The Jazz Age: An Entertainment

If you can imagine William Blake playing Scrabble with Joni Mitchell, Catherine of Aragon booking into the Holiday Inn, or Cassius Clay meeting the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, youre ready for the dreamworld created by Aidan Semmens in The Jazz Age. After five books of intense some would say difficult poetry, he has produced something more accessible, surprising, and fun. In a series of prose vignettes he casts an array of historical figures into times and places other than their own, playing on anachronism and dislocation to surreal, witty, frequently comic, occasionally poignant or disturbing effect. Each brief episode is crystalline, the whole piece theatrical, enjoyably absurd. You might identify a questioning of belief systems, of social hierarchy, of human individuality and inter-relationship but essentially this is, as it is billed, entertainment.