In 1975 I recorded, on one of the two B sides of a vinyl LP (Words & Music, produced by Hansjorg Mayer) some of the pages of the first version of A Humument. I spoke them into a huge hairy ball of a microphone amidst a tangle of wires and cables.

A sudden wave of critical attention (noted here) has tended to concentrate more often on the words rather than the images of the book. I was particularly touched by the appearance of a page on the cover of the Poetry Review announcing a fine article by Chris McCabe. Time, I thought, for Jolson to sing again especially as Tom Service had just shown me the recording device he uses for his BBC interviews, a cordless microphone no bigger than a Mars bar.

Here for a start, in full son et lumière, is a page I've just finished. More to come and, to quote the quote from Dickens that was the original title of The Waste Land, I do the police in different voices.

The fifth edition of A Humument is reviewed by Chris McCabe in the current issue of Poetry Review, Autumn 2012, (guest edited by Charles Boyle), which can be purchased online at this link. 

And here follows a round up of recent reviews, all viewable online but each of these publications worthy of your subscription.

'Every Day of my Life is Like a Page'
Review of A Humument by James Kidd
Literary Review
Issue 400 July 2012
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/kidd_07_12.php

'Were there but world enough and time': Tom Phillips on A Humument
interview with Andrew David King 
September 7 2012
The Kenyon Review
http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/09/tom-phillips-interview/

'Double Act' Review of A Humument by Adam Smyth
London Review of Books
Vol.34 No.19 October 11 2012
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n19/adam-smyth/double-act

Tom Phillips: An Interview
Adam Smyth and Gill Partington
London Review of Books online
October 4 2012
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/10/04/tom-phillips/tom-phillips-an-interview

and in case you missed it back in May
'A Humument. Long Revision'
David Jennings
19th May 2012
The Spectator
http://www.exacteditions.com/read/the-spectator/19-may-2012-31229/50/3/