Dreams of the Caucasus

Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy . . . although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream-and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates. For here are places both far and near, unknown and known . . . from the Sahara Desert to the Tamar Valley, from the doomed flatlands of Bla Tarr's Hungarian puszta to the equally-doomed shores of WG Sebald and Brian Eno's Dunwich.