The Magnetic Fields
André Breton & Philippe Soupault
(NYRB, 112 pp, £11.99)
Tablet bookshop price £10.79 • tel 020 7799 4064

Art of Escape
Mina Gorji
(Carcanet press, 72 pp, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £8.99 • tel 020 7799 4064

Hiddensee
Annie Freud
(Picador, 144 pp, £10.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9.89 • tel 020 7799 4064

You could say that poetry holds in an uneasy balance two opposing impulses: the wild and the harmonious. For the harmonious, dip into the youthful Milton; for the wild, take a risk on the poetry of surrealism. André Breton (pictured) was surrealism’s founder and its bossy panjandrum, and yet, slightly surprisingly, his first foray into automatic writing was made in conjunction with another poet called Philippe Soupault. They took it in turns to shock, outrage and generally bemuse in a marvellous, no-holds-barred romp of a book called The Magnetic Fields. The impulsive rush of their words reads like traffic coming at your quivery, naked, knock-kneed form from every direction without any notion of a speed limit.