In his review of the CD "Carnivocal", in this issue of Riding the Meridian, Alaric Sumner writes: "There is some work I do not enjoy - repeated permutations of words or phrases (for example W Mark Sutherland's Hiroshima ("Hiroshima - hear a screamer") is one I found crass on first hearing and it had not improved after its thirty or so repetitions nor after repeated listenings). There is a lot of this sort of work around, using repeated slight variations (frequently with rather obvious juxtapositions of meaning), so there is obviously a market for it. I find it tedious. Yet repetitions and permutations can be stunningly moving/stretching in the work and voice of an Amirkhanian or a Dutton."

I think, with real respect, that Alaric is wrong.

Sutherland's Hiroshima is not repeated permutations. It contains repetitions and it contains permutations; and, within its narrow material and temporal (1' 44") range, there is variety and change, lexically, rhythmically and tonally.

Sutherland is as stuck with his voice as Dutton is with his; and both seem fine to me. However, it is what one says and does with a voice that can move primarily, rather than the voice itself, in this sort of work.

The juxtapositions are appropriate: that is different to being obvious. Having said that, to move from "Hiroshima" (stressed on the third syllable, whereas in Britain we would tend to hit the second syllable) to "Hear a screamer" is unusual...

Sutherland has produced much surprising work; the other two tracks featuring him on the CD give an indication of his range. What I get from this short accomplished piece is an attempt at a restoration of meaning to an image, the word "Hiroshima", which has become an empty verbal icon; if it had not been emptied of its denotation and connotation, it would point so clearly to what we do to each other as to be unbearable. I doubt that any attempt would be adequate to that which is attempted here. I doubt there is a market for a poem which might restore to "Hiroshima" its full potency of meaning.

I don't know how far Hiroshima was thought through, as idea, before its realisation; but a point that I take from it as central is that there isn't a full transformation, a quality Alaric identifies in Dutton. The materials remain mixed but not compounded or changed.

A full transformation would let us off.

The atomic-bombing of Hiroshima was achieved with uninvolved machismo, the bomb itself and the plane which dropped it given pet names though they flew high up like a bird of prey. We are given, amongst other things, the word of the title, the name of a place annihilated without warning, and a repeated call which could either be an appeal to fellow feeling or an excited exclamation at having caused pain, repudiating fellow feeling.

Some years ago I heard a survivor of I no longer know what regime speak, ironically, of the film Alien's advertising blurb: in space no one can hear you scream. He was talking about some state thugs strangling their victims - he said something like "the censors took our words and then they even tried to take our breath" - and breath is specified by this piece -"so that no one could hear us scream" and went on to say that, while people will go to see a polished but fictional horror, few care about the victims of police states.

No one can hear you scream and live to tell of it if you are in or within range of an atomic fireball. And how many care? The dead of Hiroshima might as well be dead on another planet.

Sutherland and Dutton are doing different things and the well-intentioned comparison is misleading. One may be more amenable than the other to a particular ear; but surely that is something else. Yes, Dutton's rendition of his poem is spectacular; but that isn't everything; and there are many kinds of spectacle of which Sutherland's performance is other than Dutton's.

So Dutton's virtuosity is different in kind to Sutherland's and the roughness and lack of resolution in Sutherland's Hiroshima is part of its method and appropriate to its subject. It is an attempt at empathy beyond empathy. Hear a screamer? Of course we can't. And, increasingly, as time passes, and the war with Japan drops into vague history, Hiroshima? What's that?

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Carnivocal: A Celebration of Sound Poetry, edited by Stephen Scobie & Douglas Barbour; published by Red Deer Press; ISBN 0 88995 210 8