The Trio Confessions

Alan Price’s latest collection, The Trio Confessions, demonstrates once again his remarkably sensitive ear for the musicality of language. This time, he produces profoundly moving versions from the work of a supremely eclectic selection of poets, separated both in time and space, yet resonating with fascinating echoes across the centuries. Price’s versions of three Chinese Tang dynasty poets are exquisite. The limpid simplicity of his marvellous rendering of Li Po’s’ ‘Grievance on the Steps’ is haunted by the same subtle meaning as a Vermeer interior. Du Fu’s ‘Picknicking’ is more urgent and earthy, while in his gorgeous ‘On a Height’, the lament over the passage of time is leavened by the humour of the final line. And the gentle hint of satire colouring the bucolic scene in Wang Wei’s ‘Three Notes for Lady Pan’ reminded me curiously of the great Nicaraguan ‘modernista’, Rubén Darío – even though the two poets were writing 1,200 years apart. Adam Feinstein