|
|
Welch is on the readable
side of an experimental tradition; he writes about the atomisation of
identity and the quandary of subjectivity whilst eschewing familiar
post-modern stylistic traits (such as not making any bloody sense). His voice
is instantly accessible and pleasingly unusual. An Eastern European feel
pervades poems such as Fathering:
The stars
have broken out
Into their
brutal glitter.
Frost
roughened trees
Lead up to a
brick tower.
In there my
children are asleep
Stacked one
above the other.
Images visual and direct swinging on the hinge of one well chosen word the
brutal stars. It is the
clarity and confidence of the uncanny, also present in Launch: It was a
narrow door / Like a coffin lid, and swung open - / Ahead were the tight
stairs. On top of this imagistic facility, Welch possesses a comfortable
sense of the absurd. Gods are a
recurring motif in his poems but not in the clumsy updating of a Greek myth
or specious arcane reference. Welchs deities are defeated, anonymous and
frustrated, as in Edge:
The God has
gone back under the waves
Uselessly
uselessly trying to write his name
Im not sure why Im so delighted by that couplet I guess its just
refreshing to read a poem that operates so matter of factly under its own
logic. It is also a perfect repetition; the relentless gesture beautifully
phrased, echoing the chill of the last line: And these are our defeats the
sea is smiling with.
Welch treads the line between the playful and the unsettling deftly and
subtly. There is something alarming in the Kandinsky image conjured by
Creature:
The creature
has learned
To make itself music
Plucking and
sawing
Away at the
guts of itself.
It has the beautiful awkwardness of direct translation, a sense of newness to
the language unusual in much of English poetry. And while Welch receives one
demerit for using the word tendrils in Analysis, this is wholly eclipsed
by the accolades he deserves for the off-hand brilliance of:
While kestrel
hung
Like an
asterisk
The Eastern Boroughs is
separated into three books, the assured voice losing its footing a little in
the second. Take, for instance,
the wonderful dream sequence in That Time in France wherein a woman made of
cheese pushes in front of Welch in a queue. This is somewhat undermined by
the fact that were told its a
dream. Like anyone was going to read it and question the veracity of the
travelogue. Welch has already raised the surrealist bar higher than this
therefore it seems like an odd concession.
The more prosaic pieces in Book Two are the weakest in an otherwise exemplary
collection. The Dough Bowl is
somewhat overlong. It was
bought one wet afternoon in an English seaside town. Someone must have driven
round Central Europe buying these things up, the light wood limewood?...
[etc.] Are you stifling what Im
stifling? The prerogative of any piece of writing called The Dough Bowl,
even culled directly from a note-book, should be to make you pretty excited
about the dough bowl otherwise who cares? Take the dough bowl away. Put
dough in it or something.
This mood continues in On Sark. You can tell its a notebook / journal
because the phrasing is out, there are sometimes too many spaces between two
words and sometimes none at all after a full-stop. Some of it is crying out
to be edited:
deep in the
well the eye of water
the I of
water
Its such a splendid image of a well, too. No need to ruin it with the
observation that the words eye and I sound the same (vague notions of
identity as a liquid notwithstanding). Much better to keep the first line and
maybe even insert a comma, comme a:
Deep in the well, the eye of water. But then I never did appreciate the
avant-garde attitude to punctuation.
Maybe its something to do with living the greater part of my life a short
drive from the coast: I take seaside towns for granted, they all feel eerily
over-familiar, Im amazed that anyone has anything to say about them
(although it usually turns out that they dont). Welch draws attention to
typical Sark holidaymakers, but thankfully spares us any portraiture setting
himself above the glut of English poets who seem to write primarily to
exercise their superiority over your common tourist. Elsewhere, he is
thousands of leagues deeper. So during the mid-section, I was tapping my
foot, waiting for Welch to leave the tea-rooms and the promenade and turn his
attention back to The ever-hooded, tragic gestured sea that underpins his
best work.
The first piece in Book Three is a long prose-poem (gosh, but it makes me
cross when people say theres no such thing as prose-poetry. Is A Season
In Hell a collection of short
stories?) named The Sense Of It and its stunning, detailing Welchs
experience of breakdown, brain-scan and benign tumour. He eloquently captures
the shifts in consciousness, the sudden magic in ordinary things, at once
beautiful and awful.
'All right, this happens to everyone, but its got more noticeable recently,
as if there are gaps, odd empty spaces in the world opening up somewhere just
behind you.'
This is how the narrative works; it finds a point of common reference, but
then extends the distance, de-focuses, so that the reader shares the writers
disorientation. The Sense of It could as much be read as a reflection on
the act of writing; Welchs honesty and clarity is truly disarming:
'When it is going well I have a feeling that everything means.' I
can't say what it means, that doesnt seem to be the point. It simply means, it has that sense of
fullness. As an infant might feel at the breast?
The expansive sweep of The Sense of It makes it a fine companion piece to
the shorter meditations on consciousness of which The Good Things is one
of the more startling:
His life? He
felt it was like
A novel of
which he had never
Read more
than the first few pages,
Such fullness
of expectation
Being caught
in the morning sunlight
And he could
never quite bear to read more.
It is still
there,
A book that
waits all night beside its owner.
Specifically, it is the ontological works that are the most breath-taking.
When Welch turns his focus from the detritus of life the concrete
references most of us have to make to avoid sentimentality and writes about
existence itself, it becomes apparent that he is a uniquely gifted writer. He
can take the feeling the abstract, impossible feeling itself and describe
it more precisely and elegantly than if it were a landscape.
Benign Tumour engages directly with the psychological vs. the physiological
mind, hinting that our sense of knowing one another may be illusory.
Watching the
ferry approach I asked if you had the right change.
Then as I
was saying goodbye it came,
That
moment of indescribable strangeness
Called an
aura. Its as if a gear shifts in my brain
And I felt
I was seeing you for the very first time
Where you
were standing beside me on the sand.
It was the
thing still lodged in my head
That
appeared to be telling me this
As you
climbed in the little boat and sailed away.
In this, as in much of The Eastern Boroughs, Welch is at the top of his game, profoundly
affecting, fascinating and sad. There is a real cost to this work: it is not
just the meaning of words that is at risk that dissolved long ago it is
the things themselves, our very sense of self. Not the units by which we
measure, but the units by which we live:
Whatever was
it, the meaning
Of all that
closeness, being at home together?
Its as if we
were not sure
Quite what to
do with it,
There was so
much that went without saying
And I still
find it hard to explain
The silences,
surrounding us
Like pools of
dusty light.
[From
Family]
While it may be the stark, high-modernist lucidity of all thats solid
melting into air which initially allures, there is yet an innocence and a
warmth that plays against it, awakens further synapses. Much here deserves
a place in Welchs Selected Works. The Feelings, for instance, is essential:
And he
remembered them out of his childhood
Or rather, as
if they were
What he
remembered remembering
He thought,
the feelings were like
Animals
part familiar and part strange.
Deceptively simple, Welchs ideas unfold on inspection (Ah, the right way
round for a change, thank God). He doesnt hide his intellectualism, rather
states it plainly which is the mark of true sophistication.
Luke
Kennard 2004
|