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Alan Morrison is a young poet whose work I've been reading
for three or four years now. His quietly impressive anti-establishment poetry
has been growing on me, with its mix of often-traditional verse-forms, and
his empathy for outsiders and those critical of the way our global capitalist
society inflicts damage on the weakest and those least able to take care of
themselves. He's a fine writer with a rich stock of literary source works and
a wide cultural knowledge to draw upon. We've had our slight differences with
regards to notions of the modern and the post-modern in contemporary poetry
but this has proved to be a useful dialogue and one which I think has been a
two-way street. What I wasn't prepared for was what he appears to have
achieved in his new collection, a work inspired by his three year residency
as a voluntary creative-writing tutor at Mill View psychiatric hospital in
Hove.
This is a book in two parts, the first a series of Cantos, using the
metaphor/image of the Dragon as a way of dealing with notions of creativity
and mental health, a minefield of a subject but one which Morrison embraces
with sensitivity and fantastic energy. He challenges that old notion, taken
from early maps where the 'here be dragons' depiction suggest areas of danger
or menace, and turns it completely on its head. The second, shorter section
is composed in three-line stanzas with an entirely charming rhyme-scheme
which is both relentless and energising and deals on a more day-to-day basis
with the experience of working with groups of patients, although Morrison is
careful to maintain that his comments are general rather than related to
distinct individuals. This is a compassionate as well as a ferociously
intelligent writer whose values, for my money, are all in the right place.
These Cantos are pretty much blank verse and are filled with wide erudition,
splendid, tongue-twisting wordplay and alliteration, where the thinking is
allied to pleasure in language and an increasing sense of angry reasoning
which builds as a powerful response to notions of sanity and madness as a
critique of our whole social order. This is R.D. Laing for the new century
and its arguments are coherent as well as being emotionally responsive. In
terms of Morrison's formal devices I can only say that this magnificent and
beautifully designed work reads like a coming together of Milton and Joyce, a
glorious anachronism (I mean that in a very positive sense) which in my view, blows away a lot of the tired
arguments between modernists and post-modernists and the linguistically
innovative, and at the same time throws out a challenge to all 'minority
non-mainstream groupings' to see what common ground they might explore. This
is quite simply a masterpiece and while I certainly don't want to induce any
anxieties in its author, I can only say that he's going to have real trouble
in providing a 'follow-up' to this magnificent and powerful work.
Who'll
employ these drugged ghosts, these
spectres of the living,
These
dampened shades, these phantom extrapolations;
These
light-wilted wraiths washed-up before their primes?
Who's to
shovel slush on their plates to What's the Time
Mr. Wolf? Who's to cuff their wrists with bands when they
Huff, puff
and blow themselves down with scowling howls,
Or are goaded
like Billy Goats Gruff by phantom trolls
Skulking
under sighing bridges of their chinny chin chins?
(from 'Canto V')
Although there's a serious aspect to this poem, Morrison includes many
references (and snippets) from children's literature in his writing and
achieves what I think must be a first when using both Chomsky and Lewis
Carroll while musing on the nature of 'nonsense' - Chomsky in the sense that
a sentence can be perfectly correct in terms of its grammar but completely
'barmy' in terms of its meaning. Chomsky is not a writer who usually gets
quoted in relation to the 'creative' or 'fictional' aspects of writing and
Morrison is superb at making these connections and weaving them into his
overall polemic, for he is a polemicist of sorts but one fuelled by great
imaginative flights and superbly controlled rants (I'm so envious of this
facility!). His mixing of unexpected sources is evident from the preface
where we are given a quotation from
Alvarez's eloquent and powerful book, The Savage God (a study of suicide) followed by an unlikely piece
from H.P. Lovecraft's The Tomb. which
comments, in its roundabout way on the relation between madness and the
imagination. Morrison's whole book is an argument in favour of an expanded
consciousness (and I'm not talking about iffy new-age thinking here) as
related to the harsh realities of the here and now, which certainly look like
getting harsher. There are unexpected moments here where I actually burst out
laughing, for instance when he includes the phrase 'Adam and Eve and Pinch
Me' (from the playground trick) which was possibly something he overheard in
a teaching session. I love the way this book is filled with stuff, which
rattles along, connecting and disconnecting in almost manic clusters of
images and thought-flows. Yet the formal control of the piece just about
keeps the whole in check and avoids it toppling off the cliff altogether:
Time bends, becomes
Irrelevant,
surceases, the diatribes of flow
Exorcise cranial ghosts, scour poltergeists of the
lobes;
While the
clock melts, hands vanish, numbers blur, nurses
Scurry
corridors, dozens of watch-chained rabbits haggard
With
compassion, fatigue always late for patients arriving
Before their
bodies, galumphing unpunctually after them
Lumbering
under rubbery weights out of time and place,
Morbidly
overdue as sub-contracted trains, dragging
Their heels
grudgingly by obligation's auto-pilot; ....
(from 'Canto XI')
There's an impressive Notes
section at the end of the Cantos, which aids rather than gets in the way of
understanding but read the poems first. As someone once said of Milton, you
need to read him for the sense and then listen for the sound. These poems
have a rhythmic, metrical beauty as well as being fuelled by a powerful and
humane critique.
The Shadow Thorns has a more
traditional feel yet is filled with jangling imagery and with compassion:
But we're
becoming squarer and squarer -
We're on a
collision course with nature
Because we
can't fit into the future...
(from 'Laura
of the Tangets')
I've just finished listening to The Moral Maze on Radio 4 and wonder what the shrill and
acerbicly right-wing 'thinker', Melanie Phillips, would make of Morrison's
work. What do I care - he's touched with genius whereas Phillips isn't even
touched with compassion. This is a wonderful, wonderful book.
© Steve Spence 2011
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