Tranter systematically pilfers the poems of others to reinvigorate his own work. His earliest books grappled with Rimbaud and Eliot, lacing and addressing Rimbaud’s lines and biography throughout the poems. Methodical borrowings and rehashings – via computer programs in the case of Different Hands (1998), but also in Blackout (2000) and Borrowed Voices (2002) – have been logical developments. Poetry is also ‘exercise’, an attempt to keep one’s hand in. Philip Mead notes in the Companion: ‘Since the 1970s Tranter’s work has been characterised by restless formal experiment, sometimes in traditional forms, sometimes with Oulipian or other drivers. But Tranter was also one of the earliest of innovative poets to feel the attractions of computer-assisted experiments.’

Some readers feel alienated by Tranter’s use of external constraints in his poems, the most well-known of which are his terminals, which take the end words of a poem and rewrite from there, yet these constraints are no different in purpose from the constraints of traditional forms, or from restrictions that the Oulipo writers imposed on their works. The first poem in Starlight, ‘The Anaglyph’, began as Tranter’s comment on John Ashbery’s ‘Clepsydra’:

            The reply wakens easily, darting         from

Untruth to willed moment, scarcely   called into being

Before it swells, the way a waterfall

Drums at different levels. Each moment Of utterance is the true one; likewise        none are true,

                        (‘Clepsydra’)

The tale of my attempt to farm stubborn        soil leaked from

Untruth to legend, my unlikely phase             of boy-scout honesty being

Before I came to the big city. Here    behind the tiny

            horological waterfall

Drums amplify the fun, but only at    nightfall, then just for a

            moment

Of horrible error as I clutch the wrong           person’s hand. That

            was true,

                        (‘The Anaglyph’)

As with the constraints of formal verse that compel the poet into activity, here Tranter takes one or two words from the beginning and end of each Ashbery line and rewrites between them. The poem is intended as a comment on, and homage to, Ashbery’s modus operandi, as well as an alternative or parallel reading.

The trajectory of many Tranter poems is always partly the struggle with previous poetry. His work may be a heightened interiority, but it also sputters hilariously with every aspect of life; with shifty characters, gleaming cars, ludicrous imagery and baying pretensions.   One section in Starlight views and crazily summarises some famous and mostly B-grade films, humorously listing their clichéd signification: ‘the passers-by look suspicious and distracted / so it must be Paris, or a version of it.’ Tranter’s work is often feverishly paced, announcing his aim to remake poetry, while at the same time scathingly critical of the self-conscious artist – ‘Real artists are beyond / common middle-class morality. They say’ (‘Deep Sky’).

Another trace of critics and of Tranter’s commentaries on his work is his early fascination with Eliot’s idea of extinguishment of personality – to which one might say ‘As if’! All of Tranter’s work is imbued with the personality we know from his poems, flaying romanticism and contemporary society, and able to make any situation absurdist. The Salt Companion to John Tranter contains ten illuminating essays by British, American and Australian poets and academics, as well as an interview with, and some prose poems by, the poet. Simon Perril draws parallels with J.G. Ballard and his understanding of experience as being stylised into spectacle by the media. He shows how Tranter’s work speaks from its era, particularly in Red Movie (1972):

In the light of the decline in sixties optimism, and the very real expansion of the military industrial complex, the rhetoric of a poetical militancy for him becomes a hollow posture. The avant-garde poet’s conviction that their work will initiate a change in the social order is given the self-delusive qualities of the ... individual trying to escape what Ballard describes as ‘our time-dominated continuum’.

Perril’s essay, as with Michael Brennan’s, teases out Tranter’s obsession with Rimbaud’s long silence after the poetry. Kate Fagan and Peter Minter wittily dissect The Alphabet Murders (1976), and show how Tranter moves on from his poetic dilemma: ‘Having murdered gushy “personality” and its dazzling, crap-shooting alphabets ... Tranter’s poetry goes on to project an infinite circulation of melancholic, fin-de-millenarian écriture. Perhaps Tranter still writes home to the loss of his beloved Rimbaud.’    Kate Lilley’s sympathetic examination of The Floor of Heaven encourages a rereading of that book, as she elucidates his use of feminised voices. Ann Vickery approaches the work and life through some theories of Pierre Bourdieu, which see Tranter’s editorships, particularly of the online Jacket, as sharp career moves rather than simple feats of generosity or enthusiasm. Her essay cleverly unfolds the making of (masculine) reputation. Quotations from Tranter on his own work confirm, or inspire, the accuracy of these essays – ‘[The Alphabet Murders] ended up as an argument with myself ... and the entire tradition of literature ... an attempt to demolish what I thought was bullshit and rebuild out of the wreckage what could be a possible contemporary poetry.’

Brian Henry’s discussion of the innovative terminals picks out the new as invariably indebted to the past:

Tranter’s gesture towards community must remain a literary gesture ... By simultaneously acknowledging and effacing the sources of his terminals, Tranter simultaneously acknowledges and effaces his own role in writing them ... Tranter’s terminals are unique because they combine the conservative, influence-embracing aspect of traditional forms with the innovative aims of new forms ... They depend on the existence of other poems ...

Although all poetry can be read as commentary on, and interpretation of, other poets, Tranter does this overtly, as in his ‘The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile’ (Under Berlin, 1993), which imagines Matthew Arnold – deplored in other poems – or ‘Grover Leach’ and ‘See Rover Reach’ (based on Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, Studio Moon, 2003) or ‘Five Quartets’ (‘This version is Eliot’s poem with most of the words removed, and runs to a more economical seventy-five lines’, ‘Afterword and Acknowledgments’). His explanations are often bravely simplistic, amusingly so sometimes, but often explanation is unedifying or obvious. His richly colourful style and a tone that throttles sentimentality are constant. As with all great poets, the energy of Tranter’s work is born from this conflict of destruction and creation, enunciated clearly in ‘The Poem in Love’ (The Blast Area, 1974): ‘The Poem is nowhere to be seen, so piss off. Later / in the bar full of maniacs, you will be given a prize.’

The Salt Companion to John Tranter is indispensable for anyone seeking a better understanding of contemporary poetry and of Tranter in particular. But read the poems first. ‘It is because the greatness of art is like a snobbish relative / That we shall never agree on a strategy, and / Entertainment washes over us, leaving us ethically / incomplete’ (‘The Anaglyph’).