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Take a look at Jenny Joseph's first poem in Nothing like Love:
Fancy Free
It was the time of daffodils
And
I fancy free
So free; as free
As birds that home to nest
Propelled by the season:
And how free are they?
It's that word 'daffodils' that seems to whack me between the eyes.
'Daffodils' stand out like yellow traffic jackets in a motorway pile up. The
word daffodils in a poem takes me to only one place, and that is beside a
lake beneath and beneath a trees. I scan the horizon for lonely clouds and
things that flutter in the breeze. Yet aren't these daffodils marvellous. For
some inexplicable reason I love this line 'It was a time of daffodils'.
Perhaps the reason for this 'loving' is the context of words which follow it.
We don't wander into a pastoral idyll along the Milky Way, but we do wander
into an emotional idyll - one where the poet was young and carefree and happy
as the grass was green. Shades of Thomas and other lyrical proponents find
the air. And lyrical they - almost rejoicing in song:
A CHILD EXPECTING VISITORS
I heard you
were coming and
Thrum thrum thrum
Went something in my heart like a
Drum drum drum
And:
Baby's Song
Ding-dong
the voices in your head
the voices in your head
Ding- dong
they fall like gold and lead-
en voices in your head
Sing-song
the flyers in the sky
wings cutting through the sky /
I wanted not to be moved by these poems but for some reason I was. A bit like
a dreadful tune the you can't get out of your head - an - 'O you Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang ... We love you...'. Or a 'Whaats tha maataaa yoo - ah
shuttupa yar face!'
But to get back to the book's theme 'Love'. These are traditional love poems
in the main -and tortured love
at that:
Euridyce
My love has
power to force the sea's return
Up the black rocks. preserve forever its foam //
My love could make the dead cherry-tree stir
White in the growing grass, had power to give
A paradise to the desert, shyness to the wolf
But not to make
me live.
Great Sun
//Storm wind
That brings the clouds
Huge and heavy, stifling up the heavens
Push on, push them over
So
the the flattened garden can be righted
And love recover.
Jenny Joseph's poems are sincerely and deeply felt: they are philosophical
and well observed; they hanker for a time of youth and happiness. What they
lack in poetic craft and guile they make up for in truth - absolute.
© James McLaughlin 2010
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