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From Wales to Macao |
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Years ago,
when I was young and foolish, I had the audacity to find Peter Porter's poems
very similar to being forced to read the Daily Mail for pleasure. I was reminded of this
in Herbert Williams' book, where he is somewhere compared to Porter and
others, including The Movement's uninterestingly plain poems, as if that were
the highest praise. If I were Williams, I would rise up and smite the
perpetrator of such misinformation. Williams is indeed a plain (Welsh) poet -
if that is not a contradiction in terms - and, if it is of the kind which has
little charm for me, I have learned enough in the past 50 years to recognise
that poets like Williams are popular, just as, my mother would have asserted,
the poet Pam Ayres deserved to be. What emerges from Williams' poems is
everyday life with its universal hopes and dreams, where it is commonplace to
be included as solace in poems. The refreshing thing about Williams,
though, escaping the final platitude via the last poem in the book, is that
he doesn't trust the poets, nor, presumably, by definition, their ability to
come up with the right answers (from 'What Would Dylan Be Writing?'): |
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I imagine
Christopher Kelen's jerky poems are an attempt to reflect the duality of the
modern state of Macao - known as "the Monte Carlo of the Orient" -
formerly a Portuguese colony, and, since 1999, a Special Administrative
Region of the People's Republic of China, where nearly half-a-million
citizens are crammed into an area of 10 square miles. Kelen's poems make it
seem precisely that breathlessly crowded - which presumably you would expect
from an Australian - not least in the abundance of verbal atmospherics the
collection provides, much of which, I confess, I found too dense for more
than occasional interest, even when lucidity is the order of the day, as
in 'first breath of autumn': |