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Sat 02 Feb 2007More than a 'Metre' from Hull to PraguePoetry:To go out into the world rattling the intelligent change in your pockets, your wallet well padded with talent and discrimination is a fine start in life. To have such capacities and then start a substantial magazine whose own ambition and sensibility might create the taste whereby it and you yourself are judged, is remarkable.Justin Quinn and David Wheatley are the founders of Metre, a magazine of just such scope and weight, and have written books that demand special attention and win prizes. There are indeed certain similarities between their two new books. Both place a high premium on formal control and are abundantly intelligent in their use of it. They share an elegant late classicism that is fully aware of its debt to modernity. Rhymes, pentameters, sonnets, couplets, lightly handled quatrains, figure greatly in Quinn and only to a slightly lesser extent in Wheatley, who touches some more experimental chords. And this is appropriate because Quinn's chief subject is history - its scale, copiousness, pathos and marshalling - while Wheatley's might be best described as a spiritual aesthetics.