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FOREIGN TERRITORIES
I Been There, Sort Of by Mervyn
Morris
(Carcanet, 2006, 92 pp, £9.95)
The War Works Hard by Dunya
Mikhail
(tr. Elizabeth Winslow, Carcanet, 2006,
78 pp., £9.95)
Slower by Andrew
McNeillie
(Carcanet, 2006, 94 pp., £9.95)
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These three collections take the reader into foreign,
far-flung territories. The first two are selections from previous books:
Mervyn Morris supplements his picks from four previous books with over 30
pages of new poems. A West Indian poet, his work veers between patois,
Creole, Jamaican slang (sometimes like a less political LKJ ) and standard
English. For me, the shorthand character sketches, often using patois or
speech rhythms, are the most immediate things in the book. 'Interview',
'North Coast Hotel' and 'Cabal', though not all written in full-on patois,
benefit from this sense of freshness: the last-named is sinister and
effective, concluding 'De eediot bwoy was tryin / to block de road. We move
him out de way.' The explicitly religious sequence 'On Holy Week' (1976),
which follows, was originally written for radio and again, a babble of voices
(Joseph of Arimathaea, Mary, the thief on the cross) speaks to the reader of
the events. These are not quite as powerful as they should be, but one or two
are very incisive. 'Pilate', for instance, analyses the timeless atmosphere
of political corruption surrounding Roman power:
Your
masters wouldn't like it much
if
we should let them know
we
caught a man supplanting Rome
and
you have let him go.
The rest of the books works through three earlier collections, dating from
1973, 1979 and 1992 respectively, and these aren't quite so strong. The
non-chronological order doesn't help in identifying progression or thematic
continuity, either, but the latest poems certainly make a case for getting to
know Morris' work.
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi writer now living in America. She speaks Arabic,
Aramaic and English and, unsurprisingly, the writing and publishing of her
work through the 1990s has been fraught with the kind of personal danger
English poets never have to consider. In her introduction, Saadi Simawe
contextualises Mikhails' work with some clarity, and Elizabeth Winslow's
translations are precise and accessible to the Western reader. She writes of
exile, violence and upheaval, but also using parable, metaphors which recall
the metaphysicals and a free verse timbre which occasionally recalls writers
like Allen Ginsberg: Mikhail's 'America', a lengthy piece, seems to recast
Ginsberg's Whitmanesque musings on his country back in the 1950s and early
1960s.
Some of the recent pieces in this volume possess an almost-documentary
authenticity: 'Bag of Bones' steps straight from the news footage of mass
graves and atrocities so depressingly familiar; 'The Game' explores the empty
rhetoric of war as a sequence of moves; 'The Prisoner' and 'Between Two Wars'
explores the effects of such random, everyday violence on the innocent
civilians caught up in them. Two pieces are particularly recommended: the
title poem, 'The War Works Hard', personifies war as a diligent worker in a
tone of sympathetic irony - 'early in the morning, / it wakes up the sirens/
and dispatches ambulances/ to various places..' - concluding 'Éno one gives
it/ a word of praise.' The other particularly powerful poem, 'An Urgent Call'
discusses the US military's torture and interrogation of detainees at Abu
Ghraib and elsewhere, dramatising Lynndie England's role in particular. She
was the young American caught on film treating those detained as animals:
'hurry up, Lynndie, / go back to America now. / Don't worry, / you will not
lose your job.' Here, as elsewhere in this fine collection, Mikhail's equable
tones hide the disgust and rage which the reader shares.
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The third foreign territory explored here is the wild
region of North Wales which Andrew McNeillie tramps in 'Slower', his third
major collection. Several sequences explore the territory biographically or
tangentially: 'Portrait of the Poet as a Young Dog', 28 'Glyn Dŵr
Sonnets', eleven poems entitled 'Homage to Patagonia', exploring attempts to
found a Welsh colony in Argentina in the late nineteenth-century, and a
sequence 'Arkwork', juxtaposed with Julian Bell's drawings, which is based on
a ferry disaster in 1953. Surrounding these are some substantial
free-standing poems and a further sequence 'North Clutag'.
Given this range, the reader certainly does not feel short-changed, but there
is a very real sense that a slimmer, sharper book lies somewhere within these
extensive patterns, like field-patterns persisting beneath luxuriant crops.
For me, admirable though McNeillie's work generally is, the single poems work
best: three fine meditations on the death of a parent ('Death', 'Shade at the
Funeral' and 'Gone for Good'), 'In Memoriam Edward Thomas' (Thomas always seems to inspire good poems from others) and the
title poem, 'Slower' with its pendant afterthought, 'Quicker'. These last two
anatomise the Irish peace process densely, rhythmically and wisely: 'Slower,
history beckoned, sifting its river-silts so / late in the day..' - a mordant
thought, with which Dunya Mikhail would probably agree. Not everything here
is good - I could have done without meandering elegies to Vernon Watkins and
Dylan Thomas, even though the latter seems heartfelt - but McNeillie is an
accomplished writer, continuing to develop with each subsequent collection.
In the best poems here he outgrows these influences, consistently adopting
the right tone and exploring many different forms confidently.
© M.C.
Caseley 2006
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