Wow, that's a serious contents page! This is a book of poetry that whispers past a hundred pages but it's told in five sections and a bevy of poems, only one of whose titles doesn't sprawl at least to a second line, if not a third. They're not all quite as catchy as 'The Archaeoastronomer Considers the Intrinsic Error in the First Compass She Brought to the Menhir' but most are much closer than you might expect. The contents page reads like a particularly ambitious seventies prog rock triple album. Suddenly I want to hear that.

What it tells us, before we even look at the first poem, is that this is a saga about characters with archetypal names who are involved in some sort of story about a menhir, destroyed then created afresh on the moon and eventually destroyed again. Most of them are presumably human but at least one is an AI, which runs a Lunar Colony and is tasked with the creation component. Oh, and I should add that there's a seven -page bibliography, many of the poems starting with a quote from one of its included works. The first, in 'The Archaeoastronomer Learns of the Destruction of the Menhir' is taken from 'Solar and Lunar Observatories of the Megalithic Astronomers', published in 'Archaeoastronomy and the Roots of Science', as edited by E. C. Krupp.

While I realise that I may have just put some of you off ever picking up a copy of this book, I must say that I'm intrigued. This may well be as niche as anything I've ever read for review, even from Aqueduct Press, within whose 'Conversation Pieces' series it sits, and I adore people who live and work in niches, whatever they happen to be. That I also appreciate archaeoastronomy is merely a bonus at this point. I felt drawn to what T. D. Walker was going to do with this book and I'm happy to say that she does a great deal. I can't say that I grasped all of it and I'm still thinking about its musings on AI, especially its inherent limitations.

Immediately, for instance, she contrasts the past and the future. The past is depicted as a Bronze Age menhir, a word I know well from the 'Asterix' series but which generally means a large stone erected in prehistory, always upright and often engraved. This one's ancient enough that we know very little about who might have installed it, but it's ironically toppled in protest against a future that's represented by a Lunar Colony. The protestors believe that we were meant to be on Earth but the Poet points out that the Earth was never the centre of anything, maybe not even for us.

In the first of a few numbered readme.txt files (generally the same file to introduce each section, gradually expanded to finesse the task at hand, having learned from mistakes), the Programmer decides to feed everything that we do know about the menhir into an AI, which will then generate a monument to it up there in what we assume is safer space in the Lunar Colony. The key, of course, is what's included in that data and here's where this really gets interesting.

We learn that the Programmer is American, female and only five-years-old as I write but twenty-three when she starts this project, making this surprisingly near future. Her father took a series of photos of the menhir, which she duly feeds into the AI as data, but we realise quickly from the archival descriptions of them in the second poem that it's going to pick up on what else is in these photos too. Without context: women. With context: her mother, infidelity, divorce. News articles in the same poem add further details about now, why the menhir was destroyed, not just toppled but smashed, and underlines how history is a continuing thing. However, we have to wonder about balance. Where will the AI find it? For a Bronze Age megalith, this data is skewed very recent.

Between the second and third poems, we learn that we can't trust what we're reading anyway. A news article covers the removal from the menhir site of the Poet, one of the Programmer's dad's women, after she attempted to establish a residence there. However, her own account suggests otherwise. Who can we trust? And, by extension, who will the AI trust? In the fourth poem, the AI asks the same question. It wants more information, especially about the Poet. Insufficient data! And in the fifth poem, the Poet seeds her complete oeuvre into the AI. Now we're skewing in new directions.

And that's the first section. Not much has happened in story but a heck of a lot has been put into motion. As Walker continues through the other sections, we start to see patterns and cycles, and multiplications of error, like the stone tomb "repaired" into a picnic table. Somewhat inevitably, the initial memorial, created in hologram form, is a failure, so the Programmer deletes attempt one and enhances her instructions for attempt two. The AI needs setting, context, perhaps more than she has to give.

Where I got lost were points in the third and fourth sections, as the need for more data extends following logic that isn't ours. Maybe that's entirely appropriate, given that it's an AI looking for it without the benefit of being an actual human being with all the cultural groundwork we acquire by simply living our lives. Suddenly we're learning about Anaïs Nin (the Diarist); Diana, Princess of Wales (the Hologram Princess) and the debut album by the Cars (the Cover Model). If we wonder what these people have to do with a hologram memorial to a toppled megalith, then maybe that is the entire point. The Lunar Colony AI tasked with the job doesn't see a problem. Why do we?

In the end, I think the point being reached is that the fundamental purpose of this memorial, and indeed any memorial, whatever it's remembering, is grief. You can't create a monument to grief without understanding what it means to grieve. And, through its very nature, that's something AI can never do. It can generate a hologram on the fly. It can change it in ways we might not expect just as quickly. It can trawl in every bit of data it can find on any subject it deems pertinent and it can crunch it all together to shape what it generates. But it can't grieve and so it can't do the job it's been asked to do. The Hologram Princess perhaps gives us the answer. "You get a picture that makes you think of a rose, then how rose-like the image it presents isn't."

I liked this book, the ninety-eighth in Aqueduct Press's 'Conversation Pieces' series. While I do like structure around the poetry I write, however unusual, because that's part of the writing challenge for me, I understand that the rules we apply are entirely our own. However, Walker is happy here to expand the definition of poetry cunningly beyond the boundaries I'd thought possible, like the expanding readme.txt files with built-in FAQs or AI prompts built from archival descriptions as an entirely futuristic code. This is an ambitious work and it's still resonating with me. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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