool. Made in.
The industrious revolutionaries plucked cotton from
the Manchester Canal. Hey,hey,hey. Ya gotta believe.
Scepticism makes the heart grow foundling.
There you go a-sloganning. Wassail
will cure you: a week of sharing
and begging, a month of Sundays off.
Bread and cheer. A full belly makes a merry heart,
makes votes for the incumbent party.
The man said democracy will only really work
when everyone's got nothing. Crucify
that man, said the guard. The guardian
agreed. But I'm just a guest on this planet,
he pleaded. The tyrant said, Oh, alright
give him his own talkshow. There's a stone
to entomb a soul: the ratings always favour Barabbas.
When the judgement is suspended the hanged man curses
literalism. The word promise hobbles in on the crutches
of political sanctuary where not only the poor are taken in.
 

Not yet.

The summer of '68 we bought a budgerigar
but still couldn't balance our books.
The summer of '74 we fired our accountant,
cleaned out his cage and the lilac
waxed magnificent on his droppings.
It was the way the 0's failed to connect
hepped us to the concept of economic
inertia. We donated the perch to the Tate
after carefully removing it from the Large Glass,
preserving the dust in an envelope marked
Return To Sender. Phoenix, in the Arid Zone, a place
to park your trailer and await the Second
Coming. It was like a Vacation Bible School,
the Spirit was on that kind of holiday:
what rote and ritual failed to do, mind
expanding drugs claimed to do. Not every
claim is salted: we said cool, wow, far out:
the borders were certainly open, the guards all
chewed their tongues wondering how far that was.
The bottom line was a hook yet to be baited.