The Spanish Civil War; and Granada
& a review of Yoke and Arrows by Rob Hindle (Smokestack, 2014)
Since the global capitalist crisis sparked by criminal –and as yet unpunished– banking behaviour in 2008, Spain, second only to the Mediterranean’s ancestral seat of democracy, Greece, has been rocked most remorselessly by austerity cuts, its public sector ransacked and its youth betrayed to chronic unemployment (at an all-time high of 51%) –all ramifications of fiscal policies inflicted by the ultra-capitalist Troïka (the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and European Commission). This puts one of the more historically volatile of southern European countries in a precariously incendiary position, which to date (April 2014) shows no signs of any significant improvement, in spite of centre-right political leaders across the Continent incipiently speaking of “the Great Recession” now more in the past tense. But such optimism only applies, as ever, to the European super-rich, while ordinary people, the workers, the underemployed and the unemployed are yet to see any improvement in their pay packets, iniquitously stripped benefits, and plummeting living standards, and may well not yet for some years –even decades– to come.
In Spain, in the meantime, tensions as to land rights and distributions at a time of economic paralysis have already seen scenes not dissimilar to those in agricultural regions of Spain in the early Thirties, with some landless groups taking over apparently unused land belonging to absentee city-living landlords in order to grow their own food and be self-sufficient (and in a manner also historically similar to the English Diggers of the late 1640s and early 1650s, and, as well, a brief flourishing of present-day English Diggers on the Brunel campus near Runnymede in 2012). Further, there have been significant protests and civil demonstrations by anti-austerity groups, such as Cabalgata de los Indignado (the Outraged Cavalcade) (who also use today the same defiant phrase used against the fascists in Thirties Spain, ¡No Pasarán!, ‘They shall not pass!’), and the militant miners who have conducted hunger marches (in ceremonial hard hats and walking canes, which have often ended in bloody confrontations with police), even sporadically partaken in a primitive form of guerrilla warfare using homemade rocket launches against Spanish police. Such deteriorations in political and industrial relations have, inevitably, accelerated since the return to power of the right-wing Popular Party in 2011. Spain is a hot-blooded nation, and its inhabitants are not historically known for sitting down and putting up with governmental political oppression for very long.
As was the case during the Great Depression, which devastated the Western world throughout the 1930s, Spain, perennially one of the poorer European nations, is once again one of the worst hit by capitalist malfeasance. The impact of the Thirties’ Depression, to some extent, led to a climate of social and political tensions which culminated in the Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939), sparked by a right-wing military coup led by General Francisco Franco against the democratically elected centre-left Republican Government. This shattering internecine conflict ended, after four years of ruthless and bloody fighting, with the cataclysmic victory of the Francoists. The Spanish Civil War was also, in many respects, a dusty rehearsal for the Second World War, which became inevitable once it was clear to hitherto appeasing Western powers that the military triumph of Fascism in Spain was unlikely to be restricted to that nation alone as the expansionist rhetoric of Hitler waxed ever more aggressively over the airwaves to the heils of his brownshirts.
There had also, of course, been the highly significant invasion and eventual occupation of Abyssinia by Mussolini’s Italian Fascist forces between 1935-36, paralleled by Hitler’s incursions into the Rhineland in March 1936 –both vicissitudes having been quietly tolerated by the increasingly toothless League of Nations, but which had both served as dire warnings of the growing Fascist threat. For Fascism is, implicitly, an active creed, a behavioural ideology which is intrinsically pugnacious and pugilistic; not an armchair philosophy such as the brandied Liberalism it so often rubs up against for time-playing appeasements while it musters its artilleries for the ‘surprise’ ambush of democracy.
The Spanish Civil War was the most baldly ideological European national conflict of the 20th century, and attracted tens of thousands of volunteers from other European countries, mostly young men of left-wing ideals who flocked to the Communist-organised ranks of the International Brigades. These included battalions of green literati, socialist and communist poets of the period, such as Robert Graves, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Tom Wintringham, and several who never returned, their lives and highly promising careers cut brutally short: John Cornford, Christopher Caudwell, Ralph Fox et al. Due to its perception at the time as much more a political crusade in defence of social democracy against the rise of reactionary and authoritarian fascism than a simple prosaic war of nations, this singular conflict has long melted into the mythology of the European Left as symbolic of a pivotal peripeteia in world and socialist history, and is still venerated today in many respects as an historic example of the passion, bravery and defiance of the socialist spirit against the most formidable of odds.
In some senses, too, as with the political upheavals of 1848, and the French and Russian Revolutions, the Spanish Civil War was also, in some respects, another unexpected rupture in the otherwise ‘locked-in’ teleology of dialectical materialism, as propounded by Karl Marx in Das Kapital: even if ultimately unvictorious for the Republic, the anarcho-syndicalist experiment in Republican Barcelona during a period of the conflict’s duration was every bit as significant in the history of socialist organisation and anti-capitalist self-sustainability as the Paris Communes of 1848 and 1870-71.
Historical revisionism of the past couple of decades has attempted in part to redress the traditional cultural attitudes towards the Spanish Civil War, in terms of the actual nature of the conflict, which had been (justifiably, though also rather hypocritically in the case of those politicians who had at the time maintained neutrality) much more weighted in favour of the Republican/Loyalist side with regards to conduct, compared to the –though still, according to documentation, more ruthless– Nationalist side. And although it was written mostly from the perspective of the Republicans, socialist filmmaker Ken Loach’s 1995 depiction of the war, Land and Freedom –using as its main source material George Orwell’s forensic empirical memoir-cum-polemic of the conflict Homage to Catalonia– did not shrink from emphasising that in many ways the ultimate defeat of the Republic was as much due to internecine conflicts within the various factions of the Left, as allegedly orchestrated by the Soviet Stalinist powers (which turned both propaganda and guns against some groups of its own side), as it was to the Nationalist side’s overwhelming military arsenal, equipped and reinforced as it was by both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (Fascism also being, by nature, a distinctly militaristic ideology, in part adumbrated by the spike-moustached Prussian bombast of Bismark and Kaiser Wilhelm, but with lashings of racial prejudices and genetic mythologies throw into the mix. Fascists are basically the Spartans of modern history, but equipped with machine guns).
The more liberal Western governments, such as the UK, USA and France, while tepidly sympathetic towards the Spanish Republic, spinelessly ruled out any military intervention on its behalf, and even shied away from any significant diplomatic intervention. This policy of quiescence later melted into the notorious one of Appeasement, in the British case, under starchy Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, used to try and flatter Hitler into playing by the Queensbury rules, but which, nevertheless, tipped into declaration of war against Germany once the Nazis impolitely stomped into Poland. The failure of even the British Opposition to support intervention on behalf of the centre-left Spanish Republic was the cause of an ongoing Left-Right rift in the Labour Movement for some time afterwards.
This was also echoed among the British Left literati of the time. Victor Gollancz’ Left Book Club being ostensibly founded in 1936 as a direct literary response to the fascist threat, and included among its contemporaneous titles Arthur Koestler’s Spanish Testament (1937) and G.E.R. Gedye’s Fallen Bastions (1939, about the fall of ‘Red Vienna’ and the rise of Nazism), while George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) would have also been an LBC Choice had its author not by then parted company with Gollancz after the ‘PR’ debacle over his controversial Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and sought sanctuary with Secker and Warburg. Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the author’s experiences as a correspondent during the conflict, appeared in 1940. There was also Cecil Day Lewis’s Left Review pamphlet writ large in a double-negative, ‘We’re not going to do NOTHING’, as well as numerous other periodical appeals for literary opposition to fascism; and, in broader British society, the series of ‘Spain Days’ during which the Spanish Republican cause was promoted in many British cities through municipal kiosks which distributed flags of the Spanish Republic and polemical pamphlets and brochures arguing in its defence against fascism. Over twenty years after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, there came perhaps the definitive work on the conflict, Hugh Thomas’s 800-paged bible-thick The Spanish Civil War (Pelican, 1961); and over the following four decades legion other tomes, slims and pamphlets on this most ideological of wars have appeared, many concentrating on specifics, such as the International Brigades and the contributions of the British Left to their serried ranks, mostly through left-leaning fringe imprints. And the intra-Left cross-dialectics on the tortuous intrigues of the Soviet-sponsored Loyalist side, frequently bashed out between the Leninist (sometimes also Stalinist apologists) and Trotskyite factions of the radical Socialist* Left.
[*actually meaning Communist in this context: political wings almost always name themselves after their closest, more moderate cousins, presumably partly as a camouflage for more revolutionary significations –this political implicature is particularly typical of British parties, either through rhetorical camouflage or titular deception: prime examples being UKIP (whose scepticism towards the EU and immigration disguises what is essentially gentrified nationalism of more the Mosley than Salmond type); the BNP and EDL are of course essentially two factions of the old openly racist National Front; the Liberal Democrats are today actually just Liberals, in the Classical sense of the term, which means bourgeois libertarianism but indifference to proletarian interests; the ‘New’ of New Labour was a euphemism for ‘Neoliberal’, while Ed Miliband’s makeover of ‘One Nation’ Labour translates either as ‘(pseudo-) redistributive capitalism’, ‘social capitalism’, ‘compassionate capitalism’, or ‘social democratic’ (the old SDP position); the Scottish National Party would more accurately be called the Scottish Socialist Party; Plaid Cymru could well be called the Welsh Socialist Party; the Green Party would be more accurately called the Green Left (actually the name of one of its ginger groups), the Green Socialist Party, the Eco-Socialist Party (or even Green Labour –if nothing else, as a more grassroots riposte to the risible ‘Blue’ Labour bandwagon of a couple of years back); and present-day British Conservatism, in terms of social policy, could be more accurately renamed ‘Militant Toryism’, ‘Privilgism’, ‘Blue Falangism’, ‘Blue Malthusianism’, ‘Social Darwinism’, ‘social fascism’, “democratic’ fascism’, or, perhaps less alarmingly, ‘Two Nations Toryism’].
Or [*actually meaning Communist in this context: the more militant political parties almost always name themselves after their closest, more moderate cousins, an implicature which camouflages more radical significations to the wider public while at the same time tacitly signifying to possible sympathisers/supporters a more fundamental ideological impetus].
In terms of poetry-witness, or rather, empirical poetry on the Spanish conflict, there was of course W.H. Auden’s partly hortatory, partly despairing epic poem ‘Spain, 1937’:
“What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will,
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”
…
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
And there were also the more experiential poems of Tom Wintringham, who originally went to the Spanish front as a correspondent for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) but ended up commanding a British batallion of the International Brigade; his collected poems, We’re Going On!, were published posthumously by Smokestack in 2006 (reviewed elsewhere on The Recusant).
In many respects, the Spanish Civil War was a war within a war, internecine in every sense, from the broad paradigm of it being between two ideological factions within one nation, and also by dint of the subsequent conflicts between various groups within one of those ideological factions, unfortunately for Spain, and for history, the progressive side –and whichever side in the conflict could not stay united was to almost inescapably be the one to lose the war. But a poetry book review isn’t the place to go much further into what was a truly tortuous web of deceits, betrayals and counter-actions within the Republican ranks.
But one other aspect to the Civil War which Land and Freedom in part touched on, and in spite of its fundamental –and, I’d argue, completely vindicated– pro-Republican slant, were the reprisals against Catholic priests for their active complicity with the Fascist side, and this is depicted quite brutally in one particular scene in Loach’s film, where a group of Loyalists drag a priest out from his church and shoot him. But such violent vicissitudes, where even the cassock wasn’t a protection against the bullet, must be kept in their context –as Loach does so expertly: priests complicit with the Fascists were perceived as betrayers of ordinary people (particularly the peasant classes) and of the social democracy in place to protect them from unfettered exploitation and oppression–and this accounted for the majority of the clergy, the Spanish Catholic Church having essentially declared its allegiance to the Fascist side.
Undoubtedly part of the reason for this –other than what was at the time a deeply reactionary seam in Spanish Catholicism, it ever being a far more conservative-minded form of the faith compared to, say, English Catholicism, which tends to be, oppositely, more to the Left politically– was the gradual but widespread secularisation (a cultural and institutional change from religious/Christian values to irreligious ones) in what was still a fairly ardently Catholic country, implemented under a social democratic administration from as early as 1931, and rolled out over the next four to five years, in the face of significant Catholic opposition. So while the Fascist forces opposed the Republic from a mostly political point of view (i.e. in terms of power structures and a preference for tradition, patriotism and monarchy), the Spanish Catholic Church came to oppose it, primarily, it would seem, from the point of view of feeling its continuation and sanctity threatened by what was often a rather aggressive rising secularism.
The reasons Spanish secularism had such an antipathy towards the Church was because many Spanish secularists, atheists, communists and socialists believed that, along with monarchy –which had been truncated with the abdication of King Alfonso XIII alongside the resignation of Miguel Primo de Rivera and his right-wing military dictatorship in 1930 –the Church, as the other ancient pillar of Spanish culture, was equally responsible for the long history of polarised social classes in the country, and the vast divide in terms of wealth and land ownership between the aristocratic and capitalist elites and the massive landless agricultural peasant population, most prolific in the South of the country (particularly in Andalusia). For secularists of various political colours (from centrist liberals to radical ‘reds’) the Church also needed to be wrenched out from its roots in order to hasten a national transformation from a backward, near-feudal society to a more equalised social democracy. There had already been bouts of open hostility towards the Church throughout the country sporadically even prior to the outburst of hostilities in the Civil War itself.
But for any Spaniard who was both Catholic and socialist at this time, choosing sides in the upcoming conflict must have proven extremely difficult and confusing, and would have undoubtedly been decided by just which of the individual’s beliefs, the religious or political, felt most important and urgent at that particular point. Certainly in social real terms, this choice would have felt weighted towards defending the Republic, in spite of its rampant secularism, since, in a previous guise and under mainly Socialists, it had implemented some fundamentally vital social policies, most important the new eight hour working day, which had significantly improved the conditions of impoverished rural agricultural workers and peasant classes throughout the country and thereby protected them from the worst effects of the Great Depression. The spectre of a future Fascist Spain (which, tragically, would come to pass and last right up until its dictator Franco’s death in 1975) was a truly black prospect for the landless classes of Spain, promising only absolute subjugation of their still-young and hard-won labouring rights, and a continuation of the near-binary obscenity of a nation abjectly divided between Haves and Have-Nots.
The Spanish Civil War was a deeply complex and confusing conflict, not least in the aforementioned ‘internecine war within an internecine war’ which bedevilled the Republican side; and such inner-conflicts were perhaps unavoidable given the more diverse array of political nuances that characterised the various Loyalist factions: Marxists, Communists, Socialists, Soviet-Stalinist Communists, Trotskyites (considered enemies of the Soviet State by Stalin), social democrats, liberals, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists –a heady gallimaufry of left-wing and centre-left ideological nuances which together mingled in the ranks of the International Brigades. By 1935, a splinter faction, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista/ Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification: which comprised the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (Izquierda Comunista de España, ICE) and the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC, affiliated with the Right Opposition)) was formed by those communists who were opposed to the Soviet Union’s interventionist attempts to control all Republican factions via strategic dictates from the Comintern. Subsequently, the Stalinist Soviet forces turned their propaganda and guns against the POUM, officially denouncing them as ‘Trotskyists’ and/or as a type of provocateur faction which was covertly trying to weaken the Republican side (also known as the Popular Front) patroned by Stalin, from within (which has since been proven a completely spurious accusation); and its founder, Andreu Nin, was eventually captured and tortured to death by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in Madrid.
This tawdry and brutal internecine episode in the Civil War, the Soviet suppression of the POUM –a pyrrhic victory for the Stalinists, since it ultimately led to the Republic’s defeat by the Francoists due to subsequent in-fighting in its ranks being what eventually weakened it sufficiently for the Fascists to triumph (deeply ironic since it had been the Trotskyist POUM presented as the ‘enemy within’ threatening to weaken the Republican side, but had proven those auspices which presented it as thus which, in the end, did that very job) – takes up much of the drama of Loach’s Land and Freedom, with its central protagonist, an unemployed working-class Liverpudlian who volunteers to fight for socialism, continually torn between his personal loyalties to the POUM with whom he initially enlists, and his more pragmatic will to crush the fascists, no matter how, which eventually leads him to enlisting in the Soviet column. Loach’s socialist-realist depiction of the conflict apart, the Spanish cinema tradition on the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Censorship has often been approached much more indirectly and frequently through more symbolic, even magical realist auspices (with the exception of Communist Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, who had formerly acted as propagandist filmmaker on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War, making España 1936, and attempting but not completing another film on the conflict, Cargo of Innocence, shelved in 1938 due to the clash with another, American-produced film on the Spanish war, Blockade), as in Victor Erice’s Censorship-era The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) –and the use of such symbolic film technique in order to communicate anti-Francoist sentiments was of course necessitated due to being made in Franco’s Spain. But even still to this day, similar allegorical approaches to the conflict in Spanish cinema have continued, as in the highly regarded anti-fascist pseudo-fairy-tale, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006 –one year before the Historical Memory Law incipiently prompted Spanish culture for the first time since the end of the Censorship to reopen those historical wounds without fear of governmental redress or social ostracism).
For me personally, the most informative and fascinating account of this deeply complicated conflict was the six-part documentary, simply titled The Spanish Civil War, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1983, and narrated by the impeccable actor Frank Finlay. Not only is this an unapologetically in-depth account of not only the war itself but also of the whole period which encompassed it, inclusive of the roots of the conflict and of the Spanish manifestations of Left and Right ideologies which adumbrated it, as well as some exposition on the immediate aftermath and the start of Franco’s 37 year-long Censorship; it is also, in my opinion, the most thoroughly absorbing and captivating war documentary series ever broadcast –and is, in my view, even superior to the iconic and perpetually repeated Laurence Olivier-narrated World At War (1973) (I’m not even sure 1983’s The Spanish Civil War was ever repeated, and it’s certainly not yet been released on DVD, nor even ever on Video, though it can be downloaded online). What makes this documentary series so engrossing its considerable analysis of the partisan ideologies which triggered and greased the Spanish crisis through to its tragic conclusion, including, of course, much examination of the notorious inter-internecine intrigues and in-fighting of the fractious Loyalist side. There are also numerous subtitled interviews with both Left and Right veterans of the war, thus providing a factually balanced account of the conflict; while the documentary’s sheer absence of any pretentiousness, its unashamed didacticism, straightforward narrative approach, use of photographs, stills and old film footage, and almost meditative pace, are all the kind of strengths of a less frenetically directed period in television to today’s flash-bang-wallop rapid edits, cuts and perambulatory camera movements. In short, it’s almost like six hours slowly leafing through a seismically eventful sepia photo album to the dulcet breathy curatorship of Frank Finlay over one’s shoulder.
The pluralism of the Republican side apart, their opponents comprised various factions as well, though arguably ones more ideologically cemented than those of their rivals: the Spanish Falange (Spanish Phalanx of the Assemblies of the National Syndicalist Offensive) was a modernist and avant-garde socio-politico-cultural movement which associated most closely with Mussolini’s Italian Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism (Nazism), and also attracted the fascination of –interestingly and significantly– the elder British and American literati of the time, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Percy Wyndham Lewis and South African poet Roy Campbell, who actually served as a war correspondent alongside Franco’s forces (though in his partial defence, his chief impetus for opting for the Francoists was his first-hand witness of clerical executions in Toleda in 1936, having personally stumbled upon the dead bodies of seventeen Carmelite monks, some others of whom he had hidden in his own house); the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups (Spanish: Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, CEDA), an ultra-conservative Catholic movement (contrary to received wisdom, Franco described himself as a “conservative” rather than a fascist); and the Carlists, a right-wing monarchist faction which wanted to restore King Alfonso to the Spanish throne.
There were ideological compromises struck on the Nationalist side in order to form a formidable pincer-movement to encircle the Republic: one aspect to this being the supremely ironic fact that fascism, as represented by the Falange, is itself a political movement which aspires to the foundation of a Republic, only, of course, one which is essentially authoritarian and militaristic (a kind of Spartan State), as opposed to the social democratic Republic defended by the Loyalists. Fascism isn’t, strictly speaking, pro-monarchist, but is pro-autocratic, often in the guise of dictatorship (so, in effect, it aspires to a form of non-hereditary ‘monarchy’, but which invariably ends up moulding itself into tacit dynasties). One of the most deceitful and disturbing characters of –particularly nascent– fascism is often an opportunistic and disingenuous championing of ‘classlessness’, which, however, is not commensurate to actual social equality, since fascism is implicitly hierarchical and autocratic in structure; it also often ostensibly turns much of its propaganda machine against capitalism, which is, paradoxically, the very economic manure from which it grows, since fascism is often fuelled on (lower) class resentments which it cynically kindles, almost always promising full employment to the masses (which almost always ends up, of course, as occupational conscription into uniforms).
All this considered, there must have been a significant ideological compromise involved in the unification of Falangism and Carlism on the Nationalist side, since the Carlists were monarchists, and the Falangists, at root, indifferent if not antagonistic towards aristocratic interests. It is significant that following the Nationalist victory, while Franco assumed the role of dictator, the monarchy was not, initially, restored. However, by 1947, having sustained his grip on power by a political compromise in fusing the Falange with the Carlists as a chronic national party, presenting himself as Defender of Catholic Spain (against atheist Communism), Franco restored the monarchy, and in 1969, designated the future heir to the throne, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, as his successor; in a strange twist, on his death in 1975, the ascendance of King Juan Carlos brought with it the first democratic election in Spain for forty years –and to this day Spain remains an unobtrusively monarchic ‘democracy’ (akin to Britain), subsequent generations of Spanish, perhaps singular among European nations, psychologically segueing together the two fundamentally contradictory systems of democracy and monarchy (though Spanish monarchy is really only a nominal institution in most respects).
To make matters even more confusing, the Spanish Civil War marked a vexillological convergence of opposing sides, being a clash of identical colours: while the flags and colours of the Popular Front, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT; “National Confederation of Labour”), Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, General Union of Workers) and the POUM used reds, blacks and whites, those of the Falange and the Carlists did as well (though there were other more varied colours involved on both sides, not least the broad Republican flag which was a horizontal red, yellow and purple tricolour). The nomenclature of the Spanish Civil War was also complicated: the Republicans were also known as Loyalists (because they were defending the existent Republic against the Fascist coup), while the Soviet Communist factions were known as the Popular Front, itself comprising the International Brigades (forming what was effectively a kind of Communist Foreign Legion), and there was also the official national Spanish Republican Army, all of whom would have invariably been alluded to as ‘Reds’; while on the ‘rebel’ side there were the Francoists, Fascists, Falangists, Carlists and Alfonsoist monarchists.
Both sides had tens of thousands of volunteers from other countries: the Republicans were joined by 10,000 French volunteers, 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 3,500 Italians (the Garibaldi Battalion), and over 1,000 each from the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Canada, the US (the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) and the UK (the Clement Attlee Battalion; in spite of a huge amount of British Left literature on the British contribution to the International Brigades, just over 1,000 volunteers sounds like small beans compared to the significantly high numbers sent from France, Germany, Austria and Italy), 500 Romanians, and 80 Irish (the Connolly Column), as well as being supported in terms of supplies and ammunitions by Mexico (curiously, where Leon Trotsky was then in hiding) and the Soviet Union; on the Fascist side, 50,000 Italians, 20,000 Portuguese (the Viriatos Legion), 16,000 Germans (incorporating the Condor Legion) and a 600-strong (Catholic) Irish Brigade –Germany and Italy also providing significant supplies and ammunitions. So the Spanish Civil War was in many senses, ideological as well as in terms of the multi-nationalities of its European combatants, a bloody adumbration of the slightly later global war that was to come.
Atrocities were committed on both sides, though the Fascists’ ‘White Terror’ inflicted the most casualties –up to 200,000 Loyalists and civilians were massacred; the Nationalists claimed that up to 55,000 of their number, including civilians and clergy, were executed during the Republican ‘Red Terror’, though, being the winning side of the conflict, their figures cannot be entirely trusted (and historian Anthony Beevor heavily disputes the true statistics were as high as this) –this figure is thought to have included nearly 14,000 priests, monks, friars, bishops and nuns, counting altogether as 20 per cent of the Spanish Catholic clergy. The bitter legacy of over 255,000 fatalities in the four year conflict, and a folk memory of atrocities on both sides of the war handed down through the generations, solidified into a tacit Spanish cultural silence on the national catastrophe, which was cemented by the long suppression of public dialectics on the Civil War under Franco’s 37-year Censorship, and then re-cemented by the Pact of Forgetting (el pacto de olvido), a political agreement between both left and right Spanish political wings, consolidated in the 1977 Amnesty Law (two years after Franco’s death and a return to democracy) to obviate any protracted constitutional and legal wrangling over the legacy of Francoism. More recently, in 2007, the Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica), a kind of statutory riposte to the Pact of Forgetting, was implemented by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) under then prime minister José Zapatero, in which all victims of the Civil War were officially recognised for the first time post-Censorship, with primary emphasis on the later victims of Francoism, and an official condemnation of said regime (opposed, of course, by the Spanish political Right).
Perhaps it was the combination of the Censorship followed by the Pact of Forgetting which fed a cultural unwillingness to discuss the Civil War in Spain, but it’s something I myself observed at first hand in Granada, Andalusia, which I visited several times during 2001-2006 with my then Granadan girlfriend, who herself used to tell me that the Spanish Civil War, as well as the Censorship, were rarely if ever talked about, at least, by the Andalusians (whose region of Spain, being one of the historically poorest, and geographically the closest part of Spain to then-Spanish Morocco, and the Canary Islands wherefrom the then-stationed Franco amassed his Moorish troops to begin his advance into Spain again, was swiftly subsumed by the Francoists and brought under their aegis early into the conflict). Whether or not attitudes have began to melt towards more open discussion about the Civil War and Censorship in Spain since the 2007 Historical Memory Law, I don’t know, but certainly in the last five years preceding it I experienced a very palpable tight-lipped-ness on the subject among Granadans. The Granadans themselves tend to exude an unspoken intensity and slightly pained pride, perhaps fairly characteristic of the Spanish as a whole, which differentiates them so markedly from their more vivacious and garrulous Latin cousins, the Italians. The Andalusians, being historically one of the poorest regional groups of Spain, as well as one of the most put-upon, exploited and looked-down-on (by the Northern Spaniards), seem to have a certain melancholic air, a kind of ancestral sadness mingled with vigilantly guarded anger: the temperamental birthmarks of past oppressions.
Granada is an almost fantastical city, it doesn’t feel as if it is really in Europe at all, dripping as it with richly decorative Moorish architecture, not least the imposing sand-coloured Alhambra, which, on its interior side, is so intricately architected and decorated in tortuous Islamic arabesque and curlicues and ornate cloistered gardens within its long-trailing walls that one is almost prone to a kind of vertiginous overawe –as I was on visiting it one scorching Spring– akin to the hyperkulturemia (Stendhal’s Syndrome) most famously attributed to the artistic and architectural deluges of Florence in Italy. My Granadan ex-girlfriend used to intone to me on occasions when we were together in her native city as to how “Spain is so heavy”, and if Granada is anything to go by, I could feel what she meant.
Granada is a sensory deluge, and a considerable challenge to the palates of architectural gourmets: its tortuously twisting backstreets, the cultural clash of Moorish turrets with colourful rococo terraces; the lavish gold-dripping Catholic cathedral; the labyrinthine Moorish arcades honeycombed with baroquely decorated, catacomb-dark Arabic tea-rooms; the Rioca-fumed bars hung with bull’s heads. The city is also aurally bustling: the piercingly chirping flocks of tiny colourful birds clustered in the orange trees; the deafening cafes brimming in the dusty, thick-aired evenings with Granadans gossiping over their Churros (very rich deep-fried crispy doughnut-like comestibles) and hot chocolates. And when one decides to take the weight off their feet outside one of the city’s prolific cafés, ubiquitous, leathery-skinned, tan-singed gypsy shoe-polishers often foist their services on you before you’ve had a chance to plant them on the ground.
Granada is of course famous for being –among many things– the birth place and home town of the highly regarded Marxist poet and dramatist, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, emblem of the avant-garde Generation of ’27, who was ruthlessly executed by Francoists in the hills outside Granada on 18 August 1936 (aged just 38), just under a month to the day of the beginning of national hostilities (17 July 1936). when one visits Granada, they are greeted by Lorca’s haunting glare from the sepia of countless postcards in the doorways of all the souvenir shops, as if he has long since posthumously metamorphosed into a paper ghost haunting the city of his birth and martyrdom. It will however disappoint any Lorca-scouting tourists to discover that the café outside which the Granadan poet used to sit and pen many of his aphoristic lyric-poems while sipping his ‘shadow’ (black coffee) and smoking innumerable black tobacco cigarettes, has long since been colonised by the auspices of the giant yellow ‘M’ of that ubiquitously colonising American fast food brand.
Lorca also collaborated with Cádiz-born Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (most famous for his mesmerising, bee-humming composition ‘El Amor Brujo’ from The Three-Cornered Hat, and after whom an auditorium is named in Granada) during his considerable sojourn in Granada between 1921-1939, most notably on the El Concurso del Cante Jondo (Contest of the Deep Song) of 1922, which celebrated the art of flamenco, and through which Lorca hoped to encourage a new folkloric comity among ordinary people in a manner of which, for instance, contemporaneous English communist poets and polemicists W.H. Auden and Christopher Caudwell would have both undoubtedly approved in terms of putting poetry and music back at the heart of common life.
Yoke and Arrows
It is ostensibly in the charting of the last fateful year of Garcia Lorca’s brief life that the main narrative thrust of Rob Hindle’s poetry collection, Yoke and Arrows, takes its lead; it is a collection cut into Three Acts, so is in a sense a form of verse-drama conveyed through a series of verse-vignettes which can also be read as semi-self-contained poems. The book’s striking cover is illustrated with the 16th century manuscript representation of the yoke and arrows (el yugo y las flechas), emblem of the 15th century Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who, among other things, expelled both the Moors and the Jews from Spain. But the yoke and arrows also, significantly, later became the emblem of the 20th century Spanish Falange, the nemeses of Lorca, whose emblem also draws uncanny associations with the Roman fasces (or fascis), a bundle of rope-bound wooden rods with an axe affixed to it, which used to be worn and used as a means of punishment and even execution by the Roman lictors, a type of magistrate and punisher all in one whose authority was granted under the auspices of the Roman Republic; and it is from this symbology, and more specifically, the word fasces, that the term fascism itself was born, initially, in Mussolini’s Italy. So for various reasons, political, and in terms of associations with Granada, and thus with Lorca, this is an aptly protean emblem to adorn the cover of this book.
Hindle’s slim volume (64pp) begins before the contents proper with a triple-quatrain poem, ‘Prologue: The Fiesta of San Federico’, sub-dated ‘18 July, 1936’, one day after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It’s a straightforwardly written poem sans frills, but sets the scene for the ensuing narratives –the last verse is perhaps the more evocative, though it consciously avoids any overstraining in this purpose, and the unessential repetition of ‘flowers’ lends a slightly hypnotic quality:
The feast-bells sound across the Vega.
It is the day of San Federico, the church filled with flowers
and the scent of flowers; and the talk is of Morocco,
Franco, the army on the streets of Seville.
Then begins ‘Act One: At the Rosales House’. First there is an italicised quatrain entitled ‘Falange’, which is disturbingly suggestive of the shape of things ahead:
In the name of God and the Catholic Kings
who lie in the Chapel of Granada
the boys go round the streets with sacks
and truncheons, a list in the captain’s head.
Again, this is a piece of scene-setting, almost ominously sparse in its expression of an uncertain time approaching. ‘Señor Rosales’ (named after a leading Granadan Falangist with whom Lorca was personally acquainted and initially took refuge) is another triple-quatrain poem –its language is also restrained and descriptively economical, the last stanza, again, being the most evocative of the three:
In the square the fountain is lifeless
among the flower stalls. He walks quickly home,
his way strewn with stalks and torn leaves,
the smell of jasmine trailing him like a swarm.
This is almost prose, but not quite, since its flexible syllabic meter –9/11/8/11– lends it a sense of rhythm. The poem partly relates the routine rounding up and shooting of Loyalists by night in the city cemetery, which over the course of time culminated in the executions of thousands of people (massacres of far vaster scale to those of the snatches of Carmelite monks in Toledo witnessed by poet Roy Campbell).
In the next poem, ‘Piano’, of a slightly looser form, Hindle begins to tilt his poetry away from prose and more towards aphorism, and, complementarily to this, more resonant images and descriptions begin to surface:
…and there is nothing but the voices of women
and the voices of water.
…
a guitar singing in the blue light.
There is a woman dancing with a shadow,
their matched steps like a child’s kite.
soon, I think, there will be silence
and they will fall into the black earth.
When I awake there is singing from the next room,
low and secret as a fountain.
Here we can begin to detect poetic echoes of Lorca whispering through, with the aphoristic quality to the lines, and the image-use of colours, ‘blue’ and ‘black’ –both, perhaps deliberately, associated with blows and bruises, so possibly prefiguring the violence to come (and, in the long-run, the terrible recumbentibus to be inflicted on the besieged Spanish Republic). The wonderfully alliterative-assonantal phrase ‘a guitar singing in the blue light’ is particularly reminiscent of Lorca’s phantasmagorical lyricism; while the chiming ‘i’-sounds throughout and the serendipitous (?) rhymes of ‘light’ and ‘kite’ lend an aural ringing quality to the lines.
Similar tintinnabulations hinging on ‘g’-sounds can be heard in the next poem, ‘Toll’, which is also about a bell, ‘A great bell… on the tower of the Alcazaba’ in a town or village in an area of Spain Hindle refers to as ‘the Vega’, which is ‘rung morning and evening’ for hundreds of years. I’m not quite sure where precisely this ‘Vega’ is –Fresno de la Vega, for instance, is in the northwest of the country, in the province of Castile and León; judging by the term alcazaba, of Arabic derivation, which means a Moorish fortification (of the likes of the Alhambra in Granada), I’m assuming this particular ‘Vega’ is indeed Fresno de la Vega, since, although in North Spain, the West of this vast province borders Portugal, where there are also Moorish alcazabas. Further, Madrid, where, according to his biographical extract, Hindle lived and worked during the 1990s, nestles under the South-East border of the Vega province, so it is likely this is the area the poet is speaking of, having no doubt visited it himself.
The tradition of the Vegan bell relates to the provincial necessity for ‘irrigation of the land by opening and closing the acequias, or ditches, at set times’ for those Spaniards newly settled there after the end of the epic 781-year Reconquista (Reconquest) of Spain, which started with the victory of the Visigoths at Covadonga around 718-722, and ended with the fall of Granada, last of the Moorish strongholds, in that hugely significant year of 1492 (the discovery of the “New World”, the Americas, by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, under the auspices of the Kingdom of Spain). This folkloric aspect is alluded to in the three quatrains of this poem, each of which also dextrously achieve subtle and irregular half-rhyme-endings: ‘fire’/ ‘prayer’/ ‘still’/ ‘tilled’/ ‘city’/ ‘cemetery’:
Even in August, when the plains cracked open,
and abandoned stork’s nests flew into fire,
there would be water in the Vega, the huge bell
in its tower calling the farmers as if to prayer.
In the next verse, there is an eerie silence in this campanological tradition for the first time in centuries, ‘Now it is August and the bell is still’, but not in terms of irrigation, ‘The land is tilled/ and watered; but every village has lost men’, for we are now into the early days of the Spanish Civil War –and then the sentence continues after an apt enjambment, on the first line of the final stanza: ‘and will lose more’. The trucks that have passed ‘through the villages sloughing dust/ across the can fields’ continue their ominous pilgrimage by night, ‘leaving the villagers to themselves, their sleep/ rent by nightmares heaped in the cemetery’ –that final trope is a particularly affective and rhythmic aphorism.
‘Angelina Cordobilla’ is a quite beautiful verse-vignette in two five-lined stanzas, and inclines more towards evocation by image and description than the initially more sparsely phrased opening poems:
Women gather at the gaol door with their baskets,
jaws and knuckles clamped with fear.
Enrique the butcher’s son pokes under the linen,
bread, cheese, oranges, a clean shirt.
There is a strikingly figurative nocturnal trope in the second verse: ‘They pass into the corridor, footsteps flitting like bats’ –the shadow of Lorca looms the more one moves through these poems, though Hindle is by no means subsumed by it, simply inspired. An Endnote relates that the woman of the title was ‘Nanny to the three children of Concha García Lorca, Frederico Lorca’s sister’ who ‘walked across town each day to take food and clothing to Concha’s husband (and recently inaugurated Socialist mayor of Granada) Manuel Fernández-Montesinos in the city gaol. He was shot on the 16 August’.
The next poem, ‘The Massacre of the Abencerrajes’, split into four sequences under separate sub-headings, takes a folkloric step back in time to a bloody episode in Granada’s Moorish past, relating the eponymous ‘punishment’ perpetrated against all the males of the Abencerraje clan while they were guests at the Alhambra: their host, the Sultan of Granada, ordered their deaths after the head of their family had been observed canoodling with one ‘Zoraya’, the ‘favourite’ of his Harem. The first poem, ‘The Generalife Gardens: Evening’ is composed of five two-lined verses, and is seductively image-rich throughout:
Wind shucks the pools of the royal gardens
the smoothes them into syrup, into water.
There is a woman, almost invisible,
sitting in the edge of a great window,
The haunch of the town beneath her stitching
its streets with lamps and fires.
A thrush drops over the grey wall and disappears
like a stone; a man shadows the trees, solid
against a bleed of sunset. He should know
there are eyes everywhere, eyes and knives.
In ‘The Mexuar, or Public Halls: Morning’, there’s a verse which has some of the aphoristic quality of poetry by despatches which characterised much of W.H. Auden’s Thirties and Forties poetry:
Soon will be the mid-day prayer,
the day stopped, the rooms emptied.
each will lay out his mat, physician,
soldier, counsellor; will wash face, arms,
head, feet; will stand, bow, stand, prostrate.
I’m sufficiently struck by the clipped lyricism, ripe sense-impression and choreographic vocabulary of the third piece in the sequence, ‘The Serallo, or Reception Halls: Midnight’, that I’ll quote it in full:
Somewhere there is laughter, a short glissade,
a rill –lost immediately in the deep shades
around the patio. The black square of water
is glassy and unmoved, so sheer there are stars in it.
The myrtles breathe out, spicing the heat.
Fish rise, their suck and swirl quick as a kill.
Now there are footsteps, low voices in the shapes
of questions. The night keeps quiet.
‘The Harem: Dawn’ is a rather haunting and disturbing close to the sequence, given the context of the aftermath it depicts, and is composed in a more compactly lyrical form, reminiscent to some degree of Lorca –it contains, again, some striking and quite phantasmagorical imagery:
After the Fahr prayer
the Sultan stands at the oratory window
eyes closed, still.
He can hear the river
and, distantly, the wrecked voice of a cockerel.
‘Song for Luis Rosales’ is even more Lorcaesque, a lyric-piece strung with colouristic images:
…
at midnight, singing.
We will make a candle
with the yellow moon,
a heart with a guitar
and we will sing up a wind
to make the olives’ silver leaves
crackle and the orange flowers
fall like snow in the squares.
…
and in your eyes the night
of Andalucía with all its stars.
As I recall from poems of Lorca I used to read during my own Granada days, the poet often used lots of nocturnal images, moons and stars, and colours (white and black most commonly); while the ‘guitar’ was something of a Lorcan leitmotif. ‘From a window in Calle Angulo’ is a slightly more pedestrian affair in poetic terms, but it still includes one or two arresting images:
Everyone remembers the shirt he wore –
white, symbolic. Certainly, with his tie loose,
his jacket hanging lifeless on his arm,
there was something cinematic in his going.
The poem ends on an ambivalent observation, a type of aspiring profundity faintly reminiscent, to my mind, of pseudo-epiphanic mainstream verse from which Hindle’s superior poetry needs no help: ‘I stood/ in the window looking at the still street:/ nothing I could tell was different’. I’m also not sure about the Americanised term ‘cops’ ending the first line of the poem, but concede that it links in with the term ‘cinematic’ later on.
The next, fairly sparse lyrical poem, ‘García Lorca: Juan Breva’, is Hindle’s translation of a piece from Lorca’s 1921 collection, Poema del Cante Jondo, composed to coincide with Manuel de Falla’s El Concurso de Cante Jondo (Contest of the Deep Song, 1922), which celebrated the Andalusian flamenco vocal style of the title, associated with the gypsy “siguiriya”, and involved a flamenco performance inside the Alhambra. Certainly one can detect the exacting, diamond-cut lyricism of Lorca –here it is in full:
Juan Breva had the body of a giant
and the voice of a girl.
His song was like nothing else,
like pain beneath a smile.
It stirred from sleep
the lemon groves of Málaga.
And held in its weeping
the salt of the air.
The blind man sang like Homer.
He had that voice, that something
In it of the clouded sea,
and the dry husk of an orange.
The mythical, semi-Graeco images –‘giant’, ‘groves’, ‘Homer’– merge well with the hypnogogic atmosphere of the poem; some of the alliteration is quite magical in quality, as in ‘lemon groves of Málaga’; the phrase ‘pain beneath a smile’ serves well as a metaphor for the happy-sad, passionate-proud character of the Andalusians; and the attempt at evoking the parched strains of the deeply soulful cante jondo itself through the aural-gustatory image of ‘the dry husk of an orange’, is admirably imaginative and effective. The only remote quandary here is how do we know how Homer ‘sang’, what that sounded like etc.…? But of course this is probably meant in terms of the aural impression Homer’s hexameter imparted from the page, particularly in its use of spondees (words containing two long vowel sounds); and obviously here Lorca is seeking to link flamenco vocalism, and its then-contemporary revival, to the oral poetic tradition pioneered in Ancient Greece by the likes of Homer.
‘Interlude: At the Cemetery’ returns us sharply back to the gritty Grand Guignol of the Spanish Civil War, linking us back almost full-circle to ‘Señor Rosales’ by depicting, with quite remarkable empathic prowess, the night executions of Loyalists and Socialists during that first fateful Falangist August in Granada:
When they shot Manolito he was looking out at the dark,
knowing the shapes of hills like the knuckles of his hand.
Just before the shatter of the guns, he heard an owl’s call,
followed in his mind the long arc of its flight over scrub,
maize field, wall, lemon grove.
The repetition of the initial clause for the first line of each verse –‘When they shot….’, followed each time by a different name– is particularly effective as a kind of threnodic drill throughout the poem. Some of the imagined last thoughts of those about to be executed, or of their witnessing relatives, are deeply moving, and, at times, sublime:
… stupid boys
who would never raise a crop from the fields
nor feel their children’s skin against their skin, never notice
their father’s faces stiffen against them.
While, again, Hindle’s vocabulary and painterly application of description becomes increasingly marked:
The different faces of fear, one gnurled and dark,
an olive stump, one smooth and still as moon.
when they fell, their eyes shone exactly the same.
I suspect ‘gnurled’ is a typo: either it is meant to be ‘gnarled’, or possibly ‘knurled’, which means ridged, beaded or knobbly in texture. Perhaps most profound is the final stanza, which almost trips into picturesque rapture in spite of terminal peril, while making a fascinating point on the symbolic murder of past standards, traditions and history that all wars and revolutions involve:
When they shot Joaquín, they shot sixty years
of the country, the lap of the sea at Málaga
that made his lullaby, the rutted roads
of the Contraviesa, the eyes of all the women
in the villages, the smell of spring coming
up the valleys, and those bird lining up
across a red-setting sun; they shot the wetness
of grass in autumn; they shot his drunken snores
and his quiet breathing and his old jokes
that told the hard world that everything was well.
This would almost be Joycean if it was not for a certain restraint in image and expression –but it has echoes of Cervantes perhaps: the hoary Joaquín is depicted almost like a latter day Don Quixote, tilting at the rifles of Falangists as he falls. ‘Interlude: At the Cemetery’ very much reminds me of Francisco Goya’s highly expressive painting, The Third of May 1808 (aka The Charge of the Mamelukes, 1814), which depicts the nocturnal execution by firing squad of several Spanish resistors to the French invaders, by Napoleon’s Turkish troops (the Mamluk corps), the picture being most iconic for the rather naively painted –almost unfinished– figure in the foreground prostrating his arms and goggling his eyes in martyr-like defiance as the soldiers aim their bayoneted rifles at him and his compatriots.
‘Act Two: In the Civil Government Building’, begins again with an italicised quatrain entitled ‘Falange’:
Ramón Ruiz Alonso crosses the square,
quick march. His face is ugly with glory.
In his pocket, his just-typed defamation,
subversive; traitor; poet; maricón.
Ramón Ruiz Alonso was, according to an Endnote, ‘A prominent Fascist in Granada’. ‘Moth’ is a short lyrical piece which is strongly reminiscent of Lorca –here is an excerpt:
There’s a moth in the lampshade.
You can hear it clattering about
its bright shell. The light flickers.
A man is sitting in the cell,
hands gripping nothing, mouth
making nothing but noises.
The chiming of ‘moth’ and ‘mouth’ is a subtle homophonic touch, while the juxtaposition of a moth trapped in a lampshade with a man trapped in a prison cell is a novel one. ‘Nicolás Velasco, Left in Charge’ depicts the eponymous ‘retired Civil Guard’ who was in charge of the ‘Civil Government building the night García Lorca was incarcerated there’ being instructed by an anonymous someone to ‘Do nothing; say nothing’ following Lorca’s arrest. Velasco appears to have been drinking:
You’ve been drinking, Velasco:
this isn’t the good old days.
(A sloven, too: ash on his shirt belly;
blue pouches at his eyes.)
This poem has a staccato, filmic quality, and is clearly more implicitly part of an ongoing narrative compared to many of the previous poems. It also appears to be the first dialogic poem in the collection. ‘Along the Calle Real: Qasim’ is a similarly dialogical piece, in three tercets –the ‘Calle Real’ of the title ‘was the main street of the royal city of Alhambra’. It is composed in present tense, presumably to give it a sense of immediacy and urgency:
The market inspector says he should come at once,
so here he is, Qasim, gripping the door, the red muck
of the road still on him. He is trembling, hands and knees.
This is “Quasim of Murcia, weaver”, presumably Moorish, as the last verse would suggest –one which appears to comment on the depersonalisation of war, the stripping of identities along with all hitherto recognised norms:
Later, after the Dhuhr prayer, he finds his pitch wrecked,
his tool bag gone. ‘What for?’ he asks a neighbour.
The man shrugs. He too came once from somewhere.
That last pseudo-epiphanic line has a haunting resonance and serves its purpose as a meditation on loss of identity and social position in a conflict zone, where it’s almost as if the past up to that point of catastrophic peripeteia has simply been wiped out –at least, for the duration of hostilities. In the next poem, ‘Albaicín’, named after ‘the oldest part of Granada’ and ‘the last place to fall to the Nationalist rebels’, the loss of identity and past is to a location –though this place is perennial, timeless and essentially unchangeable in spite of the vain little white ants crawling over it as if it is a carcass:
It waits as it has always waited,
white against blue, a chalk hill
cut into fissures and scars.
People traffic the lanes and stairs
singly, hurrying. Everywhere echoes
with retreat or vacancy.
Hindle handles the personification of place, as a kind of metaphor for the countless human depersonalisations of the national upheaval, with a crisp precision of image, until, in the final stanza, this anthropomorphism seemingly replicates into what can be interpreted as its opposite: chremamorphism (the depiction of humans with inanimate characteristics), with all its gruesome suggestiveness of the aftermath of a firing squad:
A square has captured the sun
and is beating it against a high wall.
There is a tree reaching over
like hair and at the whitewashed foot,
rose-red carcasses of pomegranates
lie haphazard and split.
‘Angelina Visits the Poet on Three Successive Mornings’ has –as its title adumbrates– an almost biblical quality, depicting as it does something of a Gethsemanean pilgrimage made by the dutiful Nanny, Angelina Cordobilla, to the interned poet-uncle of her young charges; Lorca is almost venerated in a way that is commensurate to a secular martyr, so this pre-crucifixion atmosphere is perhaps, in part, appropriate. This is a meticulously crafted poem, richly figurative and loaded with thanatotic symbolisms:
1
She takes the stairs slowly,
her hand stretched in front of her,
the basket heavy in the nook of her arm.
She would stop for breath if she dared;
would hold the guard’s wrist.
But his hands grip his gun in front of him,
Farmer’s hands set from swinging axes
and hammers, from driving spades
deep into the old ground.
The latter imagery is evocative of the burials subsequent to the mass executions of Loyalists in the locality; and the phrase ‘old ground’ again plays on the sense of the past being buried. There is some exceptionally well-honed description in the second verse, evocative of decay, alliteratively trilling with l- and c-sounds:
2
The basket is still on the table
with its spilled crumbs, the tortilla
that the guard slashed open
purpling in the air.
He hasn’t touched it.
There are curls of tobacco
on the paper he hasn’t written on;
a dark dry coffee ring.
The final verse, in two tercets, has a fairy-tale quality to it, with appropriate allusions, and is phrased with aphorismic coolness –here is the first stanza:
3
We know what happens, the third day in stories.
The wolf gets stewed, a messenger returns
with Rumplelstiltskin’s name….
This folkloric spin on the new climate of skulduggery in Civil War Spain and the threat to identities is inspired, particularly in terms of Rumplestiltskin, whose unspoken titular identity is the key to his hold over the miller’s daughter imprisoned by the king on pain of death if she cannot keeping spinning straw into gold (enabled by the magic powers of the eponymous imp), since, after having made her promise her future first-born son to him as payment for his thaumaturgical assistance in her predicament, he allows her only one opportunity to relinquish said bargain: if she can discover his name. It used to be believed in more ‘primitive’ cultures in thrall to the concept of magic that to know someone’s name was to have magical power over them, and the Brothers’ Grimm tale of Rumplestiltskin serves as a kind of metaphor rooted in this old belief, albeit subverted to almost the reverse: by having his name revealed (via a chance eavesdropping by her messenger), the imp loses his power over the miller’s daughter, hence, figuratively, his magical potency, or, alternatively, the miller’s daughter acquires figurative power over the imp by learning his name.
‘Along the Calle Real: Fatima’ is a touching triple-quatrain lyric about a local lame homeless girl who suddenly disappears one day –it begins with faintly Hughesian, phantasmagorical imagery:
They used to watch Fatima
like you’d watch a crow
on the wall, wry-headed,
its eye on something.
But at its end it settles into something more wistful and hypnogogic:
Then they heard she’d gone.
and some dreamed about her
and some, eyes open, lay
waiting for the lull in her step.
The last phrase, soporific in the right sense, has an unusualness in its dreamlike description of a ‘step’, something of aural weightiness, as having the lightly lifting and dropping quality of a ‘lull’ –and the use of this word also lends the poem a lullaby quality. ‘Dioscoro Galindo González’ has a similar nursery-rhyme feel to it, both in tone and content, composed in eight rangy two-lined stanzas that have a songlike rhythm and employ sporadic verbal repeats which add to this musical sense. The poem is preceded by an italicised snippet on the eponymous man, who was last seen being escorted out of the Civil Government building in Granada, handcuffed to García Lorca, with whom he was bundled into a car and driven out of the city, on 19th August 1036; González is depicted here in his former position as a schoolteacher with one wooden leg:
When the children of Pulianas asked their teacher
why he had only one leg, he told a different story every day.
Like a nursery rhyme, each verse begins with a weekday and a different explanation for by the teacher for how he got his wooden leg –mostly these are humorous explanations, but mid-week it is as if he is struck by some presentiment of his future fate:
On Wednesday (never a good day), the teacher would stand
at the window and look out at the village and the mountains beyond
and the sky beyond them and say he’d got ill,
and nearly died; and he’d stand very still on his leg
and his wooden leg with the sound of birds coming in through
the window. Then he’d turn and smile and say it was time to go.
Out of curiosity I looked up which day of the week 19th August 1936 was on the internet, and lo and behold, it was a Wednesday, which perhaps strengthens my interpretation of the hint of presentiment, and the parenthetic emphasis on Wednesday as ‘(never a good day)’ suggests an intentional signification on Hindle’s part. The poem ends with a sleepy picture of the teacher as a kind of benign Pied Piper, again, reinforcing the fairy tale-like quality:
On Friday, he’d walk to the church, the children
behind him hopping and skipping in adoration.
The title of the triple-quatrain, ‘The Violin Player’, alludes to Ricardo Rodríguez Jiménez, who, according to Hindle’s italicised note at the top of the poem, ‘had an antrophied right hand’ and ‘had been given a violin by García Lorca when he was a child. He lived in Calle Horno de Haza near to the Civil Government building’; it depicts Jiménez’ witnessing the bundling of the handcuffed Lorca –alongside Dioscoro González of the former poem– and begins on a threnodic note, recounting the famous Spanish violinist Pablo Sarasate, who died in 1908 from chronic bronchitis, who bequeathed his Stradivarius to Musée de la Musique in France, which subsequently bears his name, Sarasate Stradivarius:
Sarasate, Spanish virtuoso,
busked old Europe with his gypsy songs,
the grey eyes of his audiences welled
with those dark, shrill incantations.
Then the poem turns to the juvenile Jiménez:
Now a boy is standing in a Granada street
looking out beyond the city. Lights hang
on the high sierra, winking and disappearing,
distress flares over the blackness of an ocean.
He has seen his friend, Frederico, bustled
with an old schoolmaster into a car and driven
away into the dark. He stands in the street,
his fingers working the ghost of a violin.
The final image is particularly arresting and has strong echoes of Lorca’s string-instrument leitmotivs, invariably either guitars or violins, both associated of course with flamenco and gypsy folk music. ‘Along the Calle Real: Umar the Tanner’ is another figurative lyrical piece, this time composed in two tercets with a quatrain in the middle –it is ripe with colouristic images of flowers and fruits:
One he would plant lavenders round the hut,
make fires of pine and mulberry. Still the stink curdled
in the vats and soured the air, summer and winter.
The lavender never thrived; Muhammed and Abd Allah
complained when the smoke got into the granary
(though God knew it sweetened the bread
better than the rancid liquor of bird shit and hides).
Personally, I’m not so keen on expletives in poetry, I seldom see any point to them, least of all in a poem otherwise so beautifully phrased, but presumably here Hindle is partly complementing the short ‘i’-assonances of ‘rancid’ and ‘liquor’. Particularly striking, for me, not least in its bravura use of ‘v’-alliteration, but also as an image of futility, of visual withering and olfactory wilting is ‘The lavender never thrived’, which would have made for a very arresting title; the chiming of ‘thrived’ and ‘hides’ is also a nice rhythmic touch.
‘John of God in the Madhouse’ is a vignette about a familiar ‘fool’ of Granada who ends up being forcibly committed to an asylum where he is subsequently abused by a brutal psychiatric system; we learn in the first verse that a child he had once ‘carried’ (the meaning of this isn’t made entirely clear) christened him affectionately ‘Juan de Dios’ (‘John of God’). The narrative is deeply moving, almost hallucinatory in its depiction of what would seems to be the ‘fool’-figure’s sense of triple-split identity fragmented into three vocational types:
Juan saw ghosts of himself.
They stood in the light the pain made:
pilgrim, soldier, shepherd.
When the lashing finished
they were still there, shimmering.
Juan prayed on his knees
thinking them angels.
The trope ‘They stood in the light the pain made’ is particularly striking, if not sublime. There’s the suggestion of what used to be more crudely termed ‘religious mania’ to the fool’s psychical makeup, though one which is seemingly benign and accepting, and in this sense, of an almost Christ-like quality (for many at the time of His judgement would have perceived Jesus as not only a heretic and, thereby, a ‘blasphemer’, as the Pharisees and Sadducees framed him, but also as ‘deranged’ or even ‘religiously mad’). Indeed, in the final stanza of this poem, the seeming serenity, childlike innocence and even purity of the fool’s deportment is contrasted with the appetite-corrupted impurity of a propinquitous priest (presumably there to hear his ‘confession’):
The dormitory raved its obscenities.
Near the door, the priest
slumped at his desk, drunk
as a gaoler. The hour sounded.
Hindle’s command of alliteration and assonance is quite exceptional in one particular verse, in terms of the ‘c’ and ‘o’ sounds which however do not feel at all obtrusive:
Trees, dark, shocked shapes,
clutter the façade of the university,
the old Hospital de los Locos.
[‘Locos’ is the collective noun for the Spanish slang for ‘mad’ (‘loco’)]. ‘García Lorca: Malagueña’ is another of Hindle’s translations from Lorca which, from memory, reads very similarly to a previous translation I’ve read of the same poem, but may well have some differences and I’m unable to compare the two at this time –but in its musical succinctness, rich sense-impressions, striking metaphors and emblematic images –colours, animals, instruments, flowers etc. (an almost Symbolist sensibility)– it is unmistakably Lorca (at least, in terms of Lorca’s fairly typical stylistic representation in English) and sufficiently brief to quote in full:
Death goes in and out
of the bar.
Black horses and cruel men travel
the dark paths of the guitar.
And the sea-lilies shiver
their salt-scent, their tang
of the blood of a woman.
Death comes and goes,
in and out of the bar.
The mingling of images such as ‘sea-lilies’, ‘salt-scent’, ‘blood’ and ‘woman’ appear to evoke menstruation and female fertility, following as they do the more phallic images of ‘Black horses’ (stallions) and ‘paths of the guitar’, which suggest virility. Closing this Second Act of the book is the second poem to titled ‘Interlude: At the Cemetery’, and continues with the intentionally repeated first phrase of each verse: ‘When they shot…’, etc. This slightly mantra-like structure of threnody-by-rote lends a sense of defiance and simmering indignation to the tone of the poem, so that, no matter how touching and harrowing much of it is, there is never any sense of wallowing, resignation or passive acceptance. In spite of its gentler elements, and attempts to objectify the almost perfunctory brutality of executions by firing squad by assuming an equally perfunctory routine-tone, this a poem simmering with understated anger:
When they shot Gustavo, before the shots
rang back their echo from the dry walls
of the Sierra de Elvira, there was a sigh,
soft and unremitting as a glance,
short and limitless as a man’s life.
The startling alliteration of those last two lines apart, the final trope is particularly interesting, with its almost sublime metaphysical spicing of immanence with the human condition, in the almost oxymoronic phrase ‘short and limitless’. The third stanza is perhaps the most brutally described, albeit with a theatrical quality of Grand Guignol:
When they shot Arturio, he slumped to the earth
like a bad actor, knees and neck hinging woodenly,
mouth gagged wide with pain, eyes turned up.
He fell in a hole, even, the bathos of his bald patch
only undone by his face cracking on a stone.
(That latter, rather gruesome description reminds me of George Orwell’s evocation of the sound of ricocheting bullets as ‘nuts hitting stones’ in his empirical memoir-cum-polemic of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia). Particularly arresting is the detachment from human emotion through depicting instead the unspoken responses of an anthropomorphised landscape, which, along with its transitory aspects of light and dark, seems throughout the poem to remould itself in expressive response to the terrible events, rather like a writhing, recoiling van Gogh landscape, all motion and emotion –Hindle uses the scenery and the natural environment as a mute but visibly responsive backdrop, wounded by each gunshot, through which the almost indescribable human emotions are projected, and this is most apparent in the second and fourth/final stanzas:
When they shot…
… everything
went utterly still, the road back to the city
lost and treacherous, the world empty
without its moon, gasping, bewildered.
…
When they shot Julia it was almost dawn,
the mountains humping out of the dark.
Moving slowly as the light moved, the mountains
gathered her small silence and spread it over them
and over the vineyards and the cane fields
and the just-returning sea.
It’s almost as if the ‘mountains’ are acting not only as pallbearers for Julia’s spirit, but are also so absolutely bereaved as to spread the pall of her ‘small silence’ over them and across the fields to the sea; this is, indeed, a scarred landscape, a wounded countryside that wears the sacrifices of its inhabitants like stigmata; and perhaps in this Hindle is suggesting that the country, the land, serves as dumb witness but doesn’t forget, as the atrocities of war are scorched into it, and, in turn, into common memory. The war-torn landscape remains a permanent commemoration of those myriad incidents intended to be buried within it, and forgotten –but any future Pact of Forgetting will not apply to the landscape itself.
Act Three is entitled ‘La Colonia’ –it begins with third italicised verse under the title ‘Falange’:
One says next morning, García Lorca is dead.
He was one of those shot him, he says,
up in the hills at Viznar. And I gave him two
in the arse’, he adds, ‘for being a queer’.
Lorca was indeed doubly vulnerable to the grasp of the Falange being both a prominent Marxist poet and a homosexual. This final section of the volume begins with a beautifully picturesque poem of some striking and quite original images, ‘Sierra de Alfacar’:
You might find houses up there,
small white flags raised against the summer;
a string of goats on the ridge
crying like souls into the steep shade…
The ‘g’-alliteration in these opening lines lends a tangible texture. This poem again anthropomorphises the Spanish landscape:
the mountains have buried the moon
and the stars give almost nothing.
As well as composing some unusual, if not original, phrasings, Hindle can also occasionally experiment with grammar, as in the nicely alliterative (‘l’ and ‘v’-sounds) line, ‘weasels silk like thieves on the drove-ways’. As well as weasels the poem also includes owls and a lammergeier (also known as the Bearded Vulture), possibly symbols for the watchful Republic and the encircling raptor of Fascism? An endnote elucidates that the newly renamed Villa Concha, ‘up in the Sierra de Alfacar beyond the village of Viznar, had been used during the early 1930s as a summer holiday house for Granada schoolchildren. The Nationalists used it to house prisoners who were to be executed’.
Part of the same endnote also explains the identity of the main protagonist in the following poem ‘The Archbishop’s Palace at Viznar’ (subtitled ‘July 1811’): ‘Peruvian-born Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta was Archbishop of Granada from 1789 to 1811’. This poem again has a strong figurative quality, almost like a folkloric allegory, and depicts Peralta remembering his perilous experiences during the Inca Revolt in Peru of 1780-83, prior to his Archbishopric in Granada –here is the conclusive verse II of the poem:
In the palace garden, thrushes
inhabit the shades, flicking at leaves,
listening. If they get snails
they hop into the sun and smash them.
When he came to Granada
the mountains were nested with clouds
as if it were home. Now as he waits
at the rim of the world and the bell
of the Alcazaba sounds across the plain
he sees Cuzco, the red clutter of roofs
surging the valley, La Compañia
with its twin towers ringing
and Tupaq Amaru the rebel, the Inca king,
tied between horses and pulled asunder.
‘Two Photographs’ is also split into two parts. ‘I: A Holiday at Villa Concha (‘La Colonia’), 1933’ describes a snapshot of the location when it was used for the more innocent purposes. The language in this verse is in the slightly more prosaic style of the first couple of poems in the book –but Hindle’s writing is never dull, there are always one or two interesting touches to lift it even when some aspects skirt the pedestrian: so, after the fairly commonplace simile, sans the Carrollian Cheshire, of ‘the housekeeper grinning like a cat’, we then have the more mystical extra simile, ‘like a familiar’. Similarly, the description of ‘the hill in the background floating like an enchantment’ lends an ethereal quality. ‘II: La Huerta de San Vicente, 1935’, titled after Lorca’s parents’ summerhouse (now a museum), describes a photograph as if it is a static portal into a past sepia otherworld. Again, the landscape is anthropomorphised, animated, active, even in a picture: ‘The pale lawn tracks past them into the tree shade,/ its flat curve like a river slowing towards its end’. The second verse then switches times to a different reality with rich colours as first perceived by a newborn:
… We are from the future:
an unimaginable place where these old men
in their light summer coats will sit away
the winters in their farms…
…
Where the mother will not see her reflection
in her husband’s face, but the face in him
of her son, silent and fading;
where the baby, now looking at the new world
with its green floor and its white walls
and its blue ceiling, will watch it darken
and grow unfamiliar.
The ending with ‘unfamiliar’ contrasts with the ‘familiar’, which closes the first verse of the first part of the poem; perhaps, as well, the fresh perceptions of a baby just out of the womb of a quickly darkening world serves as a metaphor for the unrealness of the times ahead as the storm clouds of oncoming war gather across the country.
‘The Black Squad’ is for me one of the most strikingly descriptive and compacted poems in the book, brimming with symbolism, rich in sense-impression, and among the most rhythmically regular (with approximately alternating 11/9/9/11 syllabic beats) with some occasional end-rhymes and half-rhymes. It begins with another compendious italicised proem: ‘Members of the Black Squad, assigned to La Colonia to execute the prisoners, are in the upper room, listening to those locked up below. It is some time before dawn’. I excerpt the poem in full, since it is only ten lines in all:
Dark as witches, eyes flickering round the stove,
they sit with their legs splayed out straightly,
supping cocido. Spoons clack on the tin bowls;
one slurps, one spits. The night goes quietly.
In the stove’s red cowl the fire collapses
a little: a brief yellow light jumps into the room,
shocking the men’s faces, glistening teeth
and tongues. Through the floorboards come
voices like the voices of the damned, singing
lullabies and songs of the country.
The ‘red cowl of the fire’ (‘cowl’ being a hood-like covering) which ‘collapses/ a little’ could well be a metaphor for the tottering Republic, or even for Lorca, the doomed ‘Red’ poet, while the ‘brief yellow light’ that ‘jumps in the room/ shocking the men’s faces’ possibly symbolises Lorca’s imminently departing spirit or aura; this halo-like image also conjures that of an angel, and the shock of tomorrow’s executioners has something of the fear and trembling of biblical transgressors who ‘know not what they do’.
The ‘voices of the damned’ from below serve really as echoes of the consciences of the transgressors above the floorboards hearing them, as if symbolic of a retribution which awaits them, not the temporally ‘damned’ prisoners, on another plane, where the situation may well be reversed, and the members of the Black Squad be under ‘the floorboards’ (i.e. in Hell). In this context, the aural image of ‘lullabies and songs of the country’ has a Banshee-like foreboding –a vocal music which is, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, a veritable ‘brandy of the damned’. Here we also see Hindle’s quite hypnotic, songlike use of verbal repetition: ‘voices like the voices’, which serves as an aural reverberation.
In the next poem we slip back into a far distant past again, the furthest back yet, in the ominously titled ‘Pogrom’ (subtitled ‘Winter 1066’), the term here being deployed in its original authentic sense, specifically relating to a violent purging of Jews; in this context, the night-time ousting and execution of a Jewish Vizir (of Granada, presumably?):
They crucified Joseph son of Naghrela.
He hung on the wall of the old fortress,
clothes sullied, the sunset caught in his eyes.
In the time honoured manner, they’d hacked off
a foot and a hand. Blooded, they flew into town
to find more Jews…
…
Soon it will be day, the last of the old year,
the sun making shadows the length of mountains.
The poem is incredulous, imparting to us through its subtly revealing verses that this vigilantism is not under kingly patronage, but does however serve as a vicarious blunt instrument for the tacitly anti-Semitic Moorish ruler:
Then it will be for the king to decry the mob,
to send his guards to clear the streets of their butchery.
More will die as tokens of his strength, maybe;
and then he must call up his council, choose one
among them (Berber, not Jew) to stand
in place of his dead Vizir, Naghrela.
It is implied, then, that ‘the king’ is unofficially countenancing, even probably encouraging, such pogroms as this, which has vicariously –and violently– removed a Jewish Vizir whom he appears to have wished to be removed, as hinted at in his choice of a Muslim replacement for his vacant post. As most rulers, this king is particularly unscrupulous, even to the point of avenging the Vizir’s brutal removal by subsequently ordering the collective execution of ‘the mob’ which did this, purely as a ‘PR’ stunt to publicly wash his own hands of any part in the vicissitude.
So this is a pogrom-by-proxy, and in that, chillingly prefigures, for example, the feigning of ignorance by Adolf Hitler as to the full horrors of the world’s biggest pogrom of all, the Holocaust, perpetrated under his private direct orders (and, to a much less graphic degree and on a smaller scale, although, in attitudinal terms little different, the ‘wilful blindness’ to the material, social and psychological destruction wreaked by the “difficult decisions” and “tough choices” of our own partitioned rulers in present-day Whitehall, through the welfare caps and the machinations of the DWP-Atos axis against the sick and disabled, as well as the vicarious persecution of the unemployed via oratorical stigmatising –e.g. “scroungers”– and rhetorical discrimination –e.g. “skivers” versus “strivers”).
In an historical context, this horrific incident is also curious, since ostensibly there was a tacit cultural pact and exchange between Moorish Granada and Jewish Palestine. For example, although it’s rarely –and equally curiously– cited in the brochures, one of the most iconic features inside the Alhambra, the Fountain of Lions, after which the central court is named (the Court of Lions), described on Wikipedia as ‘an alabaster basin supported by the figures of twelve lions in white marble, not designed with sculptural accuracy but as symbols of strength, power, and sovereignty’, was, so my Granadan girlfriend –as a native interlocutor– informed me at the time we visited the palace, a gift from Jewish Palestine (in spite of it being inscribed with a poem by Moorish-Granadan poet Ibn Zamrak).
One aspect to endnote to the next poem sequence, ‘El Paseo’, that ‘Frederico García Lorca was executed along with two bullfighters, Joaquín Arcollas Cabezas and Francisco Galadí Melgar’ has an almost-biblical symbolism about it, faintly echoing the crucifixion of Christ alongside two ‘thieves’ –Dismas and Gestas; of course, bullfighting isn’t a deviancy or crime (at least in the legal sense), but its terpsichorean cruelty and perverse mystique of gory chivalry is, in essence, emblematic of the darker animalistic side to human nature. And by this juxtaposition –factual but metaphorically serendipitous– such Messianic associations aren’t entirely unfitting given the vaguely hagiographical regard in which Lorca has been posthumously held in both poetic and political circles throughout the decades.
‘El Paseo’ is a sequence of six individually titled lyrical pieces, each with a different prosodic shape, and each expressing the point of view of the protagonists in this nocturnal Danse Macabre. The first, ‘The captain’, is an exceptionally evocative three-line depiction of the officer in charge of the Black Squad leading the prisoners to the place of their execution –Hindle’s grasp of sense-impression, particularly the aural and tangible, is virtuosic:
He walks ahead, chin up, stick fast under his arm: his baton.
each step, his holster slaps on his thigh, heavy like a sack
of ox heart. It sickens and excites him.
That final pairing, ‘sickens and excites’, serves well as an aphorismic pathology of the almost sadomasochistic mentality of fascism. ‘Two bullfighters’ is a startlingly poignant lyric, depicting the eponymous toreadors as they are made to kneel –presumably blindfolded with hands tied behind their backs– before the firing squad, picturing themselves in their minds as preparing for a last performance in a blind bullring of the inky night:
Did we imagine it different?
Buckling our knees in a new silence, caught breath
and the round sky thickening?
Would we notice the thrown flowers?
The horses and swords round the bull’s dark stillness?
Our graves of sand? Our blood?
Their execution is almost depicted as a brutal retribution for their years of bull-slaying, but this ‘round sky’ is no longer that of an arena, but a cemetery –their cemetery. ‘The school teacher’ interpolates the last thoughts and reflections of Dioscoro González, recalling the day one of his pupils brought him a dead finch as a strange present, in the manner of a cat –again, there’s the sense of the belated recognition of a past portent, and, as if in homage to the ‘grinning like a cat, like a familiar’ of ‘Two Photographs’, here the image is of an infant augur expressing a kind of feline fealty:
He put it on the table, smoothed the wings
and walked to his chair. Whenever I looked up
he looked away. I never asked for his story,
where he’d found the finch; he never told me.
Is the implication that the boy might not have ‘found’ the finch in its current rigor mortis, but possibly killed it himself? ‘The poet’ needs no elucidation; it is an appropriately Lorcaesque encomium to Lorca in his last moments, simply dripping with sense-impression –ocular, aural, olfactory and gustatory; tellingly, there is no tangible evocation here, presumably because the poet has his hands tied behind his back, and, perhaps more tellingly, the main emphasis is on the olfactory and aural, because it is either a pitch-black night, or, more likely, because the poet is blindfolded (since if it was too dark then the Black Guard would have trouble hitting their targets).
Having said this, the second verse would appear to suggest that, at least initially, Lorca is not blindfolded, since the descriptions are almost all ocular. Hindle’s deployment of alliteration and assonance is, as is typical of his poetry, of a sculptural quality. The Messianic implications of what is historically depicted in common memory among the Spanish Left (and literati) as a secular martyrdom, moreover, an almost Christ-like self-sacrifice akin to a symbolic crucifixion, is honoured quite emphatically by Hindle in the final Golgothan line:
Smell of pines, the dust of the path,
spice of orchids. This is all.
scrape and crunch of my feet,
trickle of stones in the barrancos.
My throat, thick as a wound.
Stands of pines, black on the blue night.
Rocks and fields of rocks below the path,
the bulked slopes crowding above.
The utter darkness of caves. This is all.
No scent of the distant sea.
No gold or tin moon, wise or aloof.
No song. Nothing beyond this paseo
in the loud emptiness of the sierra.
No cross or Calvary.
[Note: barrancos is Spanish for ravines]. Again we have the bruising colours of ‘black’ and ‘blue’. ‘The executioners’ is another striking, allegorical epigram:
When Goya was mad he might have painted these
like he painted Saturn eating his children.
They have the god’s eyes, some of them: staring,
lost from whatever it was that once kept them human.
Saturn was the Roman god of agriculture, which is of significance to the agricultural character of much of Andalusia, as well as to the agrarian disputes and tensions of land rights and ownership that adumbrated the larger ideological imbroglio of the Spanish Civil War itself. The last piece, ‘The grave-digger’, is a kind of mini-monologue by the eponymous protagonist expressing resentment and moral discomfort at his occupational complicity:
Look. If you knew me
you’d know what I think of this.
In the bars they are all so certain:
the Reds deserve what they get –
and so on.
I like the assonance of ‘the Reds deserve what they get’. In its slightly matter-of-fact style, its casual frankness of tone, I am reminded of some of the work of Wigan-based poet Peter Street, particularly his wittily satirical ventriloquisms of anthropomorphised flowers and plants –and, by a strange coincidence, among Street’s former legion occupations, he once worked as a grave-digger (a subject which he has occasionally depicted in poems). We next get a hint of how these night executions are illuminated: with lamps, or lanterns:
Well, then: let them come up here
each night, wait for the crack of guns,
the lights coming back, job done.
Let them climb those last yards,
each darkness hiding horrors.
The lamp then becomes the key emblem of this poem:
Let them stand the lamp on the rock,
scrape the ground back,
roll the bodies in,
slack and grim.
The name of this poem isn’t of a place but is the rather gloating sobriquet ascribed by the firing squads to the fateful route of the Alfacar road along which they marched their prisoners –as the endnote puts it, the ‘executioners mockingly called this walk of death el paseo after the evening stroll which is a part of every Spanish family’s life’.
The endnote to ‘Ainadamar’ (subtitled ‘The Fountain of Tears’) elucidates the eponymous place: ‘The ‘fountain of tears’ celebrated by the Moorish poets –now called Fuente Grande– is the spring of the Río Darro. Its water was diverted to irrigate the gardens of the Albaicín as well as to provide water for the Alhambra. García Lorca was killed closed to the fountain’. Presumably, then, the ‘fountain of tears’ is near to a cemetery –or possibly Lorca wasn’t shot in a cemetery, as were many other Granadan Loyalists. This is a poem of aftermath, almost of refreshment after the event, making much use of aqueous imagery:
It is suddenly night in the Plaza Larga.
The men playing Mus tilt their cards
to the window light; low voices carry
like farewells from the bar door.
The water of Ainadamar
brings it cold songs from the sierra
From the terrace of San Nicolás
the bluff of the Alhambra darkens
by minutes: gold; bronze; umber.
A bell clanks like a pall.
The woodenness of that last description is curious given bells are normally associated with metallic sounds. These watery refrains have a deft aural trickle –the ‘g’-sounds in the second line of the second refrain lend a irrigative quality:
The water of Ainadamar runs in its channels,
its songs ringing in the lanes and gardens
There then comes an apt description of the continual seasonal and elemental contrasts of Granada between the climate of the valley-city and that of the mountains that surround it; for instance, in spring, the valley of Granada gasps with a thick-aired heat wafting over from the North Sahara, which is trapped within the Granadan basin until the city brims like a dust-bowl –and yet, even when temperatures can reach as high as 35 to 38 degrees, the mountains overhead in the distance are still, contrastingly, capped with snow. In Hindle’s verse below, the contrast appears to have reversed, so that the mountains are sun-traps while the valley below is depicted at night, probably just before dawn, hence the lofty glimmerings of light:
Even now there is sun on the mountains
on Veleta, Caballo, on Mulchacén.
There is sun up there, flashing its curfew;
there is deep memory of snow.
The penultimate poem is another of Hindle’s translations from Lorca, ‘García Lorca: Barrio de Córdoba’, subtitled ‘A night theme’, it is, again, instantly recognisable as a Lorca lyric, with its images of night, and its emblems of flowers, birds and string-instruments –note the lulling quality of the rich assonance throughout:
In the house they hide
from the stars.
The night is in ruins.
In the house a dead child lies,
a dark rose clustered in her hair.
Six nightingales weep for her
at the window bars.
The men are signing the truth
with their guitars.
‘The night is in ruins’ is a wonderful phrase, while the ‘men… sighing truth/ with their guitars’ is poignantly evocative of that more mournful, sadder strain of Spanish gypsy music. We then come to the closing piece of this absorbing, even mesmerising volume, the parabolic ‘Epilogue: At the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh’. Curiously, this is a prose-poem, composed in fully justified paragraphs, but it is emphatically a poetic prose:
That story, the Moor’s sigh, last breath of the old world. They tell it with grins on their faces, a drinking song. The king weeping, his mother scolding, the echo dry as rock fall. Do not cry like a child for that which you could not defend like a man.
Only the mountains then, snow and the hawk’s rattle. The sun sunk in the west.
The flag of the Christians is on the tower. Yoke and arrows. The Moor turns his horse to the high blue road south, the ghosts whispering in the barrancos. They are mountain people: they must live again in the mountains.
The final endnote elucidates its precise depictions: ‘Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada, surrendered the city to the Christians on 2 January, 1492, following a seven-month siege. The treaty guaranteed religious rights to the Moors and safe passage to the Alpujarra mountains. These rights, however, were soon overturned, and the inevitable rebellion was brutally put down. Within 10 years, all Muslims of the former Nasrid kingdom of Granada were either killed, expelled from Spain, or forced to convert to Christianity’. Whether or not any suggested juxtaposition between the purges of the Moors by the Christians and the later defeat and oppression of the Spanish Loyalists –many factions within which were actively atheistic– by the Catholic Falangists and Carlists is being made here by Hindle is open to interpretation, but if so, it’s an intriguing paradigm. The chiming imagery of ‘sighs’, from those of the sad strains of Spanish guitar-players to the historical motif of the Moors, perhaps suggests, by way of symbolism, that such a paradigm is, to some degree, being implied.
Rotherham-born Hindle is that not so common combination of a poet and journalist – or at least a much less common combination than poet-and-critic or poet-and-literary journalist; indeed, it’s difficult to think of many poets who were/are also journalists (though much easier to think of journalistic poets, but that’s an entirely separate matter, and doesn’t apply to Hindle), but there are some: American poet Archibald MacLeish (twice Pulitzer Prize winner), who famously lectured on ‘Poetry and Journalism’, and, lest we be permitted to forget, Anglo-Australian broadcaster and supplemental-poet Clive James. Ezra Pound once coined the aphorism ‘Literature is news that stays news’ (ABC of Reading, 1934).
A contemporary American poet and journalist, David Tucker, commented not long ago that poetry and journalism complement one another –and certainly when one reads such disciplined and precise poetry as Rob Hindle’s, this would seem to be a justified remark, albeit only in terms of applying to a certain type of poetry. Tucker also alludes to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as “the best piece of reporting to come out of the 19th century –Whitman having been originally a typographer, then a successful journalist in New York, parallel to his prolific poetry career. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was also a newspaper editor; and triple-Pulitzer Prize-winning American-Swedish poet Carl Sandburg worked for a period for the Chicago Daily News. There are numerous poet contributors to The Recusant, for instance, who are also journalists of various sorts (whether reporters, feature writers, reviewers or critics): Anglo-Hungarian poet and correspondent Thomas Ország-Land, Iris poet and journalist John McKeown, and of course Andy Croft who frequently contributes poetry write-ups to the Morning Star. But this tacit tradition of poetry and journalism would appear to be more of an American than British –or European– one.
The discipline of Hindle’s bread-and-butter profession might account for his extremely polished, clipped and aphorismic style, as well as for his tendency to write poetry about other lives, other events and cultures, and of other times, rather than concentrating on more personalised self-expression, and, as is a key journalistic technique, to impart polemical or political points through the mouths of others (anything else would be opinion piece, the preserve of columnists) –a kind of poetry as empathetic reportage. Such qualities were perhaps neglected to some extent by Cyril Connolly in his Enemies of Promise, particularly his chapter cautioning aspiring writers against careers in journalism, ‘The Blue Bugloss’; but of course Connolly had a point in emphasizing the distinction between the ‘todayness’ or ephemerality of journalism, and the aspiring and sometimes accomplished permanency of poetry.
Hindle’s previous collections have also had historical-narrative themes, both in international and regional senses, as indicated by their titles: Some Histories of the Sheffield Floods 1864, Neurosurgey in Iraq and The Purging of Spence Broughton, Highwayman –and in the case of Yoke and Arrows, Hindle’s biographical extract on the back mentions that he lived and worked in Madrid in the 1990s. I’d be curious to know how well-acquainted Hindle is with Granada itself, and it’s not always completely clear from his descriptions and depictions of the Moorish city how intimate his associations are. However, I know from my own frequent visits to that very Moorish and yet also quintessentially ‘Spanish’ city, how challenging it is to try to evoke its very particular atmosphere and architectural eclecticism in poetry without tripping into pseudo-Lorcaesque synecdoche and colouristic aphorism.
Because it is the richness of the colours and the odours of the city –it has a very distinctive bouquet comprising eucalyptus, oranges and various spices– that tend to linger in one’s memory the most, as well as the thick dusty Saharan-heat in spring and early summer, the very heavy sense of Spanish tradition and history that drapes over the city like a brocaded hanging. And it is an intensely coloured, richly elaborate tapestry, which incorporates such a heady potpourri of historical and cultural scents and fragrances: the Alhambra’s lasting monument to the mediaeval Moorish occupation; the effigies of King Fernando and Queen Isabel as sculpted representations of the Spanish purges of the Moors (and Jews); the folkloric legacy of Miguel de Cervantes, Shakespeare of Spanish prose, and his ingeniously allegorical novel Don Quixote (in Granada, every souvenir shop and department store is chockfull with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza miniatures of all types and materials –although the iconic character hailed from La Mancha, the region that borders Andalusia to the North).
Clashing with the Moorish Islamic architectural influences are the triumphant relics of the Spanish Roman Catholic Church’s overbearingly baroque heritage, typified by the gold lustre and vertiginous inner-design of the Cathedral of the Incarnation; as well as the still living tradition of Holy Week processions when anguished Madonna icons and bloodied thorny Christ effigies are hoisted through the streets. There’s even one shop window in Granada which has an assortment of literally hundreds on hundreds of Biblical figurines, encompassing practically every protagonist, including some of the more obscure ‘cameos’, and, of course, all the Saints, lined up as a cosmic strata of miniatures –window-shopping for strictly Catholic tourists.
Then there is the vast population of postcard Lorcas; the Manuel de Falla auditorium; the tortuous Moroccan arcades; the ubiquitous orange trees; the wide-girthed bullrings; the proud and passionate tradition of gypsy flamenco (Granada has the country’s oldest and most famous flamenco bar, a catacomb-like haunt wallpapered with myriad photographs of famous and flamenco stars and historic performances). I’ll never forget one late Spring evening when we chanced on a public performance by female Spanish dancers in their full peacock-like traditional dresses with fans brandished, performing danzas españolas replete with crotacología (playing castanets while dancing) –though this type of strident brassy music and striking choreography are traditionally associated with Spanish ‘music nationalism’ and the works of the likes of patriotic composer Enrique Granados, even to some degree Manuel de Falla, who, in spite of his ambivalence towards Francoism, was nevertheless knighted in 1940 under the rank of Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise, while he lived in self-imposed exile in Argentina (certainly the bolero-like ‘El Amor Brujo’, an almost viscerally stirring piece by de Falla, has many of the orchestral characteristics associated with the music of the Nationalist movement).
Granada is an intense tourist experience, exhausting even, if one is –like myself– practically incapacitated in any kind of heat above 28 degrees (I once endured 35 degrees one late spring in Granada, where fans merely circulate the thick warm currents rather than relieving them with cooling breezes, and felt like I was walking around in a spin-dryer when we finally trekked out after six pm –we had to stay indoors during the day as it was almost dangerously hot, small wonder the Spaniards don’t bother with carpets, but have cool-inducing tiled floors in every room). Being landlocked and in a valley circled by mountains, Granada can become a dustbowl in spring and summer, albeit a still intensely beautiful dustbowl; in winter, when it snows thickly from the mountains, it is sublime and fairytale-like. Hindle captures something of the exotic, almost-magical qualities of Granada in these poems, even if his prime aim seems not so much to evoke a particular place as a particular place–in-time, one which is as much psychical and atmospheric of mood and emotion as physical.
The Granada of Yoke and Arrows is a city of mind and of the soul –its dark night, indeed– and Hindle’s empathetic poem-depictions of the last days and nights of García Lorca in a scorching August of 1936 are by turns deeply touching, hypnotic, and often exceptionally choreographed. This is a highly accomplished collection, and quite apart from its considerable poetic qualities, is also a worthy contribution to the long canon of Spanish Civil War-related British literature, as well as surely one of the most empathetic, sensitively handled and carefully sculpted poetic tributes to García Lorca, his life and his poetry. In many respects, Hindle, I think, manages to capture in these poems many aspects of the cultural-historical-political-poetical post mortem made by Cyril Connolly in the closing chapter to the second section of his literary polemic, Enemies of Promise, ‘Outlook Unsettled’, from ‘II. The Charlock’s Shade’, which was published either towards the end or at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1938), so was presumably written a little earlier, chillingly near-contemporaneous to the execution of Lorca, so far from the emotionally removed judgement of greening wounds:
The most real thing for a writer is the life of the spirit, the growth or curve of vision within him of which he is the custodian, selecting the experiences propitious to its development, protecting it from those unfavourable. When he fails to do this something seems to rot; he becomes angry, frightened, and unhappy, suffering from what Swift called ‘that desiderium which of all things makes life most uneasy’.
The spiritual reality of the artist may come into conflict with the historical reality of his time and true to his own reality, he may even have to sacrifice himself by his opposition to the external world and so find that no life but premature death is required of him. …Genius is important in creating that world and therefore will be among the first things to suffer. There are destructive elements – war, plague, earthquake, cancer, and the dictator’s firing squad are among them – which take no account of the unfinished masterpiece or the child in the womb. They are real and their reality must never be under-estimated but there remains a reality of will and spirit by which within the unchanging limitations of time and death they can be controlled.*
Then, in an asterisked footnote, Connolly uses the then only recently executed Lorca as a contemporary example:
*The Spanish poet Lorca was shot because he fell into the power of an element which detested spiritual reality. Yet Lorca fell into those hands because he lived in Granada. Had he lived in Barcelona or Madrid he would be alive today like Sender or Alberti. But he lived in reactionary Granada, a city of the past, of gipsies and bullfighters and priests, and he made his best poems about bullfighters and gipsies. That element in him which sought the past, which drew him to the medievalism of Andalusia, contained the seed of his own death, placing him, who was no friend to priests of feudal chiefs, in a city where the past would one day come to life, and prove deadly.
Today, Spain appears to be almost economically paralysed at what is another socially and politically fractious time, which looks set to continue traumatising its way through the younger generations, over half of whom are faced with grim prospects of chronic unemployment in conjunction with remorseless cuts to public expenditure and welfare benefits, and, as even more graphically in bankrupted Greece, rising homelessness, destitution, despair and suicides. So, at a time when Spain –particularly Andalusia– is experiencing the same kind of capitalist-caused social and economic iniquities to those it was ultimately sundered by in the Thirties, Hindle’s Yokes and Arrows is aptly timed. The volume serves both as a benediction to a Marxist poet effectively martyred during his country’s darkest hour, and as a poetic reminder of the torrid and bloody societal meltdown into which Spain was plunged over eight years ago as a result of the catastrophic failure of European capitalism; for the seeds of class resentments are the periodic poppy-seeds blown by capitalism, that, almost singular to its auspices, nourish arid plains of fascism.
Moreover, during a period which is in some respects Europe’s potential second “1930s moment” –a kind of Thirties Redux–Hindle’s empathic Spanish testament in verse also serves as a dire warning from the past of just how rapidly capitalist crises can tip into partisan extremism (contemporary Hungary, for example) and open hostilities (Greece, Spain, Ukraine et al), which in turn can be so easily orchestrated into outright civil war. Chronic economic recession –for in Spain it appears to be chronic– is a lingering hair-trigger for civil unrest, anarchy and worse. And where there is anarchy, the strong arm of the Far Right is always waiting in the wings to seize its chance, as almost happened, for instance, through the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece, the aggressively anti-immigrant vanguard of which held an alarming attitudinal and behavioural sway in Athens up until its impeachment as a criminal organisation in September 2013 and the prosecution of its leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos, following the assassination of an anti-fascist rap artist.
We can only hope and pray that Spain, among other European nations at this time (Greece, Ukraine et al), never reaches that same tipping-point over which it tumbled in 1936. In the meantime, The Recusant recommends Yoke and Arrows for a shot of poetic-historical reflection on the incalculable Spanish sacrifices in the cause of democracy and freedom (and socialism) that, in the longer run, did not prove futile –but the belated fruits of which, post-Censorship, appear to be increasingly and rapidly threatened once again in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a result, entirely this time, of capitalist malfeasance, as unemployment among young Spaniards skyrockets out of control, hundreds of thousands are plunged into poverty, and a recently elected centre-right government hammers out the axe of austerity on the anvil of the Spanish public sector at the kleptocratic dictates of the Troika. In the Thirties, the great threat to Spain was fascism; in the Twenty-Tens, it is the ‘fiscal fascism’ of the IMF, the ‘White Terror’ of the Troika –this is a time of a pecuniary yoke and arrows.
Alan Morrison © 2014
Alan Morrison on
Mike Jenkins
Barkin!
Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2013
Mike Jenkins is a prolific and award-winning Welsh poet (born in Aberystwyth, currently living in Merthyr Tydfil), former editor of Poetry Wales and current co-editor of socialist poetry journal Red Poets. He is author of several prose works, short story collections and novellas, such as a Welsh dialect children’s story Barbsmashive (Spells Trouble; 2002), and over sixteen poetry collections for adults and children spanning over thirty years, including The Common Land (Poetry Wales, 1981), Invisible Times (Seren, 1986), A Dissident Voice (Seren, 1990), Graffiti Narratives (Planet, 1994), Red Landscapes (Seren, 1999), Moor Music (Seren, 2011). Barkin! is Jenkins’ fourth collection of poetry and prose from Welsh-dialect press Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, following Laughter Tangled in Thorn (2002), The Language of Flight (2004) and Walking on Waste (2007).
My understanding of the use of the term ‘dialect’ in the case of the linguistic style of Barkin! is to indicate that the poems, mostly anecdotal monologues from various Merthyr ‘characters’, are presented in a form of accentual vernacular which is comprehensible to English readers whilst visibly stressing the phonological aspects of the Merthyr idiom through pseudo-phonetic inflections. These aspects, coupled with a lively and humorous tone, though not one which precludes social and polemical comment, or meaningful meditations on the human condition, remind me of another contemporary Anglo-Welsh pseudo-dialect poet, Gwilym Williams, in particular his Mavericks (2005; 08) and Genteel Messages (Poetry Monthly Press, 2008 –both previously reviewed on TR); and, to some extent, perhaps inescapably, Dylan Thomas’s iconic benchmark for all subsequent Welsh-inflected English poetry, the phantasmagorical bucolic Under Milk Wood (1954), which still throws such a profound shadow sixty years on.
But Jenkins’ particular metier is the Merthyr Tydfil dialect, and he presents it, as mentioned, with a phonological tangibility on the page, as opposed to Thomas’s more rhythmic evocation of the undulating sounds of the Welsh accent (in his case, from Carmarthenshire), Alun Lewis’s similarly musical ‘valley’ adumbrations (Abadare), or, again, Gwilym Williams’ phrasal emphases. What to the English eye and ear might seem a faintly old-world, quaintly Celtic and parochial idiom in the village-gossipy presentation of Jenkins’ speakers, is nicely juxtaposed with the impersonal auspices of contemporary consumerist society in what feels almost like a clash of not only cultures but also histories, attitudes and, most particularly, regional relationships with language.
Suffice it to say that the Welsh –like their fellow Celtic Irish, and to some extent, the Gaelic Scots– have continued to cultivate a very ‘lived-in’ vernacular, an intimate and highly expressive engagement with their dialects/languages, songful, melodic, intuitive, brimming with feeling, compared to the long slow Anglo-Saxon linguistic disengagement, the English arguably being the only monoglot regional group in Britain, albeit with some startlingly varied colloquial nuances; particularly in the North-West, in cities such as Liverpool –where, however, the accentual distinctiveness of ‘Scouse’ is, of course, of mostly Celtic influences, being a combined absorption of both Welsh and Irish locutions into a Lancastrian coastal community.
Rather ingeniously, Jenkins also uses his dialectal idiom to play on homophonic –and often ironic– serendipities, as in the first line from the first poem in the book, ‘Posh Pirate’, where the speaker mentions ‘a newclear scientist’ who ‘lives up Dowlais Top’, and later in the same poem, ‘ee knows ow to ambush poetree’. ‘Posh Pirate’ dips us straight into the Merthyr ‘dialect’ that dominates Barkin!, and there’s something immediately reassuring in reading/hearing contemporary memes of consumerism couched in perennial Welsh phrasing and the elongated monophthongs singular to the region:
there’s a trolley stuck in-a river,
Taekwondo at-a Leisure Centre…
from ower very best Pound Shop…
picks arguments with minin engineers,
leaves nex day soon as ee can;
posh pirate leggin it to Englan’.
Jenkins tends towards the shorter line and shorter stanza, and most commonly employs tercets, a succinct form which has been fashionable in contemporary poetry for the past three or more decades in particular. ‘The girl oo become Blonde’ is a deft anecdotal lyric which manages to be both conversational and poetic at the same time, not something easily pulled off, but Jenkins has a real ability to bring different linguistic dynamics together for best effect –a kind of sing-song slang:
Sittin on a bus t-Cardiff
nex to the mingiest person as always,
windows shut an i’m gaggin.
then this girl, just by Whitchurch,
does this really weird thing
(bout 16, dressed in Chinos an Converse);
she puts a back cap over er air,
short black air an simple
not like er fren’s purpley steaks an spikes;
…
is it some disguise, or t make er
look a lot older in a bar?
On a bus fulla baldies and silveries
an the mankiest person in-a universe…
‘I’m A Dead Man’ is a powerful lyric-monologue, in short haiku-like tercets, relating a marital or relationship breakdown from the point of view of a man left behind –that Jenkins can draw out such raw emotion, even despair, from so few words and phrases, is quite remarkable:
She’ve left
she’ve gone,
to er I’m a dead man.
we lived close by,
suppert t’gether
an now Aberdare
might just as well
be Australia
f’r all she cares
I paint, do collages,
end up turning em black,
end up burning em up
all them years
f’r what?
no kids, no nothin!
And then some hints that the absconded wife suffered some form of schizophrenic illness:
that Clinic turner er
‘gainst me an I even
paid f’r er t be there
too many voices
when she shoulda slept:
er father fucker her up
now I’m left t regret
I couldn be er child an usban’:
I’ll have a fewnral f’r myself
drink till my ead’s a canvas
stretched an ready f’r-a brush,
but my ands shake, I carn raise it.
This is pithy but potent stuff, almost like a Welsh version of the similarly succinct urban lyricism of Tyneside’s Tom Kelly (published by Red Squirrel Press). In ‘Las Person on-a Planet!’ there’s some more additions to the Jenkins Merthyr dialectal idiom, such as ‘yeard’ (heard) –and it’s also noteworthy that Jenkins even manages at times to draw half and full end-rhymes out from his vernacular verse, ‘crisis’/ ‘roses’ and ‘transfer’/ ‘counter’/ ‘splutter’/ ‘in yer’. The final line is particularly powerful.
It’s a mark of Jenkins’ tonal confidence that the following poem, ‘In Memree of ‘Toilet”, is markedly lighter-hearted, albeit in a reflective way, the narrator remembering a departed busker friend of his who was a big Beatles fan and was nicknamed, inexplicably, ‘Toilet’ –it’s the first poem of the collection to divert from tercets into quatrains. The next two poems are back to the swifter tercets, ‘Las Person on-a Planet!’ is similarly anecdotal and humorous, while ‘Smokin the Torch’ is particularly amusing, recounting an episode where a local livewire imbiber of various chemicals (alcohol and drugs), called ‘Scripo’, while ‘Arf pissed, arf stoned’, unknowingly sabotages an Olympic torch ceremony in the village, seizing on the flaming totem assuming it to be ‘a giant spliff’:
As cops catch old of is coat
ee yells out –‘Ardest joint I ever smoked!’
ee singed theyer eyeballs with a-flame!
It’s almost like a Welsh punk version of Last of the Summer Wine. It closes with another deft homophonic play:
In-a ‘Merthyr’ nex week wuz the eadline
REPUBLICAN DRUNKARDS RUIN OLYMPIC RELAY!
an I made Scripo a Yew-tube sensation.
‘Ewman Advert’ is a curious, almost surreal piece about a man stood for waiting for a bus outside a KFC, who appears to be overcome in the heat and fumes of the fast food restaurant, until he feels as if he’s metamorphosing into a Kentucky fried chicken; but the poem’s subtext, playing literally on the adage ‘you are what you eat’, or in this case, ‘you are what others eat’, seems to be an olfactory and gustatory satirical take on the depersonalisation of consumerism, when the man finds his very body and apparel (read identity) transmuted into a KFC advert, though more for the battered comestibles of a ‘Field Marshal’ than ‘Colonel’ –Kitchener Fried Chicken:
A sign across my t-shirt read –
‘Colonel Sanders Needs You’
like an army recrewtment poster.
‘All Poetree’s Gay’ is a tongue-in-cheek monologue by Merthyr male suddenly finding his masculinity being called into question following his entering and winning a poetry competition; almost as a statement of his uncompromised machismo, he sells the book tokens he wins to his ‘ol man’ in return for some money. The title poem appears to be about an eccentric local, ‘Dave’, who, almost Mr Ben-like, normally alternates his appearances in various themed costumes of ‘Fancy Dress’, but who is observed on day out shopping and looking relatively conventional in a ‘a grey suit’, with ‘is silvery air…/ plastered down/ in thick, greasy strands/ tryin t ide is baldin…/ ung in a wiry web’. In the next poem, ‘Itchcock’s Brother’, we encounter ‘Dave’ again, this time posing as Alfred Hitchock’s lesser known brother –this is an individual with a multitude of assumed identities alternately sported for the amusement of his fellow Merthyrites:
Coz I seen im loadsa times:
‘MEXICAN DAVE’ down Tescos
with is floppy sombrero,
‘COWBOY DAVE’ in is stetson
an ‘POLICEMAN DAVE’ down-a presinck
Again, the theme of identity is being examined by Jenkins, and it’s significant to note that these characters –‘Toilet’ and dress-alternating ‘Dave’– sublimate their senses of identity vicariously through popular cultural icons, while the ‘Ewman Advert’ has his identity seemingly decided for him simply by the propinquity of a KFC, and Scripo chooses to amplify his personality through chemical means.
Without wishing –or intending– to sound at all patronising, the impression I get through this ‘Jenkinsian’ ventriloquism is of a subtle polemical comment on the inauthentic senses of identity cultivated by so many people in anarcho-capitalist society who inescapably come under the ubiquitous influence of commercialised and consumerist memes and symbols –popular idols, celebrities, fictional film and TV characters etc.– as if the only way they feel they can express their sense of individuality is vicariously, through the introjection of famous others’ accomplishments, as if they are their own personal accomplishments; to try and become what or whom they admire, like wearing badges or t-shirts branded with the images of their icons –to be living symbols for other things or other people, rather than simply being, or rather, discovering themselves.
But being or discovering ourselves are particularly slippery pursuits in the labyrinth of malls and shopping centres that is the Primark-kitted kultur of capitalism; in most senses that truly matter, this is a type of society which is, less obviously, every bit as inhibitive of individuality and expression of personality as Soviet Communism once was. Most of our ‘choices’ are superimposed by hypnotising spiel and sales pitches, and variations in ‘ways of being’ are reduced to symbols, logos and brands, mostly indistinguishable from one another in terms of their actual products; capitalism serves up for us merely the symbols for things, but not the things themselves (and by ‘things’ I mean more metaphysical experience and opportunities).
But more particularly, in this parochial context, these poems and their various picaresque characters seem to portray a quite tragic case of a Welsh working-class community (possibly ex-coal mining?) seemingly gutted of its authentic heritage to a de-industrialised cultural relic of its own past character, where old comities and camaraderie are replaced by commercial mimicries, and human exchange is reduced to a game of incognito charades. In this scenario, then, these various characters appear to represent individual attempts to invest such consumerised anonymity with aspects of spontaneity, even if, perhaps inevitably, these subversions are themselves victims to the all-pervasive influence of commercial advertising, so that even ‘Dave’’s wardrobe is fimbriated with prefabrications, he only being able to express his restless itch for a true identity through various disguises that signify other people’s identities.
Indeed, capitalism almost implants in many of us a sense that the only way we can become ourselves, express our true personalities, is through acquisition –in this case, acquisition of wealth and fame; aspiring to be rich and famous is essentially aspiring to having an identity or a fully explored personality –something so fundamental to being and yet something so many feel is only obtainable through essentially material means, when it’s actually anything but. Hence the deplorable term ‘wannabe’, which basically means someone who ‘wants to be’ something or someone else, largely due to a sense of personal inadequacy (‘status anxiety’), and a reassurance-seeking narcissism (actually a sublimated deep sense of inferiority), which capitalist society, with its social Darwinian emphasis on competition and hierarchy, instils in almost all of us. But by aspiring to wealth and fame, to ‘celebrity’, we are not, in truth, aspiring to an authentic realisation of our personalities and identities, but simply to the opportunity of feeling superior to others and/or reaping the applause and admiration of others, a kind of egoistic reassurance-seeking –which is itself a synthetic substitute for true self-actualisation.
(One of the typical psychical tricks of capitalist society, amplified by the false familiarity and phrasal casualness of tabloid and red-top prose, is the phoney personalising of the rich, powerful and famous, particularly celebrities and royalty, by speaking to us about them in first name terms, or even slightly more intimately phrased nicknames, in order to try and cultivate a public sense of vicarious intimacy with them and thereby make the elites seem more informal, hospitable and accessible; a classic example of this today is in the over-familiar moniker of ‘Wills’ (i.e. ‘Wills and Kate’), which tabloids apply to the second direct heir to the throne, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge who couldn’t be more removed and partitioned from ordinary people’s lives in terms of his hereditary status. But even contemporary politicians don’t miss this trick of synthetic casualness by abbreviating their Christian names in order to try and sound more down-to-earth and ordinary: ‘Nick’, ‘Danny’, ‘Ed’, ‘Tony’ etc.).
But to return to Barkin!, which at least has more verisimilitude in its tone of familiarity and casualness. ‘Yew’re Gonna Pay’ is about that most impropitious slap-in-the-face of industrial capitalism: the redundancy notice just before Christmas –no doubt a fairly common annual vicissitude under the present State-cutting government:
The debt’s so ‘eavy
slike cement on ower backs;
money runs through us
like-a Taff in flood.
…
Christmas’ll afto be cancelled,
my, kids won’t get nothing
on theyer Santa lists:
the future’s a wall, no endin.
…
Me an my famlee below
an starin up, no cracks o light,
the shadow of-a wall
always blocks-a sun out.
‘Owlin at-a Moon’ is a lively verse about the resilient comity of outside smokers in the backyard of a pub, who take a prompt from one of their number, Mark, who starts to ‘owl like a werewolf’ at a full moon above them ‘bright ‘n’ round/ as a promised coin/ to a young child’, and all howl together:
An somebuddy from over-a wall
in-a bus station close by
owls a really loud reply
an we piss owerselves.
That’s what I like about Merthyr:
this town’s full o nutters.
In these gentrified, smoke-free times, it’s almost as if social camaraderie is relegated to a kind of courtyard lycanthropy –smoking is one of today’s frowned-on social taboos, an ‘elephant-in-the-patio’ of pub life, and takes its place, metaphorically, alongside sport-apostasy and republicanism. From howling wolves to tuwit-tuwooing owls in the next, rather gloomier poem, ‘Too Far Gone’, in which a narrator recounts the accidental death of an old school friend fond of pranks, who found ‘Everythin’ borin’ “cept art’ but whose doodling during lessons was tolerated by teachers ‘long as ee kept is mouth shut’. Tanked up on that cheap liquid opium of the masses today, ‘White Lightnin’, a kind of battery-fluid white cider, the prankster ends up tightrope-walking along ‘an ol pipe’, tempting fate by deliberately wobbling and flapping ‘is arms’ and shrieking ‘like a loopy parrot’ until he slips ‘onto solid boulders stickin out:/ down like a bird shot/ landin on is ead’, then not moving. Then, in a darker tone:
We panicked and done a runner.
Never even called a-cops.
Left im there t rot.
The narrator is subsequently plagued by nightmares of his old prankster friend ‘crawlin up-a banks/ an draggin at my legs’ –this rather gruesome anecdote of youthful fatal high jinks reminds me of the genuinely unnerving, almost macabre 1977 Public Information Film (PIF), Apaches, which depicts several typically lank-haired Seventies kids playing at ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in a dilapidated farmyard, each picked off one by one by various inanimate hazards –a falling sheet of rusty corrugated iron, impaling farm implements, a bog-like vat, the raking blades of a tractor etc. – in a kind of agricultural Grand Guignol (like an episode of The Famous Five directed by Sam Pekinpah), or a rusticating Resistentialism (the latter ‘jocular’ neologism coined by humorist Paul Jennings in 1948 to mean ‘seemingly spiteful behaviour manifested by inanimate objects’, a kind of spoof on existentialism with attaching slogan, “Les choses sont contre nous” (“Things are against us”); though Jennings was prefigured by M.R. James’ 1933 horror short story, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’).
The next poem, ‘Settin Fire t Tescos’, was one of Jenkins’ contributions to The Robin Hood Book – Verse Versus Austerity, and was, I think, written in part-response to the August 2011 riots and arsons (the theme of shoplifting in Tescos echoing the Dickensian episode in said riots when a youth who pinched a bottle of water from a supermarket was handed a six month prison sentence). In this poem, it’s a Merthyr petty shoplifter who, while ‘on drugs n booze’, accidentally perpetrates the felony of the title while trying ‘t burn off-a tags’ from some shop products in order ‘t scurry through a-securitee’, and is then pounced on by security, his ‘ead a Waltzer spinnin’. His confessed defence at the end is perhaps not the best advert for most shoplifters’ motives of impoverishment (ever more common no doubt today in our stripped-down ‘food bank Britain’), a very candid slice of social realism:
I was liftin clothes tha’s all
coz i carn afford none:
arf my benefit goes to-a dealer
an the rest is jest f survivin.
But Jenkins’ sociological cogitations are undoubtedly well-intentioned, and more on the side of the transgressing underdog than the punitive and disingenuous ‘justice’ system that criminalises him; while there’s also a nice double-play on both perennial auction and penal phrases:
What ope f the likes o me
when there’s fuckall opportunities:
sirens blarin all ower town,
theyer message – ‘Goin… goin down!’
‘Soopermarkit Drama’ continues the theme of parochial shoplifting with a more humorous episode in which some customers in the local ‘soopermarkit’ suddenly take part in a spontaneous incipient Bacchanalia, one ‘bloke’ clearly –by way of pun– ‘off of is trolley!’, who starts ‘strippin off’ ‘jest by-a frozen peas n carrots’, and another ‘young fella, beard an long air’ who climbs up on top of the ‘Wines an Beers’ (not completely sure how this is practicable) and starts ‘slurpin’ from cans while performing a striptease, only to be ‘dragged down by eavies’ before he’s had a chance to get ‘down to is goolies’. The Merthyr narrator concludes, as if by cut-price dialectic:
What a protest against shop-liftin,
ee wuz pissed with all ee’d bin nickin.
‘The On’y Way’ is one of the more intriguing of these anecdotal poems, its narrator recounting how an evangelical Seventies schoolteacher –presumably of Religious Education?– and reformed alcoholic converted him to ‘Born Again’ Christianity and put him off all literature other than the strictly Biblical, but by doing so, at least in the ephemeral sense, ‘saved’ him:
It wuz-a worse time f me,
Parents always arguin,
Fren’s inta drugs n drinkin.
I coulda gone either way,
My ead like litter in the wind,
Coulda ended up in-a drain.
Ee tol us Jesus wuz the on’y way,
To follow is life ev’ry day,
The bible ad-a truth of ev’rythin.
‘I’m sorry, but gays…’ ee’d say
‘…ull all end up in ell
With anyone oo’s disbleevin!’
At-a time when-a boyz
Wuz inta glam, when bands
Dressed up like women;
I knew ee’d saved me
An I’d leave my parents fightin
Whenever the Rapture come.
We done disgustin stuff in school:
‘Of Mice n Men’ all swearin an blasphemin,
This woman Angelou with scenes o rapin.
We ad meetin’s ev’ry week at lunchtime,
Ee tol us these wuz Satan’s work,
The bible the on’y book of education.
We wuz the promised ones, ee sayd,
Ee’d bin through it, drunk an misled:
English, I sat like a gravestone, an never read.
There’s an intriguing suggestion of juxtaposing alcohol and evangelicalism as two types of ‘intoxication’, though the latter, to a degree, a less debilitating coping strategy for life, albeit one morbidly empowered, so it would often appear, by a certain ‘damnation-happy’ disposition almost antipathetic to the basic charitable purposes of Christianity. It’s interesting to note the once almost standard use of John Steinbeck’s un-intimidatingly slim and accessibly allegorical Of Mice and Men for the State school English curricula, which I also remember studying at around fourteen at an archetypal Brutalist-prefab comprehensive which was a breeding ground for right-wing and/or evangelical pedagogic dogma. Fortunately my English teacher, one Mr Armer (the first person who ever encouraged my creative writing), was unapologetically left-wing at a time when it was almost requisite to apologise for being so, or at least exhaustively ‘justify’ one’s socialism (this was the ultra-Thatcherite late Eighties); Mr Armer also took us for R.E. as a side subject, and, being himself an evangelical atheist, singularly innovated in tossing the Bible aside and turning our attention instead to unsolved mysteries of alien visitations (something I found quite diverting, even if I wasn’t myself an atheist, though more at that age an agnostic).
‘The Bloody Snow’ is more quotidian but no less quaintly entertaining in its colloquial idioms –‘my ol rag n bone body/ worryin down t the bus-stop’, and:
Tha’s all ‘ey talk about in-a queues,
yew’d swear we woz Eskimos,
it’s snow this an ice that
an ow it’s warmer in Vladi-bloody-vostock!
(Ivor the Engine meets the Savage Innocents…?). Again, the Welsh-inflected poems of Gwilym Williams spring to mind, which also often have a sprightliness of tone, are slightly tongue-in-cheek, quirkily anecdotal, but which are not ‘dialect’ transcriptions as Jenkins’ poems, but play more on parochial turn-of-phrase and expression, as well as on rhythm –here’s an example from Williams’ witty ‘Telling Directions’, from Mavericks (2005):
R S Thomas is it?
Famous poet?
We’re chapel here…
Well my husband is.
‘nglish he is, that man Thomas;
Lived in Cardiff I believe; once
Painted a church as black as night.
I can’t say I liked him very much;
Mind you, I haven’t actually read him,
But I’ve heard things you see.
Welsh, you say? And lived here?
We’re Chapel here…
Here we can see similarities between the two poets’ styles, but Jenkins’s, also highly rhythmic, is, demonstrably, more phonologically presented.
The rather bizarre ‘Diego Maradona Come t Merthyr’, which begins with an apparent visitation from the aging Argentinean football star ‘with is air totalee grey/… is beer gut/… gone all bigger’ on the Merthyr ‘Igh Street/ goin on bout-a play-offs/ an ow Cardiff blew it’, then suddenly diverts into a phantasmagorical polemic on the contemporary upsurge in CASH FOR GOLD STORES, basically flimsily disguised Pawnbrokers:
The day ee lifts is And o God
an points down-a arcade
t where a new shop ave opened,
doubts ee’ve got any gold.
Slike some buildin society
on’y with-a name of a butcher;
in is blue n white stripes,
carn bleeve it’s a pawnbroker!
With is face pale as lard,
with is worn out trainers,
numero 10 couldn elp wonderin
if is shirt ud bring any fuckin money in.
So, presumably, this is another of the ragged-trousered Merthyrites who expresses his personality through a ‘popular’ (sporting) icon, and who the narrator playfully depicts as the actual icon himself, now somewhat over the hill, casually wandering around a Welsh town in his Argentine kit, as if he’s just strayed off a World Cup pitch.
‘Surjree Talk’ plays ironically on the common phrasal emphasis on sanguinity and wellbeing in casual daily greetings by using the demonstrably un-salubrious setting of a GP Surgery –the joke of the poem is encapsulated in the first and last stanzas, interpolated by a series of verses listing all the various symptoms and ailments that might have brought one there, including ‘an throat like a clogged chimley’:
Funny ow, in-a surjree
Ev’ryone always sayz –
‘Yer owright ‘en?’
…
Yew could ave all o these
An yew’d still bloody well reply –
‘Not too bad, ow about you?’
There are potential problems –at least, for more purist poetry readers– in composing poems around everyday ironies in the manner of jokes or ‘gags’, which can give the impression of a poem as a comedy routine, ending not in an epiphany but a punch-line. In the main, I think Jenkins succeeds at conveying more than mere observational comedy in most of his poems in Barkin!, but I feel ‘Surjree Talk’ is perhaps an exception in that it doesn’t really appear to be imparting much more than a humorous irony. Fortunately the following poem packs more of a polemical punch again, ‘A Big Party’, a satirical take on David Cameron’s nebulous concept of the Big Society, in mock-tribute to which some Merthyrites gather for a boozy celebration, replete with a token appearance from a khaki-clad Afghanistan casualty (Wootton Bassett meets Merthyr), and, more disruptively, ‘them Thomases Welsh-Nat’s/ Welsh-speakers’; but the party is brought to a crashing standstill when one ‘Alan up-a road puts a dampener
On the whool bloody evening,
stan’s on-a table, one foot in-a cake remains
an gives off t ev’ryone –
‘Big Fuckin Party!’ ee shouts is ead off,
‘yesterday I gotta Big News,
the Council’s on’y laid me off
an now I feel like a nobuddy!’
‘Nodbuddy’ being the operative word here: if one loses one’s job in the ‘Work’-fetishising Big Society, then they also, at least in economic terms, lose their sense of identity. ‘In-a Bus Shelter’ is a narrator’s candid encounter with a Cockney transvestite (‘She woz an ee’) who speaks ‘in a voice deeper/ an much oarser than mine’; it also includes a spot of Welsh self-mockery: ‘Which is the one f Llan’illeth please?’/ I sayz, careful not t gob over er’. After repeating the phlegm-churning name ‘Llan-hill-eth’, the transvestite replies curtly:
‘Well, you can go to Aberbeeg an walk!’
Ee chwtshed at a baby in a pushchair,
Never stopped knittin till is bus come.
Fuckin ell, Ebbw Vale’s weirder ‘an Merthyr!
‘Nothin Lager’ is a monologue of a seasoned beer-drinker bemoaning the acidy substitute tipple of the title, which sends the narrator gushing on various types of the genuinely brewed drink:
I kept thinkin o Rhymney brews
made in a Dowlais micro.
I kept thinkin oppy an barley:
golden summer, bitter autumn, dark winter;
Spring in Belgium, with Trappist ales
t get any monk boppin.
It closes on an apposite aphorism, which might also serve as a metaphor for the synthetic comity of consumer capitalism:
But it tasted of all them chains
o the Igh Street, of metal links joined.
‘Passin Facebook Frens’ is a deft satirical take on the ironic pseudo-solipsism of social media forums such as Facebook and Twitter. Continuing in the vein of exploring some of the Huxley-esque dystopian pastimes of contemporary capitalist culture is ‘Fish Foot Clinic’, tackling one of the more bizarre types of consumer decadence, and in this instance, depicting an inebriated Merthyrite demanding not guppies but piranhas as ‘On’y piranhas are ard enough’ for his tattoos. In ‘Int Goin Out’, a fearful narrator verges on agoraphobia when considering all the potentially fatal hazards of travelling anywhere, whether to Al Quaeda-stalked London, or Tenerife, after the recent grisly incident of an English woman tourist getting ‘er ead chopped off in a soopermarkit’. ‘Mormons on a Mission’ is the Merthyr take on the white-teeth and tanned American religious cult, apparently doing a spot of evangelical outreach in Wales with their ‘rucksacks fulla scripture’, ‘badges like executives’ and ‘shirts white as virgins’, in ‘pairs like salesmen:
Get yewer soul sealed with double glazing,
get a tidee conservatree in eaven.
In ‘Criminal Fence’, the narrator lambastes some cowboy builders for constructing a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ in their absence, and struggles to find ‘words t describe ow I feel’, settling for a combination of the surnames of three notorious prime ministers for an ultimate expletive: ‘CAMERONBLAIRTHATCHERS’. In light of the recently mooted –though swiftly aborted– Tory proposal to make the vaguely phrased ‘annoying behaviour in public’ a future offence in our post-ASBO society, as well as the increasing intolerance of social attitudes towards the unemployed and incapacitated, and the welfare cuts, bedroom tax and other punitive social policies creating something akin to a penal atmosphere for the poorest sections of the population, the penultimate stanza of this poem might now be more apposite than perhaps the poet thought at the time of writing them:
No, this wuz about ‘abusin the builders’.
If ‘abusin’ is such a crime,
They could arrest arf the population,
Or make the whool countree a prison.
The verse ends on a triumphant and wholly appropriate half-rhyme:
There are limits t bard language:
If I could really describe ower neighbours,
If I woz ever in-a dock
I think I’d call em VILE MURDOCHS!
‘Em’tied Lives’ is a deeply poignant and moving monologue about ‘working poverty’ which in this instance leads to debt and repossession for a family simply trying to scrape by in employment, lamenting the years of hard unforgiving labour which seem to have all been for nothing. In aspects of tone and theme, it’s a kind of modern day Welsh equivalent to John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ –though that magisterial pastiche-Kipling poem-monologue by a poverty-stricken Cockney clerk is a formidable template to summon up for comparison with any contemporary poem (and given said poem was penned in the 1890s, shows just how much modern British society has stagnated in terms of social progression and improved wages in over a century). Nonetheless, Jenkins gives the perennial theme of the soul-destroying diminishing returns of poorly waged employment a good stab in this powerful and heart-wrenching poem which needs to be excerpted in full:
I done it all frmyfamlee,
I worked all owers
an didn ardly see
my two little ones.
My missis workin on-a tills,
we paid f r nursree.
It gutted me
t come ome late
an find em in bed orready;
I kissed theyer cheeks
an promised all-a olidays
we’d ave eventually.
Itwoz jest a letter,
I even joked t Debbie –
if issa bill
put it where it b’longs …
in-abin!’
I couldn bleeve it,
on y a coupla months
we adn paid up:
wha with the eatin,
foodgoinup ev’ry day,
scrimpin f r value stuff;
we don’ even smoke,
go out on Sat’dys down-a club.
All tha talk bout ‘negative equity’
‘it me slap in-a face
like I’d bin mugged,
‘repossession’ a word
never thought I’d read
in a letter to us.
All-a thin’s we’d done t the ouse
and I int even andy, conservatory
an a combi boiler. Issa tidee area
an all, the kids cun play safely.
Don’ know where we’ll go: my
mam’s is a small terrace. She’d
ave us tomorrow but Deb is so cut
up she stares inta distance an
lissens when I rant -‘Whassa
fuckin point? Why ave we
bothered? All ‘ese yers workin so ard!’
It’s easy f them politicians an
them experts on-a telly, sayin
thin’s ull turn agen, sayin it’s on’y
tempree. F’r us, it means ower
lives ‘re em’tied, ower futures
stole like the bailiffs come an took
furniture away.
Wish now I adn toiled
my bollocks off doin overtime
an put the presen’ first,
played with Shane an Faye,
read em stories till they slept.
An when Deb sayz
we’ll afto start agen
I glare at er like she’s crazee
like she aven learnt nothin.
Thus is the ever more common crie de Coeur of the ‘working poor’ of Tory society, those very families who “do the right thing” and “want to get on” but who are prevented at every turn from reaping the tangible rewards promised them for such sacrificial industriousness. The ending packs a particularly profound punch, a kind of ‘kitchen sink’ aphorism which imparts its own philosophical point, though it’s slightly ambiguous as to what that ‘point’ really is: is the husband saying that starting again would simply be to repeat the same mistakes, or is he saying that they should learn from this betrayal by a system which promised them things their labour couldn’t reap, that they should prioritise the things in life that really matter, like family time, over any slavish and fruitlessly sacrificial ‘work ethic’? The final emphasis on the word ‘nothin’ also seems significant, since ‘nothin’ would appear to be, in material terms at least, what their years of profitless hard work have gained for them, while robbing so many of their days and opportunities for familial nurturing –and time cannot be reimbursed (pensions cushion retirement but they can’t extend it).
The gloomy ‘On-a Bridge’ is a strangely downbeat ending to the main poem section of Barkin! (which is followed by a further twenty-odd pages of prose vignettes, also in dialect, but I confess I’m not particularly keen on poetry-prose combination collections –I personally find little point in continuing switching the medium from verse-narratives to prose-narratives in what is fundamentally a poetry collection, but this is not peculiar to Jenkins, such mixed medium is becoming more common today in poetry volumes, blurred even further by the contemporary fashion for prose-poems or what I call ‘prosetry’), and is quite possibly depicting how the husband and father of the previous poem has ended up: homeless and without anything to tout in return for spare change. It’s a moving and succinctly lyrical piece and, given our society’s rapid return to mass street-homelessness courtesy of Tory policy, an appropriate close:
Pass me by
on-a bridge
I see yew go
with yewer bags,
come back full.
Yew don’ see me,
I squat so low;
like dogshit on yewer shoes,
later scrape it off.
Walkway over a-road,
ev’ryone’s goin somewhere,
but I go nowhere.
Carn offer no mewsic,
don’ offer magazines.
I got nothin t please.
An emptee can
waitin f coins.
Yew turn away yewer eyes:
presen’s t be bought
an ice on-a streets.
Ev’ry day I wonder
if the river an the weir
would take me further.
The cold an damp
got steel-capped boots;
theyer the ones oo stop,
an give me a kickin.
And today it’s not just rogue Droogs who give the homeless ‘a kickin’: it’s also the well-heeled shoes of pinstripe Tories through the remorseless jabs of their toe-capped rhetoric; even those street homeless who show some ‘enterprise’ and ‘initiative’ (to pick from the Tory lexicon) by, for instance, pitching on behalf of the Big Issue as street vendors, aren’t spared the broad brush-tarring of the Big Boot Society, even in the subverted slogan of the very magazine they tout: ‘Not a handout, but a hand up’. I once stopped to chat to a dishevelled, coat-hanger-shouldered young man brandishing his clutch of Big Issues at his street pitch, who almost apologised for the fact that he was a street vendor, saying to me that he felt like he was begging even when he was, demonstrably, working, and merely for some tiny percent of the copies he sold (supposed to pay towards what precisely for him? A couple of quid day isn’t going to lift someone out of homelessness!), which at best would only get him a snack and a hot drink each day while he stood out in all weathers for several hours.
More recently, I chatted to a young Scotsman sat in his sleeping bag near Covent Garden –when I expressed my sympathy for his predicament and sense of solidarity with his all-too-common plight, he almost seemed slightly evasive, muttering quite calmly about “it not being so bad”, and, when I asked him if he had anywhere to sleep, proudly informing me that he did have a shelter to go to at night: the corner of a disused car park. It’s at times such as these that one comes to confront the ultimate attitudinal victory of anarcho-capitalism, which seems almost magically capable of making some its most abjectly impoverished victims seemingly in denial of their own destitution, or at best, accepting about it, as if it’s just par for the course in capitalist society, and therefore somehow acceptable; there’s even a sense of complaisance detectable sometimes, as if they still feel, inexplicably, given their often involuntary situations, some sense of obligation towards the very society that has abandoned them to the pavements.
In my view, this is nothing noble, but something deeply depersonalised and disturbing. It’s as if the Cameronian Big Society rhetoric has, in some cases, succeeded in indoctrinating its very scapegoats into some masochistic sense of ‘debt’, or penniless will to ‘contribute’ –but contribute to what? To an iniquitous culture which not only cultivates the grotesque economic inequalities which inescapably inflict destitution on the most defenceless sections of society, but also actively victimises and stigmatises said victims. Certainly the rhetoric of the “undeserving poor” has worked its ‘unsympathetic magic’ on the likes of the street vendor who apologises for his labour as if it’s beggary, and for the street-homeless Scot who seems to feel almost grateful that he has a car park to sleep in at night and is almost puzzled by the expression of concern from a member of the public as they pass by him sat on the pavement. It’s not even a case of how far we’ve come, but how far we’ve gone, backwards, in a century, from a nation of ‘ragged trousered philanthropists’ to one of ‘ragged pavement apologists’, pauperised penitents, some of whom even see their poverty as something of a ‘privilege’, when in fact it is the one and only ‘entitlement’ permitted the un-propertied and dispossessed of the population.
But off my soap box, and to sum up on Mike Jenkins’ Barkin!: an accomplished collection of monologues in Merthyr dialect, with some apposite polemical comments made throughout, and a rewarding mixture of tones and themes, from the comically picaresque to the grimly urban, a patchwork depiction of the resilient spirit of a small Welsh community cultivating its own very distinctive version of modern living. Barkin! might also be broadly read as a survey in verse of contemporary Welsh working-class memes, attitudes and behaviours, albeit in many cases consumerist substitutes for a more authentic cultural past. In many ways, with a mixture of colourful characters expressing themselves through anecdotal monologues in a provincial context, Barkin! has something of a modern day Chaucerian mummering about it –say, Merthyr Tydfil Tales, or the Wyf o Taff…
Although I normally prefer poetry which a marked metaphorical and descriptive use of language, it would in any case be disingenuous in the context of dialect-‘poem monologues’ to pick up on this too much; moreover, considering the linguistic challenge of this particular idiom, and also the need to keep the locution colourful but at the same time reasonably authentic (where highfalutin metaphors might appear implausible), Jenkins does as good as a job as one could expect. His insistence on an almost phonetic representation of Merthyr dialect –and in every poem, which, personally, I’d be inclined to restrict to a sequence rather than an entire volume (though I know Welsh dialect poetry is Gwasg Carreg Gwalch’s chief remit)– is where he tends to differ from his closest comparison (to my own mind), Gwilym Williams, whose own poems, however, lay more stress on the dialogic Welsh turn-of-phrase as opposed to more directly (or phonologically) representing the idiom on the page, and this allows Williams more scope for poetic language, and focus on image and description. But, as said, considering the meticulously linguistic template Jenkins employs for a whole collection, his ability to imbue many of the poems, nonetheless, with a cadence, musicality and rhythm, is impressive. Barkin! makes for a divertingly irreverent read, and one which is also, in places, deeply touching.
Alan Morrison © 2014
Two Volumes, A Dozen Years Each: 2000-2012
Peter Branson’s Red Hill and Alexis Lykiard’s Getting On
Red Hill
Peter Branson
Selected Poems 2000-2012
Belfast
Lapwing Publications, 2013
Brown Corduroy Fields
I published Peter Branson’s similarly titled debut ebook collection, Red Shift, as the first in a series of Caparison solo ebook collections, via The Recusant, back in 2009. Of the scores on scores of early submissions to The Recusant, Branson’s dexterously disciplined and cadent poems, mostly composed in exacting blank verse iambic pentameter, stood out to me as among the most accomplished I had received, and so when I decided to set up a small ebook imprint, Caparison, Branson was the first on my list for a solo production. Red Shift followed, and contained many exemplary poems, mostly politically engaged (left-leaning, naturally) and laced with memorable aphorisms.
But on reading his belated debut print collection (also a Selected Poems), Red Hill, published by the excellent and eclectic Belfast-based press Lapwing (who produce beautifully simple and elegant perfect hand-bound and hand-printed volumes in thin-spined white liveries), I was more than pleasantly surprised to see that since Red Shift Branson’s poetry has progressed significantly, and entirely positively, from what was already a highly accomplished metier, into what is now, in my view, an even more impressive oeuvre whose range of subjects, painterly imagery and metaphor, and prosodic precision have become something quite formidable.
The wealth of varied and respected journal and supplemental credits listed at the front of this collection also pays testament to the wide appeal of Branson’s poetry, his Acknowledgements almost constituting an A-Z of the most prestigious poetry journals around; and the triple-A of Acumen, Agenda and Ambit, at the beginning of the list, demonstrates how versatile Branson’s style is, while only the most commercial of post-modernist glossies are conspicuous by their absence, which itself pays testament to the fact that Branson’s style might be supplement-friendly, but is not, thankfully, in any sense ‘fashionable’ or ‘trendy’ enough to find itself couched alongside today’s most groomed young-up-and-coming poets of ‘the moment’ (or ‘Puppies’, as one might refer to them). Quite simply, Branson has now proven himself a masterly poetic craftsman and one of the most rhythmically accomplished currently writing. Readers will forgive my expediency in choosing to comment on what are for me the stand-out poems of this fine collection in page order.
Ironically Red Hill kicks off with two of the least typical of Branson’s poems, ‘Nanny Goat Lane’ and ‘Attila the Nun’, both of which are composed in short-lined free verse, following no particular iambic meter. Though not among the ripest of this collection’s rich crop of poetic miniatures, both pieces are nicely judged, albeit of a slightly more mainstream timbre than most of Branson’s poems. ‘Nanny Goat Lane’ ends on a pleasing half-rhymed image:
tall as the clouds,
you scoured the wooded tracks
for unicorns
with finest ivory
proud on their brows.
The punning titled ‘Attila the Nun’ alludes to Branson’s upbringing in the Roman Catholic faith. It produces an arresting description of the –presumably rather tyrannical– nun of the title: ‘the stark, starch, habit-white,/ black-shrouded penguin suit’. But for me, this collection starts proper with the first of legion tightly-packed iambic blank verse sonnets (very much Branson’s prosodic signature), ‘Jubilee’, which begins with a quote from the nursery rhyme ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick’, and a dedication to one Brian Lythgoe. Branson’s poems are so compact and precise in terms of iambic exactitude that they almost come across as slightly obsessive in terms of prosodic discipline –but then, isn’t poetry, in its most meticulously composed forms, among the more obsessive of the artistic mediums..?
‘Jubilee’ is an immediately intriguing poem, rich in imagery carried by a faintly Dylan Thomas-esque cadence:
Rosarean Club, with half the parish wrapt,
like sympathetic string. As rare back there
as outhouse loos today and rationed, wireless
king, ghosts float before your eyes, reflect
grey-flannel world outside. Mind set one meanstreet,
ranger ride away, sneak home to build
an outlaw roost behind the chicken coop.
You’re down four foot before you know, see off
light rain with hessian and cane, off-cut
broadloom for floor, snug as a grave. …
One notes the dextrous sprung rhyme of ‘rain’ and ‘cane’ within the same line (11).
If I had any criticism of Branson’s miniaturist style, it’s simply that at times this almost symbiotic impulsion to stick strictly to the iambic pentameter for each line inevitably produces very sharply clipped phrasing which, with images after images punctuated by commas, can occasionally come across almost as image-lists; and this in turn can also remind one a little of the more staccato aphoristic journalistic practice of some of the higher brow broadsheets (or, for example, the figurative compactness of David Thomson’s inimitable film reviews), although that is certainly not a negative quality, most often, quite an arresting one.
These are of course mere quibbles –hence best to get them out of the way early on– with what is in the main a stylistic tendency at which, for me, Branson excels above any poet currently writing (at least those of whom I am aware); and if many of his verses can be categorised as ‘supplemental poems’, perfectly formed miniatures which sit neatly and compactly in a white square couched between broadsheet columns, that is certainly no criticism either, since, unlike many of his contemporaries, Branson’s poems actually have something interesting to impart, if not in subject then almost always in terms of descriptive image, invariably fairly gritty Northern urban images, tinged with some form of social comment (or, to put it another way, poetic miniatures which paint an urban picture –more often than not rather Lowryian– in striking aphoristic language, almost like social document).
‘The Salvager’ is the first of many descriptively striking poems, beautifully composed with some deftly evocative combinations of images –and manages too to impart a wistful and very touching narrative, which appears to be about an older relative, perhaps the poet’s father or father-in-law, remembered by the bits and bobs he spent much of his spare time among in his shed, after his death from cancer:
He spent his hard-earned freedom in this shed,
two bar electric fire, appraising form
and filling betting slips, old woodwork tools
and garden implements fussed over, rubbed
to sheen with oily rag, at our expense.
No doubt he was at home here making stuff,
his fag end glowing on/off, like Morse code.
The smell’s what kicks you when you first come in,
that mix of sawdust, polish, oil and damp.
His workbench fills one end and there are shelves
on all four walls, with jam-jars full of strange
concoctions, tins of every shape and hue,
unlabelled so you’ve no idea what lies
within, yet he knew perfectly each one:
drill bits, nuts, bolts, nails, screws, rawl plugs…
…
…He’d tease out nails from planks,
tap-hammer them till straight – against his vice.
He fashioned things with craft and care, each joint
perfection, never mind how long it took,
his coat slung on a nail inside the door,
the pockets tired and sagging out of true.
By his muscular grasp of the nuts and bolts of language and image, Branson manages to pull off a poem which ostensibly depicts a fairly quotidian scene with such confidence and panache that he makes it genuinely interesting and arrestingly evocative, where many other contemporary poets would, in less well-crafted, cadent forms of more elliptical, sparser lines, have simply bored the reader before they reached the end. With this, as with many of Branson’s poems, I could have comfortably continued reading something of twice this length, so beautifully sure-footed are his flourishing lines. Towards the end of this poem, where the fatal illness that snatches this handyman from his family is cited, we also get an intriguing allusion to Cathy’s dipsomaniacal brother Hindley from Emily Brontë’s magisterial Wuthering Heights:
“Man of few words,” Macmillan nurse explains
when you turn up just after he has gone.
Later, you howl, pummel the steering wheel.
Hot tears, bleak school reports, cold war missiles,
dark Hindley clones lurk deep inside your dreams.
This ‘Hindley’ allusion presumably hints at a darker side to the handyman relative (e.g. the hint ‘tap-hammer them still straight/ against his vice’), presumably the poet’s father-in-law, who is otherwise depicted more rosily at his soberest and most resourceful. It’s interesting too to note again the clipped phrasing of the lines, such as ‘Macmillan nurse explains’, which would seem to echo the very Northern (mostly Yorkshire) habit of omitting the definite article in everyday speech –a serendipitous complement to this distinctly Northern poet’s iambically precise style.
‘Time Travelling’ has a lovely look on the page, being arranged less compactly than most of the other poems in the collection, with slightly rangier lines falling in indented verses, giving it a sing-song appearance –and even though the lines are not strict iambic pentameter, there is still a strongly cadent rhythm to them, hinged nicely by sporadic assonantal half-rhymes. As ever, the descriptions are quit exquisitely phrased:
such inborn, fragile elegance; ash brown
above a creamy, dappled breast; what taste!
Dash out in twisty, darting flight to snap
up insects on the wing: turn deftly back
to self-same spot they started from, like kids
used to in playground games embracing chalk
and token bits of brick.
Eggs warm to touch,
you’d gaze in wonderment; translucent, pale
and delicate, pure porcelain…
This poem appears to be a figurative narrative using bird symbolism for someone’s children leaving home, the ‘old habitat’, for ‘six new houses schemed’, and there is some nice imagery relating to what is presumably a ‘bereaved’ mother recalling old struggles to feed her young saplings:
…too soon
that thankless task, striving to pacify
those gaping famished mouths.
So cadent is Branson’s poetry in its sprung rhythm that they often carry the effect of being rhymed verses when they are not, and are almost only ever at most half-rhyming, and this is of course largely due to the brilliantly bouncy iambic blank verse –‘The Blood Eagle’ is a great example of this Bransonian buoyancy –here’s a sizeable excerpt:
Same postage-stamp, iconic stance, you say
they’ve long died out. “A wanderer,” he smiles,
“from Scandinavia.” The statue stirs;
winged sail, red shepherd sky, dawn sacrifice.
Can’t wait to tell them at the boarding house.
Defying gravity, first bouncing bomb
then low-slung Lancaster, you watch it till
there’s nothing there to see, time in reverse.
There’s a great use of alliteration in the following stanza, particularly with the g-words, and a masterly deployment of assonance throughout this and the subsequent verse:
Less anger than relief, strange men a straight
red card, they’re on your case. Lips sealed, you sound
silent retreat, trail tears of cupboard grief.
Tongue tied, hot beans to spill, you rage inside.
Horned devils armed with broadsword, axe and spear
spew from the dragon’s mouth, as quiet as wraiths.
With famished rabid strides you make high ground
before church bells cry foul, whole town asleep.
(I particularly like the phrase ‘low-slung Lancaster’). Here Branson demonstrates how a sense of cadence is eminently possible without any recourse to rhyme-endings through a meticulous control of blank verse iambic pentameter. This is a difficult prosodic effect to get right, but Branson has a habit of making it seem effortless.
‘Gobby’ is another bravura burst of iambic buoyancy and riveting imagery, rich with brilliant alliteration:
Bolted, thin as an unstrung bow, all eyes,
you stooped to suit, with Tonka hands and feet,
stilt arms and legs like loose-strung bags of bones,
pure pantomime, it never worked. I joined
your scourging, swallowed pride; when things died down,
played faithless Peter by your side, for you,
pie crust of permanent surprise baked on
your doughy face, were indispensible.
…
… With birds, somehow you knew.
Outside your territory you’d point which patch
the garden warbler’s nest would be, spot where
the barn owl should appear and she’d be there,
pale as a ghost, gilded and quartering.
This is near-tangible poetry; images such as ‘pie crust of permanent surprise baked on your doughy face’ are exceptionally original and imaginative, as well as unobtrusively alliterative. ‘Ice Maiden’ returns to the Bransonian staple of iambic blank verse sonnet form, proffering some more beautifully judged images –just take the first perfectly sculpted verse:
“Married the job,” but at what cost (Mum talk),
way back? Dad’s two pints proud: “Inspector in
the Force, retired with cataracts, own house.”
Like rusty headlamps on her goggled Sprite,
tight-lipped, not able to relax, knick-knacks
at risk, those frog eyes follow me around.
Thick lenses wither, halos of white light,
garaged, widescreen, gimlet-gaze magnified.
‘Sandpipers’ is a lengthier poem, in more irregular meter, and its first three lines strike an instantly affecting aphorism:
You notice every time you pass, old pubsign
faded to a pallid afterthought,
like watercolour ravished by the sun.
But the linguistic momentum doesn’t stop there –it goes into full tilt with some more stunningly sculpted descriptive lines which, in their rich lyricism, remind one of Keats:
You’ve never been inside, imagining
tar-varnished walls, tired furniture, cramped style.
Recall your visitor, aged nine, disturb
him from his meal, pipe-dream, small patch of silt
above the broken wheel and silent mill.
Too small and delicate to be a snipe…
…like wine, improves
with age, “The Shadow Of Your Smile” refined
and more intense. Forewarned by piercing threenote
cry, you’ve scanned the pool for strangers through
tall reeds and sedge, then watched the bobbing head
and tail, those stiff, bowed wings in ticking flight.
You clamber back, through feral dank remains
of ornamental Wilderness, last trace
of fallen country pile, now real estate,
to watch the willow warbler flit from tree
to bush, a loose leaf nervous on the breeze,
until it falls to ground and disappears
beneath low bramble and rough thatch…
The image of ‘country pile’ is particularly striking –how often do poets evoke rippling pastures by depicting them as rumpled carpets? ‘Jenkie’ continues the alliterative dexterousness:
Can’t raze it from my brain, that Christmastime
you spewed the claret down on Stafford Street;
worked in between the cobbles, wrinkled, crazed,
all weather face. Drunk as a leaping lord,
knocked from your ninepins by a headstrong car.
Was never caught. He felt your collar though.
“The impact snapped the second vertebra”:
that skittled you. An educated man…
I also find Branson’s use of colloquialisms and slightly faded phrases appealingly nostalgic, such as ‘leaping lord’ and ‘ninepins’. For me, one of the most accomplished poems in this exceptional collection, and certainly one of the very best of the sonnet forms, is ‘Rook Pie’ (preceded by a quote from the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye’), which has an almost Keatsian quality to it in terms of startling images and phrases couched jewel-like in precisely cut sequins of lines:
Plump squabs fresh from nest were treats way back.
Told how he scaled, swayed in frail rigging, wing
‘n’ prayer, green besoms in clenched fists the glue
that bound, singled him out from Icarus.
Graveside, words spent, you view the spire beneath
Red Hill. A beech stand screens old town and new.
See in its topmast reach, ink blemishes,
x rays of bleeds that fetched him here today.
Black birds, our noisy neighbours, nomads from
the Steppes, here centuries before those bells
were cast, are oil-on-water sheen close up,
soft purples, blues and greens, like dragonflies.
They shoal at dusk, like mating galaxies,
cavort and kiss, one consciousness, one will.
Images such as ‘green besoms in clenched fists’ immediately grab the eye, and subsequent ones such as ‘ink blemishes’ and ‘Black birds’ chime nicely in alliterative recapitulation; while the subtle sprung half-rhymes and alliteration of ‘the glue/ that bound, singled him out’, grabs the ear. This is a beautifully composed and phrased poem, a little jewel. ‘Men’s Work’ is another compact sonnet, its theme seeming to be about The Troubles in Ireland, with the subtitle reference, ‘Wicklow, October 1920’; more specifically, it appears to depict a female Irish Nationalist activist (or for want of a better term, ‘insurgent’, of the nascent Irish Republican Army), described in a visceral, almost erotic manner, reminding one of the female counterpart to the notorious gangster duo Bonny and Clyde, of the same period:
…Broad daylight, pistols tucked
inside your knickers, you’re the gunslinger.
Crude hardness bruising chaste white thigh, each signpost
one more Station-of-the-Cross…
The imagery in the poem plays palpably on Roman Catholic symbolism, and Branson’s alliterative descriptions are as ever robustly displayed:
Mouth parched, loose talk or treachery
bad news, sweat beads anointing brow and nape
like rosaries, you draw more secular
responses from the Black an’ Tans…
The final lines seem almost to juxtapose religious with sexual practice, even if this is just suggested rather than explicitly invoked:
At Mass, the Lads make furtive craic,
like émigrés, outside the high church door.
Such scant observance male preserve, you kneel
within, amenable, head veiled and bowed.
One notes the –I believe– Geordie colloquialism, ‘craic’, the etymology of which is presumably either Gaelic or Irish. Branson undoubtedly has a strong Irish connection, hence, too, his formative Roman Catholicism, and the following poem ‘On the Old Bog Road’ is also subtitled ‘County Galway, Ireland’. This small gem of a poem, another blank verse sonnet, starts off with disarmingly aphoristic aplomb:
His face adds texture to the ground he cuts.
Cured by the wind and rain and written on
like pages from long-faded paperbacks…
And again ‘craic’ appears, this time couched alongside the alliteratively contrapuntal ‘cook’ and ‘crook’:
…The air is dozy with
the sense of drying peat. You watch him turn
new-sheening turves to cook, then try his spine,
lean on his crook to craic the time…
The word ‘turves’ is presumably also some form of (Irish?) parochialism. The poem concludes on a Hardyesque aphorism:
He’s shaman-wise, stacks visionary truths,
old as these hills, we burn unwittingly,
like youth’s fair-mindedness, to smoke and dust.
‘At the Rising of the Moon’ is dedicated to folk singer Luke Kelly who died in 1984 at only 44; the title of the poem partly taken from a song by John Keegan Kerry with an ‘At’ added at its beginning. This poem starts with another of Branson’s descriptive flourishes, initially appealing to our aural sense:
The awesome present of your voice: outside
the angry guttur of a power saw;
slowly the copper beech across the way
is layered to the floor. The Council say
it’s wormed inside and dangerous, mindful
of recent winter storms when branches tore.
(Presumably ‘guttur’ is the poet’s own coined noun taken form the adjective ‘guttural’). The image of the copper beech being cut down at the beginning of the poem would appear to serve as the prime metaphor for the early death, at his prime, of the folk singer in question, who is next described, brilliantly, in colouristic echoes of the felled tree:
Feral red hair, rash beard and navvy looks,
you work each song as though it is your last;
a wild wood-kerne, veins cabling from your neck
as unequivocal as gelignite.
Beneath a rover’s weather-battened face
and dancing tongue, you charm tired simple tunes,
breathe text to life transporting minds and souls.
Unglazed by sophistry you clarify
what’s right, inspire us with pure energy,
complexity resolved to black and white.
The third and final stanza brings us back to the copper beech image, but this time terminally, using its ‘wormed inside’ as a powerful metaphor for the aggressiveness of an unspecified illness soon to claim the life of the singer:
Banjo divining like a Thompson gun,
you cast our doubts and forge an attitude:
raw undirected anger driven straight
inside the heat of things; fuse life and art
in perfect symmetry that’s understood.
The heroes you revered died sound, culled long
before their time. This tree, now a mere graze
of dust upon the ground — like you, inside,
the incubus had gorged and thrived; too brief
that span between the two great mysteries.
Once again there is a very cadent thread of sprung rhyme throughout Branson’s iambic blank verse which makes the lines sing, until the final line sounds as if it is rhyming with another end-of-line rhyme when in actual fact it isn’t (indeed, its only near-rhyme is the sprung one of ‘symmetry’ earlier in the stanza) –one might almost call this technique ‘ghost-rhyme’.
‘Heroes’, which begins with a short quote from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Clearances’, appears to juxtapose the past Ireland of The Troubles with contemporary England of Middle East military interventionism and the more ‘peaceful’ physical competitiveness of the London 2012 Olympics, in what seems to be an embryonic polemic on the primal parallels between sport and war (reminding me of D.H. Lawrence’s aphorism, ‘that decadent mystique of athletics’, which I believe was an allusion, in part, to the spectacle of the 1933 Berlin Olympics in Fascist Germany). I say ‘embryonic’, because Branson’s adherence to his signature sonnet form restricts what might have perhaps been a more forensic dialectic stretched out over a rangier frame. However, such succinctness is what gives much of Branson’s poetry its tantalising quality, and no doubt this sense of compactness and leaving the reader somehow wanting more is perhaps in part what appeals so much to the journal editors. ‘Heroes’ is one of the most striking miniatures in this collection, beautifully phrased throughout with some faintly Keatsian images, and, as ever, a bravura array of alliteration and assonance, not to say, as well, the occasional onomatopoeic word:
Tromping to Monsalhead and back with friends,
you pause near dank cold Demonsdale beneath
a fitful crowded sky, mapping your mood
where Devil’s Scabious turns green banks haze-blue.
Parade of Heroes, the Olympic dream
fulfilled: no lives at risk from those who fight
(Afghanistan, Iraq), or those who don’t,
no bones wrong – right; no loving sacrifice.
Take Heaney’s great-grandmother, off to Mass
in her new husband’s trap for the first time,
mobbed by the Orange gang she’d left behind.
Sense neighbourly outrage, well-hurled insult,
riding the Troubles straight through here and now,
white-knuckled cobbles, blood across the page.
‘George Green’ is another exceptionally sculpted slice of iambic blank verse, and this time around we are treated to three ten-line stanzas, all wrought with gorgeous imagery. The alliteration is again mostly hung on the g-sounds of words, as signalled by the title itself –here are some significant excerpts from the poem which I most admire, the ellipses signalling where some lines have been omitted (otherwise I’d be literally quoting the entire poem), the first verse being distinctly Larkinian:
Shaped from heart wood, hard stone, no figment, flesh
and blood transformed by low-born artisans,
these fiendishly-depraved eyesores, symbols
employed to decorate high corbel, roof
boss, font, bench-end and startled misericorde,
kept fussy church officials ignorant
of what they represent, the living sap
within the gnarled dark root, those furtive eyes
above old chapel doors, the dancing men
and stag-horns peeping out from altar screens.
“The Reverend Griffith took me to his church,
showed me this curiosity in oak,
with leaves and branches sprouting from the mouth
and ears, entirely smothering the face.”
Jack in the Green’s abroad. No begging game
by lean black chimney sweeps in garish clothes,
led by a hobby horse;…
Where branches arch beyond the grazing height,
you’ll find his signature…
Those haunted eyes, gaunt cheeks and knotting brows:
there’s something present here we’ve never known
yet recognise, an energy, a fugue,…
…
These days George Green’s despondent, gaunt, afraid
he lacks the strength and cunning to redeem,
restore our baneful toxic fingerprint;…
Technically this poem is another Bransonian tour de force, and its un-sledge-hammered dialectic on the mute dissent and radicalism expressed by church artisans, stonemasons and craftsmen through their skilled manual work, is particularly compelling, and imaginatively depicted; while some of Branson’s most eye-catching descriptions and turns of phrase punctuate throughout: ‘startled misericorde’, ‘branches arch beyond the grazing height’, and so on. This is a poem about craftsmen composed in an appropriate display of poetic master-craftsmanship. ‘The Time the Light Went Out’ is one of the more contemporaneously polemical poems in this collection, its title punning on the well-worn trope so often clothes-pegged onto the much misunderstood and unfairly maligned Seventies (and also echoing the title to the recent Seventies-revising tome, When The Lights Went Out), but, subtly, attaching the more ominously singular phrasing of ‘Light’ to modern day ‘austerity Britain’: ‘Lids flipped, big-time; weird portents, false sunsets./ The web and mobile culled, churches swelled up –…’. The poem turns reality into part-projected, dystopian conceit, by extrapolating from current Tory-driven social miseries something more approaching a state of all-out anarchy, though not entirely extrapolated since, of course, riots hit the streets of our major cities as early as 2011, only about a year or so into Con-Dem occupation:
Cards idle, cash
points blunt – rioting: ‘All looters will be shot!’
Shops glass-eyed blanks and supermarket shelves
exposed, how people change … They hid what food
they’d got.
And again we get a poetic hyperbole as if perhaps to warn –and thereby hopefully preclude– any future mutations of material austerities to out-and-out vigilantism and fascistic retributions (though, in terms of currently ‘acceptable’ neo-fascist rhetoric against the poor and unemployed, the UK of 2013 is, at least attitudinally, already there): ‘…a boy was birched/ for stealing cabbage leaves; black marketers/ and deviants were scourged and strung from trees’. Indeed, Branson’s boy being ‘birched for stealing cabbage leaves’ is a polemical play on the Dickensian case of the young man caught stealing a bottle of water during the riots being sentenced to six months in prison. But the dark satire bites the most in the brilliant third and final stanza, where Branson’s polemic is at its most robust and unflinching with regards to the contemporary Tory ‘class war’ waged against the poor, unemployed and disabled, in particular, the mass evicting of tens of thousands of pauperised households through the malign and vindictive bedroom tax to outer “doughnut ghettoes”:
Folk tried to flee the towns
and cities. …
…
Badlands we shun today, rank with hindsight,
became death camps. Nine out of ten expired:
many gave up the ghost. …
…
Gamekeeper, poacher, new age traveller
survived The Cleansings; gypsies dined like kings.
Arguably here Branson is signposting just how perilously close this nation is currently coming to its own “1930s moment” through Tory social policy of benefits-stigmatisation and persecution of the poor and vulnerable –our very British homemade brand of ‘gentrified fascism’. ‘Ghosts’ is a candid but deeply touching depiction of fatigued married life, and in its exceptionally evocative descriptions of what is presumably an aging working man and smoker, reminds me of the coalminer poems of Jarrow-based poet Tom Kelly (another poet adept at the compact image, but who chooses sparser free verse forms on the whole in which to couch them); again, alliteration mostly hinges on the g-sounds of words, giving Branson’s lines a guttural quality fitting to the grittiness of subject:
The kitchen is the space she likes to dwell,
framed by the hearthside’s gilding under-glow.
Next door he taps his pipe against the grate,
refills, strikes up. She smells tobacco, hears
his old man’s cough-and-hack into the grate,
the chatter of hobnail on flag, discerns
his little dog scrape by into the hall.
There’s something of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood in tropes such as:
Some nights, the cradle ticking like a faint
heartbeat, a live time bomb inside her head,
she hears the cello. Locals tell he played
slow airs when beasts came near their time or yields
were low….
It’s suggested that possibly this aged man is a farmer, when Branson sublimely juxtaposes a fumbling attempt at making love to a tired wife with the clinical, almost gynaecological imagery of a vetinary examination:
Strong arms wrap round her waist; rough hands
expose her belly, breasts, between her thighs,
as though examining a troubled ewe….
‘One for Sorrow’ seems, if you like, one for more mainstream tastes, being rather more anecdotal and casually phrased than the majority of poems, but still proffers some typically adept descriptions, such as ‘this ancient pub, oak-boned, magpie, foot-worn’. ‘Poems ‘N’ Pints’ is a caustic satirical depiction of a typical elbows-out type of poetry reading in which most of the audience are themselves poets, all competing with one another for their moment, few of them likely to be taking very much in of the other poets’ readings but giving special attention to their own. The lines are suitably iambic, but just six beats per line (i.e. iambic trimeter):
This could be any town,
tired old committee room
up narrow jointed stairs.
…
This is no common muse
to prick out feelings with,
plant words for everyman:
recession, dole and debt;
Iraq, Afghanistan.
Quaint dusty poetry
on bookshop shelves;…
One notes the flipping of the ‘Afghanistan, Iraq’ from ‘Heroes’ here –the mere listing of the two nations instead of any attempt to evoke them in some more symbolic form is partly justified by the fact that both country’s names are now so loaded to British ears that one almost doesn’t need to expand on them descriptively; though I would argue this is an almost bullet-pointing technique which would better only be employed once, not twice. ‘Poems ‘N’ Pints’ seems to be figuratively placing a poetry reading in a war zone, again playing polemically on the dissociated cultural contrasts of desert wars abroad and icy literary conflicts at home, or guns and pens, if you like (pens can be loaded weapons, ‘sticks and stones’ etc.), but also commenting on the evident sense of most contemporary British poets’ detachment and distance from said battlefronts in terms of their actual poetic subjects of the same period, even if, ironically, it is much more the fiscal atrocities of austerity on the home front that the majority of Britain’s established poets seem indifferent to, whereas what dearth of polemical poetry there has been in recent times has focused much more prominently on the more universal and non-ideological topic of futile wars in the Middle East:
Quaint dusty poetry
on bookshop shelves; should this
grow topical you guess
they’d move on somewhere else:
local theatricals,
folk dancing club, life class.
Sniff teargas on the breeze:…
…
This lot don’t flinch
as mortar fire takes out
the local library,
oblivious to what
is really happening
outside. Stray bullets chip
the old pub front. Gaga
about the last poem read,
some woman who communed
with this small goose…
In this sense, the poem reminds me of a similar poem about a poetry soirre in a war zone in Owen Gallagher’s recent volume Tea With the Taliban (Smokestack). ‘Life Class’ is a touching vignette about a lonely septeginarian spinster attending life writing classes, presumably facilitated by the poet –in a tone faintly reminiscent of Paul McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’, Branson depicts both snapshots from the elderly lady’s autobiographical writing, and his own imagined projections of her lonely domestic routines of dotage. One trope manages to communicate something sublime without actually saying anything in particular, carried by the sprung assonantal half-rhyme of ‘on’ and ‘become’:
Eventually she shakes herself from sleep
to carry on, changed irredeemably
from who she was to what she has become.
Indeed, this portrait through recusatio, as it might be described, is symbiotically attuned to a sense of repetition, reawakening or resurrection, wherein memories which have been previously unearthed through creative writing have, like past drafts, been discarded and forgotten, only to resurface again through another writing exercise –and here one also senses a subtle play on the effects on memory from diseases such as dementia:
A long term member of her writing group
yet each September she begins afresh,
same train and station, page or two, full stop.
Blacked out, weird sirens like banshees, strange stars
appear between clear pools of fierce moonlight,
as shell fire shakes the shadow-lands beneath.
It starts at Stafford stepping from the train,
name tagged, evacuee down from the Smoke.
Eventually, about six paragraphs,
she joins a family she can’t make out
at all near Stoke. That’s where her story sticks.
The ravaged sky splits open like pie crust
and she dives in. Bad memories are cut
and spliced, words inked, till there’s mere shrapnel left…
The switch from the elderly lady in the writing class to her reminiscences of being a child evacuee in the War are particularly moving, and it’s interesting to see a hyphenated use of C.S. Lewis’s phrase ‘shadow-lands’. The poem ends on a touching depiction of an old film in which an apprehensive wife listens for the footfall of a man with a telegram about to impart her new widow-status:
…Deep in her seventies,
stalled in the Potteries, she’s in the groove
again, takes tea and coffee, washes up,
enjoys the gossip of this gang of friends.
What happens to her after she lands here
she finds impossible to call to mind.
Would it be better, do you think, or worse
than old B pictures we have conjured with:
official telegram; footfall outside
her room at night, door slowly opening …
‘The Barthomley Massacre’ appears to depict a Cavalier siege of Parliamentarians during the English Civil War; and, another of Branson’s beautifully sculpted blank verse sonnets, deserves quoting in full:
Fresh from an argument with friends, “That sort
of thing could never happen here,” a sign
glides by, headlines the total loss at one
black spot in three short years. On Slaughter Hill
you wince inside. A Chinese whispers thing:
“Sloe Tree”? Far-fetched you think, as cavaliers
turn up to cleanse the place of parliament,
high Christmastide of 1643.
This day the Valley Brook is flush with blood.
Some flee to Barthomley, claim sanctuary
inside their parish church, till they are forced
from safety when the tower is put to flame.
“Twelve men were slaughtered while one youth, his throat
sliced open, bleeds to death before my eyes.
Sweet Jesus Christ!” Four wounded, three escape
this Calvary of fruitless sacrifice.
‘Shadow Dancers’ is a duo of ornithological sonnets, both of which are scored through with some meticulously crafted descriptions –‘The Swift’ plays beautifully with alliterations mostly of b- and p-sounds:
Not here this year, lost souls, homes worn away,
handhold to fingertips, like spent pueblos.
They don’t die back or hibernate, but cruise
vast distances above the turning world.
July evenings, they side-step, scissor-kick
thin air, etch pen ‘n’ ink invisible
tattoos. Banshees, dust devils in wet suits,
anchors on skeins of rising light, they’re soon
shrill specks in your mind’s eye. Time lords, stealth craft
hot wired to while away brief summer nights,
they preen, breed on the wing, use what the wind
blows in to feed, fix nests under house eaves.
Broadcast, they silhouette the urban sky,
shape-shift, in one heartbeat, present and past.
‘The Hobby’ is equally beguiling and deftly alliterative:
Late August daylight crumbles into dust,
the cemetery behind, the marsh ahead;
above, in feeding mode, vast teeming shoals
of double sickle-shapes in silhouette.
One shadow dancer’s larger than the rest,
a lithe stealth-jet slip-streaming nimble shrill
spitfires. This deadly symbiotic dance
of insect, swift and falcon must reprise
at watering holes both here and Africa,
points in between, throughout the turning year.
A random pick, or wilful choice perhaps,
within a blink this conjuror can craft
a fallen angel broken on the rack,
a rag doll from a tumbling acrobat.
Continuing in this avian timbre, ‘The Curlew’ is one of my favourite of Branson’s sonnets, another compact gem of descriptive detail and rhythmic precision, lamenting as it does the near-extinction of the titular bird –note the brilliant deployment of sibilance throughout this excerpt:
This tearful horn-anglais refrain haunts like
old Irish pipes, high-bubbling trills as shrill
as tribal widowhood. St Beino blessed,
his sermons rescued from the waves…
…
These browns, burnt olives, duns add clout…
…echoes of flyblown
gunnels and consumptive back to backs;
of guttersnipe, folk old before their span –
famine, disease, debilitating dust;
of gamekeeper, mill owner, magistrate,
pawnbroker, rent collector, tallyman.
It is with a tone of despondency that Branson lists all those pestilences of industrial society and their complementary human operatives all of which are still sadly with us, while a natural creature of beauty and plangent, haunting call, teeters towards extinction –these contrasts of urban grimness and pastoral ghostliness are strongly reminiscent of William Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweep’, ‘The Garden’ and ‘London’ from Songs of Innocence and Experience. ‘Some Blessed Hope’ is a slice of polemical iambic blank verse worthy of W.H. Auden’s Thirties’ and Forties’ periods, clipped and precise yet also somehow expressive, it succeeds once again in setting an evocative urban scene, at New Year’s Eve 2012/13, the lines snagging on alliteration –particularly hard consonantal k-sounds– and sibilance:
Three quarter century’s neglect has left
this feral coppice tired and overspent.
The gate I lean against this blear-eyed New
Year’s Day is propped by barbs of rusted wire,
millennium twelve years away, your time
one hundred more, same tune, a sepia ghost.
Fearless, all frost and fire, the stormcock’s back,
lights up the swaying oak’s exposed topmast;
first salvo, flings its raking challenge in
machine-gun rote, defiant, unabashed,
then charms the darkling treescape with its themesong,
wassail, band-of-hope – all this despite
the corrugated ground, a spectral, iron
death-mask; our threadbare hospitals and roads;
the central heating on back home full blast;
e money flooding from rogue credit cards
like blood flushed from cadavered-marble slabs;
soldiers in coffins flown from far off lands.
Unusually, this is something of an expanded ‘Bransonian sonnet’, with the bonus of an extra four lines. ‘Comic Cuts Bin Laden’ is unknowingly prophetic of a subsequent and very recently exposed war atrocity allegedly committed by a soldier in Iraq against an unarmed and wounded member of the enemy, as detailed in the quote preceding the actual poem, “Killing a captive who poses no immediate threat is a crime”, Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor at Nuremburg’. A further note under the title elucidates an allusion in the poem: ‘Hugh Lupus, or Hugh the Wolf’ who ‘was granted most of Cheshire by his brother in law, William 1’, together with a footnote mentioning Cheshire’s ‘The Bleeding Wolf Inn, circa 1933’ –in terms of pinning down its precise meaning, this is one of Branson’s more cryptic pieces, beginning with a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Richard III (e.g. ‘Richard is himself again’):
Himself again, pub window seat, tells how
he got laid out upon the bridle-path
behind. A wild beast bars his route. His mount
rears up and that’s the last he can recall
until he comes to here, this roadhouse inn,
listed, survivor from the golden age,
white render, Norfolk thatch, for those who could
afford a car way back. Oak panels, beams,
stone inglenook, tall story in stained glass,
fag end Pre-Raphaelite – kills wolf and spares
King John; saves Magna Carta too, drunk with
hindsight…
‘The Boat House’ seems to be a wedding poem, possibly one recited by the poet at the reception itself –not only Larkin and Auden, but also, in strictly stylistic terms, Wilfred Owen’s more compact sonnet form and succinct phrasing is echoed in this poem:
This is the season for it, not when fields
are iced iron-rut or frayed brown corduroy
or loud with corn; rather when bells are pitched
to tune with living things, the rising sap,
white blossom, throstle, lark, hormonal rooks.
These days the stallion’s bolted, door distressed –
For me, Branson’s crowning trope in terms of imagery in this collection is in the fields like ‘brown corduroy’ –in such acutely observed descriptive evocation contrasting the natural and the man-made, Branson demonstrates an astute poetic susceptibility to inspired simile comparable at times to Keith Douglas, but in terms of complementary lyricism, more so Alun Lewis (who in my mind was the superior of the two World War Two poets, being more emotionally affecting and tonally mature than the more greenly cerebral –though exceptionally imagistic– Douglas).
‘Crow Bait’ is one of the most image-rich of Branson’s compact sonnets, beginning with an ominous description of the black bird almost as a death-portent as it ‘prints/ its shadow on the lawn beneath your feet’. Continuing in this thanatotic vein is ‘One Step Away’, inspired by a plaque at Magpie Mine, Sheldon, Derbyshire, quoted before the poem: “In memory of Ephraim Brocklhurst, killed at Magpie Mine, Jan 20th, 1860, aged 25 years, ‘There is one step between me and death’”. The description of the now disused mine is nicely phrased and alliteratively wrought: ‘It’s more ruined bailey than abandoned mine/ viewed from afar, tall chimneypiece a tower’.
‘Retrospect’ is a curious little piece, starting off with a typically succinct depiction of Christ’s parents drawn from a famous painting, then switching in its second stanza to the distinctly secular ‘icons’ of Isaac Newton, and George Orwell –all three subjects are focused on through the prism of iconographic significance from an angle of hindsight as to their ‘obscurity’ pre-‘fame’ or ‘celebrity’, but they are very odd choices of bedfellows, and one presumes Branson is trying to juxtapose religious with scientific icons, and then by adding Orwell, whose name is so synonymous with his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that ‘Orwellian’ has long entered the lexicon as a term for dystopian authoritarianism, thus presumably Branson here is commenting on the ‘propaganda’ elements to how recorded history, through soteriological, secular, and artistic representation, is always an exercise in ‘reality-adjustment’ and ‘spin’ –but what ‘Retrospect’ appears to be fundamentally about is the fact that behind every ‘myth’ of the past there are ordinary ‘human’ subjects, hence his choice to start the poem on one of the least hagiographical depictions in painting of the Nativity scene:
In Breughel’s masterpiece, Joseph and spouse
arrive at Bethlehem to pay their dues,
no hint, before celebrity kicks in,
they’re more significant than other folk
out there, soused by the snow. This makes no sense
in geography nor when bowled over by
two thousand years’ remorseless spin.
The second stanza is, for me, less imaginative linguistically: ‘smug contemporaries’ is a little lame a phrase, particularly for such a phrase-rich poet as Branson, and perhaps again highlights the restrictiveness of sticking so strictly to the iambic pentameter, while, although no doubt meant slightly ironically, ‘All things are possible’ is a truism bordering on trite.
Those who knew Newton as a problem child,
had they an inkling what he’d grow to do?
Could smug contemporaries at Eton sense
the Orwell rising in young Eric Blair?
All things are possible. In later years,
no doubt, drunk with hindsight, they drown in clues.
‘Retrospect’ is one of Branson’s least successful pieces, though it still more than holds a candle to much contemporary output by other poets; but the point is, Branson can do much better than this, and one feels in this instance the arc of the dialectic here simply cries out for expansion of poetic form –fourteen lines isn’t nearly enough to either do the polemical thrust justice, or rise to the occasion poetically. But the reader only has to turn the page to be greeted by another of Branson’s supremely crafted sonnets, one of the most strikingly phrased of them all, ‘The Flax Bow’, subtitled ‘A tradition of the Cherokee Indians’, which I quote in full:
The squall you sensed tonight would bring has built
into a storm. When latches rattle like
long-dry Morse bones and windows re-invent
themselves, moulding continuously before
your eyes, melting, like ancient 45s,
dark energy you’ve sacrificed to fire,
each agonising flinch a cruel death mask,
you crave the sanctuary of calm outside.
If you could craft a bow of flax, the roof
green willow sprigs, which bend like compromise,
thread beads, rose quartz for harmony, turquoise
for trust and kindness, amethyst and mother
of pearl, stability, on strings you weave
together, seal with tears like ambergris …
This is a stunning miniature, painterly in its compact descriptions, with some luscious images that tantalise almost all our senses: ‘latches rattle like/ long-dry Morse bones and windows re-invent/ themselves, moulding continuously before/ your eyes, melting, like ancient 45s’ is a masterly trope, made more emphatic by the rhymes of ‘eyes’ and ‘45s’, while ‘the roof/ green willow sprigs, which bend like compromise’ and ‘amethyst and mother/ of pearl, stability, on strings you weave/ together, seal with tears like ambergris’ are equally compelling, cadent and lyrically rich in the best sense, worthy of Keats or Alun Lewis –the alliterative chiming of the g-sounds is again very tangible with ‘strings’ and ‘ambergris’. Technically and lyrically, this is one of the stand-out poems in this collection, a true gem which warrants future anthologising. ‘Rode Park’ is a curious little ornithological, this time observing a sparrowhawk flitting about on a cricket ground; it contains some rather quirky descriptions: ‘this paraclete,/ mad beatings of the air like bongo drums/ ignored’, while its compact ending, the last line being tucked up neatly into place, though again nicely alliterative –b-sounds this time– does have rather the effect of an image-list: ‘no bullet in the brain,/ revenger’s tragedy, bedlam, mob rule’. There’s a lovely play of sibilance and assonance at the conclusion of ‘Class War’:
…Sensing an armistice
she feints a flank attack, then suddenly,
hard face caves in, divest all artifice
(disarming), one euphoric gormless grin.
‘Hillsborough’, though obviously on an extremely important theme, and a timely piece given recent revelations surrounding the ‘publicity’, or rather, fabricated ‘version’ of the tragic event of 1989, is for me a little throwaway in terms of its sing-song structure, replete with repeated choruses, none of which really adds much to the subject that hasn’t been said before, and little of which plays to Branson’s strengths as a poet. Branson’s poetry is sufficiently cadent due to its frequent use of iambic meter, so I feel this use of slightly irregular iambic lines with rhyme-endings, song lyric-like, is a stylistic ‘experiment’ which actually, if anything, feels more pedestrian than Branson’s more typical metier. ‘Fox Tor Mires’, depicting Great Grimpen Mire, setting for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, is another bravura blank verse sonnet (though where Branson allows himself the luxury of irregular meter) with Branson’s signature short clause phrases, almost staccato at times, and contains some typically rich imagery:
Green counterpane palpates,
seductive, soft as eider down beneath
your feet. Alone, both limbs shin-deep in icecold
peat, you’re ancient mummery…
This sonnet has something of the thanatotic metaphysical conceit of the sonnets of John Donne, ending: ‘Ghost virals we can’t shake inoculate,/ draw out death’s sting, shroud darkness in white light’. ‘Narrow Boats at Road Heath Rise’ juxtaposes the sight of barges tied to the sides of canals with that of corals of wagons in cowboy films:
…proud ring a roses livery, war paint,
throat-lozenge shapes, like coffins in a plague.
…
sterns list where tethered heavy-horses strain;
bows nodding-donkey ride, tease air for sign
of hostiles, like old wagon-trains in films.
It’s handy for the all day shop and pub,
next lock. No space to form a circle though;
exposed to locals on the towpath side
who wander by with dogs or fishing looks.
‘Folk Rising’ is a wistful nostalgia piece on the radical British folk revival of the Sixties and Seventies, dedicated to Bert Lloyd and Ewan McColl, the latter having arranged and performed much of the compositions which punctuated the hugely absorbing series of radio social documentaries on the cultures and traditions of the various British proletarian trades, such as coal mining and train driving; this poem appears to be Branson’s homage to a now sadly bygone revivalism in working-class culture and consciousness, which also infiltrated, for a time up until the cusp of the Eighties, popular music too –hence the many allusions to slogans –‘Ban the Bomb!’– and songs of the period throughout. Having witnessed Branson actually singing some of his poems at a poetry reading, I can vouch for the evident vein of folkloric inflection in his oeuvre, and, indeed, for his good ear for tone and harmony. The second and final stanza is particularly resonant:
It couldn’t last. The moguls changed their tune,
signed likely lads, stars in their eyes; folk rock
drowned out the words. Gone underground, down-sized
yet in rude health – until next time, so keep
it to yourself; new songs to tell it like
it is when roused by breach of commonwealth.
“Just You Wait and See” is another nostalgia piece, the title quoted from the famous song ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ (as famously performed by Vera Lynn), and is preceded by another ornithological quote: ‘Some species of long-distance spring migrants are declining in numbers at an accelerating, possibly unsustainable, rate’. The imagery here focuses on stars in the night sky, and there’s a curious nod to the Hopi Indians, whom, among other singular cultural traditions, used to believe that celestial powers were absorbed into their heads via holes in the skulls:
…Not shapeshifters
nor sleeping ones the Hopi knew,
half ours, alternative far worse, they chase
the tilt of Earth and charm us with their voice
As is often the case with Branson, there is a faintly dystopian flavour to the poem as it projects anxieties as to some apocalyptic future:
What if they don’t turn up, flycatcher, swift,
warbler and turtle dove, those cuckoos in
‘The Times,’ that nightingale in Berkeley Square?
Will spring go missing too?
‘Scouse Jack’ appears to depict an ‘elocuted’ Liverpudlian friend of the poet’s, but later in the poem, this figure also serves as a personification of the unique Liverpudlian accent and character, a bracketed explanation of the term ‘Scouse’ as ‘a Liverpool stew’ very much symbiotic with the impression of a ‘stew’ of influences which themselves concoct the inscrutable distinctiveness of the natives of this distinctly Catholic-centric North-West city –the unique Scouse accent itself being mixed from the melting-pot of Irish, Welsh and Lancastrian accentual ingredients. Branson hits the nub of the Liverpudlian personality by drawing on the dockside city’s rich heritage of imported influences:
An inner émigré, he’s hard to pin,
urbane, that razor wit, well-honed in youth,
reined back and kindly-used. Rare time when drink
cuts in, just two or three, shield brows relent,
shy scamp again, deep furrows harrowed out.
Salt twang he ditched, when elocution blitzed
at grammar school, returns “Address unknown”;
vowels broaden, consonants go walkabout.
Take stock of Saxon, Viking, Norman, Celt,
sea gypsy, refugee, bondman and slave,
scran hostel, hovel, bawdy, drinking dive,
constituents of rabid enterprise,
add spice from Orient and Africa,
rich mix to tease and whet the appetite.
‘Mis-En-Scène’ is a sequence of five Bransonian sonnets, iambic pentameter blank verse with mostly assonantal end-line half-rhymes; each poem appears to describe castles, abbeys and cathedrals form various parts of the country, Wells, Bath, Coventry, Lichfield in Staffordshire, and Salisbury, and the language is suitably picturesque. At the beginning of the first poem, ‘Tomb Effigy, Wells’, we get a fascinating piece of architectural history: ‘Large cracks began to appear in the tower structure. In fear of a total collapse, several attempts at internal strengthening and buttressing were made, until the famous ‘scissor arches’ were put in place by master mason William Joy between 1338 & 1348’, followed by a gloriously tangible description of the object in question, with some breathtaking use of alliteration, particularly on the c-sounds, and sibilance:
Chased out of rock laid down in salt lagoons,
…you rest here on
your crib of self-indulgences, paid for,
fair copy of what’s rotted underneath.
This leprous nose is flattened out, the stone
dissolving, cartilage, bone congealed like wax,
the Silent Scream played on a misericord
…
Is it good luck to rub your ghost facade,
a rite to keep believers safe from spells,
the charm of gravity, collapsing walls,
tamed here by master mason’s scissor trick,
until the early warning trumpet calls?
‘Bath Abbey’, the second poem, is also beautifully sculpted with description throughout:
Round here, even the scroungers are well-heeled
and know it’s not polite to poop on folk
who take their ease at pavement coffee bars,
corralled, led by the credit card. Gulls strut
like troubadours, sleek pigeons dance between
packed chairs and tables, standing legs, tired feet.
…
And from the tall west frontage of the church,
in your mind’s eye, God gazes down, benign,
above the scant remains of angels long
since ill defined, and saints with bare-faced flaws,
blunt-nosed, expressionless and disinclined.
‘Hunter’s Moon’, the third, subtitled ‘Cathedral of St Michael, Coventry, November 14th, 1940’, is so beautifully described that it deserves almost full excerpting:
The bulldog breed don’t beat retreat, to view
toy town, close weave of hearth and industry,
emblazoned by a quisling Palmer sky.
Berlin gets blitzed, its people terrorised.
…
…massed thunderheads and balls of light,
hard raining hell on earth for anti Christ.
A dragon sucking in cold air to feed
itself, the old place glows white hot. New church
is raised, a garden made, the cross of nails,
‘Father forgive.’ Ruined walls retained, lest we
forget…
‘The Ladies of the Vale’, the fourth, is my favourite, ironically juxtaposing as it does, in a compact rift on the English Civil War of the 1640s, the vestigial scars of the Roundhead desecration on what was presumably a Laudian church during the English Revolution, and the Cromwellian decapitation of the Monarchy, with the Ruritanian spectacle of street-bunting celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations of July 2012:
Dark Ladies of the Vale command the view,
in widows’ weeds, just like when Parliament
lay siege, the reek of powder on the breeze,
the talk of sorcery and regicide
Pass bunting Jubilee, red, white and blue,
criss-crossing narrowed sky like razor wire.
See saints and angels soar like kittiwakes
west face, three spires severe as witches hats,
space acrobats, defying gravity
on wing and prayer. Inside, all reliquary
defiled, carved heads lack noses, puritan
distaste for ornament, whole site ransacked.
This miniature reads almost like a distilled versification of Christopher Hill. Finally the fifth poem, ‘The Spire’, a slice of verse-ventriloquism through the spectre of John Constable as he paints Salisbury Cathedral, is, once again, sharply descriptive and strikingly aphoristic:
This painting was commissioned by my friend,
John Fisher. See him with his wife beneath
these elms, the meadows drained, church settled where
the deer gave up the ghost, as legend tells.
There is no easy way to paint a pure
and unaffected scene, movement and light,
for landscape alters as the weather does.
…
rainbow behind, dark thunderhead on high.
‘Essere Amata Amando’ is one of the most lyrically well-formed and musical of Branson’s sonnets, and innovates in being, I think, the only one which actually ends on a rhyming couplet; it starts with the quote “To love and to be loved’, Alice Douglas-Pennant, Penrhyn Castle, 1880’, and has something of Christina Rossetti’s haunting ‘Remember’ about it –here it is in full:
I gaze down from my ivied tower room
on lean-to greenhouses and potting sheds,
walled garden where we met, etch words of love
here on this diamond page of leaded glass.
Childhood charmed us invisible, times when
the governess was occupied, young girl
and keeper’s son. And nothing changed till you
were old enough to join the outside staff
and I was on the cusp of womanhood.
Eyes and ears everywhere, silent as wraiths,
the housemaids come and go, unseen, between
two worlds, this and the one below the stairs
where gossip brewed. The butler passed it on.
Now I’ve been banished here and you have gone.
‘The Spirit Mask’ seems almost a kind of homage to magical realist novelist Angela Carter, replete with titular allusion to her most famous (and later filmed) short story, The Company of Wolves, and to its main source of inspiration, Little Red Riding Hood (the other being lycanthropic folklore):
Before dawn dark, beyond the kissing gate,
no trace of human enterprise, year’s edge
and seasonably cold, big moon hoodwinked,
the wood’s re-wilding at flood tide. Alone,
anything’s possible, hair trigger primed.
You conjure up the company of wolves,
soundscape all eyes. Words come to mind but not
tall stories, shepherds’ lore, Red Riding Hood.
Too soon, the darkness draining like a halfblocked
waste, they melt away like smoke. As light
re-civilises things, with nature trained
on gibbet, poison, snare and gun, recall
men in wolf heads, dead outlaws posed by ghosts
of bounty men, snug in your sheepskin coat.
This is yet another deftly sculpted, richly phrased sonnet, and, perhaps fittingly, concludes this collection with a colouristic echo to the volume’s title.
Such is the sheer painstaking craftsmanship of much of Branson’s poetry that it felt only respectful to catalogue what to me were the stand-out poems –which are, in fact, the good majority of the collection– with significant excerpts intended to demonstrate to readers just how well-honed are Branson’s prosodic skills, and how exceptional they are at a time when much contemporary poetry is considerably less meticulous in its composition, more prosaically phrased, less linguistically engaged (or engaging), and too often gratingly casualised in tone. Branson’s poems are, to my mind, qualitatively the pinnacle of supplemental verse –but their surefootedness of form, image-compactness, and metrical discipline rarely curtail their richly poetic aphoristic qualities –and, taken together, Branson’s finely honed skills as a poet make for some of the most descriptively striking and visually attractive (in terms of shape on the page) poetry I have read in some time. If I have any qualms at all, it is simply that I would like to see some further, more expansive breakings with what for Branson is clearly, in the main, a certain ‘comfort zone’ of blank verse iambic pentameter sonnets –though, having said that, so beautifully composed are these Bransonian sonnets that I also crave to read some more.
Branson has undoubtedly found his ‘voice’ now, has proven his supreme craftsmanship as a miniaturist poet; all that now remains for him is to, if he wishes, show his gifts in more expansive, looser forms, should the impulsion spring upon him. Lapwing has both done him much justice with this handsome production as it has also procured for itself something of a coup: Red Hill is one of the most consistently strong and richly formed collections of recent times, and, most crucially of all, the vast majority of its contents, particularly the lusciously sculpted sonnets, are more than deserving of enshrining in book form since they simply scream out to be re-read and savoured several times over. This collection comes highly recommended by The Recusant –it really is worth purchasing and treasuring for many years to come, as, bluntly, very few poets practising today equal Branson’s sheer artisan-like craftsmanship at iambic blank verse.
Alan Morrison © 2013