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I
passed over these poems the first time I looked at them although hearing
James Bell reading some of the material from his first collection recently
gave me pause for thought. Bell himself says he knows little about fishing,
which may well be true but the work in fishing for beginners has the feel of being written
by someone who is very familiar with the estuarial river bank and the
wildlife which lives there. It's easy at first to perceive these poems as
fitting into a received pastoral theme, the kind of writing which is easy to
parody and perhaps easy to write but there is a deceptive 'simplicity' at
work here, where observation merges with un underlying melancholy which is
nevertheless life-affirming in a strange way.
There's a sense of plain statement here which often belies a wry humour or a
more serious, ought I to say philosophical, mode of writing which is very
satisfying to read when you begin to familiarise yourself with Bell's tactics
and approach:
it is
customary to throw the fish
the line - include bait at one end
hold the other - if nothing happens
be assured
the fish has not drowned
(from 'fishing for beginners')
This is writing in the tradition of Thoreau's Walden, rather than, say, Marvell's more metaphysical
conceits, where an exploration of the 'natural world' is seen as an antidote
to the ways of mankind and a working environment where time is a valuable
commodity. Yet to state this so boldly is to miss the subtlety of Bell's
work, which is more than a late-Romantic response to
industrial/post-industrial society, which would be a clichˇ before it hit the
page and very hard to pull off. Bell's observations set up a relationship
between the watcher and the seen and also between language and world:
you craved
the river
wanted the
timelessness
undisturbed
by its wild
by its calm -
how time has passed
since you saw
water last
revel in the
heathen awe
what is
craved you realise can be close
to craven,
but thankfully too a haven
(from 'craved')
Bell is a skilful lyricist, he uses rhyme carefully and is occasionally quite
an experimenter, particularly in 'gossip round a river crown', where he
develops a method of repetition which aids the flow of the piece. What comes
across most about these fine poems is Bell's individual take on the world and
his deceptively plain yet information-rich observations which make you think
about matters anew. They are both attractive and strangely surprising when
you get beneath the surface and it's certainly worth taking the effort to do
so.
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Rhys
Trimble's poetry couldn't be more different than Bell's but is equally
interesting in its own way. This is poetry saturated in modernist technique
and history yet has, at times, an emotional thrust which propels the reader
forward. Some of the more interesting contemporary Welsh poets - Lloyd
Robson, Peter Finch and David Greenslade, for example - may have an awareness
of Dylan Thomas and R.S. Thomas, but their work is more informed by
avant-garde influences, American and European in the main. Trimble is a new
name to me and one, who like Finch, at times, uses the Welsh language
alongside English. While I have no semantic access to this, it certainly
looks good on the page and complements some of the multi-syllabic words he
utilises (Roger McGough isn't the only British poet influenced by e.e.
cummings). It probably sounds wonderful read out loud. There are themes and
subjects explored in these poems, from literary topics like Frank O'Hara to
Welsh mythology but it's the texture and fractured nature of the texts which
really appeals to me:
last hum
of
acousticstring cadence
crossout-lines
on
schoolchild's
black hirsgwar
metalruler welting
stereo-blent-wood
prism of slate
You can see the influence of Barry MacSweeney on these lyrics, certainly one
which Trimble acknowledges and it's good to see that this particularly
creative seam hasn't finished in a dead-end. Trimble's work looks good on the
page and his mix of expressive word-play, strange lyric fragments -
suggesting subjects not explored in more conventional sentences - also hint
at Maggie O'Sullivan, whose work I suspect he's familiar with.
In the Noisy Sounds,
we get:
lupine stance
she-night and
wet
with
afterdrink
with soapy
smoke
hunting
veneers of
headlights,
panels, wolfgod in
darkmead-vices
marlboro-lights
destructive
lupus homo
hominis
the smell
of
premeditation
vocalisation
This work seems quite close to Lloyd Robson's in its mix of condensed
language and narrative snippets, less cheerful and 'excessive' perhaps but
it's good again to see the influence. Rhys Trimble is a poet whose work I'll
be looking out for in the future.
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Damian
Furniss is a fantastic reader of his poetry and his work translates
wonderfully to the page. The three sections relate to periods of travel,
mainly in Cuba and in India, and the central selection - My White Ghosts - is comprised of poems
inspired in various ways by painters and their work. Of the latter, I was
particularly taken by 'Bacon Dust', where we get:
The art
connoisseur
Will say
'Vintage stuff!'
As he gets a
nose
of this
fragrant muff,
Snort it like
coke
Or sniff it
like snuff,
A line or a
pinch -
Pure bacon
dust.
These are poems which generally scan and often rhyme in traditional ways and
they are very satisfying to read or hear read out. Furniss has a knack of
combining a sense of the 'importance' of his subject which an earthy
injection of the frailties of the body and the dangers of romanticising. This
is most evident in 'Che's Hands', a puzzling, riddling poem where he explores
the notion of Che as martyr of the Cuban revolution:
Che's grave
is not Che's grave.
And the bones
in it are not Che's.
And those
photos of the dead Che
as Christ,
with the generals playing
Romans,
display neither Christ,
nor Che, nor
Romans. And his wounds
are not
wounds as we know them.
And if you
say that Che was a saint,
You either
did not meet that Che
or you have
never met a saint.
I can remember reading a piece by John Berger, years ago, suggesting the
iconic links between the corpse of Che and that of Christ and while Berger in
his own way is deeply involved in deconstructing images he comes from a very
different place from Furniss. You get the feeling from reading these poems
that Furniss is a poet who has seen a fair bit of the dark side of life and
of death in his early travels around the world and his take on things has a
more spiritual resonance. I admire this poem and what I take to be its
'argument', despite the fact that I still have a soft spot for Noam Chomsky
and wish that American foreign policy really could become a force for good in
the world.
Poems about paintings often 'miss the mark' but Furniss is an exception to
that 'rule'. In particular his pieces on Egon Schiele and Edward Hopper
capture something of the backdrop, the mood, the style and milieu of the
respective painters:
I can take
lines for a wicked walk
with my
fingers, nibbed like quills;
smear on
swabs of colour with
the pads of
idle thumbs. ...
(from 'Nip the Bud')
which manages both an amusing aside to Paul Klee and to express something of
the 'disturbing meatiness' of Schiele's work.
Her flips the sign
from open to
closed, dims
the lights,
and dusk comes in
from where
the road merges
with a
smothering of trees.
(from 'Gas,1940')
Hopper appears as the American equivalent of De Chirico, where the emptiness
of the landscape has an ominous quality of its own and where people are
marginal and their psychology goes unexplored. Road movies where the subject
is the road.
There's a jaunty side to Furniss' work, expressed in taut rhythms and
debunking relish:
He wore a
marzipan beret,
Its insignia
that rarity-
A perfect
star-shaped strawberry-
To strip the
comandante
Who took the
I from industry
Of the badge
that gave him dignity.
They gagged
him with a Cadbury's flake
Imported by
the C.I.A.
And stretched
him on a rack of cane
Lashed onto a
Chevrolet,
Carved him up
at Gitmo Bay
With harvest
blunt machetes-
(from 'Chocolate Che')
The excess of the American Dream, a consumer glut inside a horror story like
the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy. This is more complex stuff than it
first seems and Damian Furniss has put together a collection that demands to
be read and re-read. A triumph.
© Steve Spence 2010
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