I bump into... ROD BURNS

age: 36
nationality: English
type of visitor: rare
eating: pain au chocolat
drinking: two black coffees, one Irish coffee

I seldom see Rod, and then only at night, in bars, when we fail to resist ending up in the slightly louche cocktail bar Rick's on Frederick Street (a couple of doors from the slightly sleazy Fingers Piano Bar), so I'm surprised to see him striding through the cafe. He looks different in daylight - like a newly washed car edged out of a dark garage.

Rod was one of the poets to get into the first edition of the poetry magazine I founded, Anon. Subsequently he wrote to me, and we've been good friends since. His visionary swearing is always impressive.

Sometimes publishers ask me to write back-cover blurbs. I've only agreed twice: once for an American poet called Rose Kelleher, and once for Rod's book The Salesman's Shoes. It comprises tanka (poems with five lines and a strict syllable count on each line in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7), and I find many of them brilliant. They use shifts of perspective and unusually striking imagery to make the ordinary extraordinary. Here are a few of my favourites...

Seeing traffic lights
sequencing through green, amber
red for nobody
the nightwatchman's heart blows out
like a torn bicycle tyre.

*

Savour of hotdog
and overhanging bosom
and raw woody ink --
circles in the inferno
of this bookless passenger.

*

Ah, broken wiper
dragging smears across the glass
of the driver's side --
won't you now illuminate
the sound of one blade flapping?

Rod's writing name is James Roderick Burns. His latest book Greetings from Luna Park uses the Japanese verse form sedoka -- a form so neglected and obscure that it draws a blank on Wikipedia. Maybe Rod could rectify that...