Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an intriguing poet (including collaged visual poems) and critic. Her Selected Poems can’t help but feel centred around, perhaps grounded by, her Drafts project: 114 (+) cantos which rework, or ‘fold’, 19 poems six times over, riffing and refining, tangenting away from and interrogating the texts themselves and the author’s processes and poetical understanding. The sequence is both a challenge to and a critical deconstruction of some of the very male modernist long poems of sequences such as Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus project; and the long poem is also the subject of a recent critical volume.

There are under a 100 pages of poetry preceding Drafts in this Selected Poems, mostly fragmented lyrics, perhaps most akin to the work of, say, Rae Armantrout. The last line of the very first poem included here, 1970’s ‘A Poem to Myself’, acts as a kind of manifesto…