The Lores,

Poetry. Between 1989 and 2000, Robert Sheppard worked on a long network of texts called Twentieth Century Blues, of which THE LORES forms ''the knotted core.'' Previous volumes in the series include EMPTY DIARIES (also carried by SPD), of which Tim Wood wrote that it was ''one of the more important poetry books of 1998.'' Of other parts of the project he wrote that Sheppard ''openly exposes the manner in which language disrupts fixed social relations, and this language of disruption becomes an ethical critique,'' words particularly relevant to this volume, whose style picks up on Derrida's concerns with linkage in terms of the horrors of the twentieth century. ''For Sheppard, syntactical construction is part of the strategy, ranging from techniques to open up ambiguity and the range of possible meaning, to forms of civil disobedience at the level of the sentence''-Keith Jebb.