The Flaying of Marsyas

The fifteen poems in this selection by the Swiss poet Florian Vetsch - documentarian of Ira Cohen and the American beat poets, traveller, organizer of cross-cultural books and literary events - are often playful. He writes about beer; he writes about wine, riffing on "A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell; he writes about being invaded by dead poets. And then he's not joking: he writes about an old photograph of his mother as a young woman before WW2; a poem for the American journalist Mary Colvin, assassinated in Syria by the Assad regime; and then "The Flaying of Marsyas", protesting against the frightful punishments inflicted on those artists, mystics or philosophers who challenge the ruling coteries of gods, priests, and politicians. In this small collection Vetsch covers an astonishing range of our ways of being alive. It wears its playfulness lightly - pff-tok! says the beer-can; excuse me while I kiss the sky - And then it looks at history, the other things we do. Vetsch moves on and we move with him, remembering the colour of rust and blood staining river water.