The West Midlands Poetry Renaissance

 

Backra Man, Jon Morley (Heaventree Press, 2009).
Nature Mystic, Barry Patterson, (Heaventree, 2008), Price: £4.00. 978-1-906038-29-8
Lady Godiva and Me, Liam Guilar (Nine Arches Press, 2008), £5.00.

It’s not surprising that Coventry, in the West Midlands, features in three recent pamphlets. It is, after all, at the heart of what some are calling a renaissance of poetry in the region, with presses, courses and festivals proliferating. But the mediaeval city which survived near-destruction in the Second World War to become a culturally diverse commercial and industrial centre is engaging enough in its own right to have inspired three very different poets.

A leading figure in the West Midlands poetry renaissance has been Jonathan Morley, editor of Heaventree, whose publications have featured poets as varied as Mario Petrucci and Scrubber Jack. The same eclecticism is a feature of Backra Man, Morley’s first collection, published by his own press. The fine production values of this pamphlet — stiff, full colour covers, professional typesetting on high quality paper — might imply that Heaventree’s pamphlets have been upgraded, though there’s nothing to indicate whether this is a one-off or the introduction of a new house style. Cover notes describe Backra Man as ‘polyphonic in its mingling of registers’ and it almost seems to be a sampler, a catalogue of forms and voices Morley has mastered, from the exact pentameters of the sonnet ‘Spon’, with its poise and balance,

a water-skin films privet, hornbeam, herb
and our hair. Everything manmade is wet.

to the open fragmentation of ‘Dobeš’ Snail’,

bisect
            bisect
                               bisect
&remove      carefully        the
most of them.

by way of the dramatic monologue, ‘Sistah’,

I raa givin um awright bwoy!
Nawon calls me niggah
tellin me 2 go-back to Afrikah
                                knaw wha mean?

Compared to the multi-faceted complexity of much of the collection, this apparent transcription seems to be innovative mainly in its combination of phonetics and text-speak. Perhaps, like the dialect poems of Hardy’s long-forgotten contemporary, the self-styled anthropological poet, Parson William Barnes, this is meant to serve as a social record as much as a work of literature. Morley is more successful when playing with, stretching and challenging language, never more so than in ‘Bomb’, the most interesting and possibly the most accomplished poem here, with its fusion of dialects and neologisms representing the simultaneity of Coventry, its cultures, its past and its present.

each oblong & tri
angle now ska with
blu of no sky

nail-varnish blu
clutch flesh-grey town
at choke road

Before the reader reaches the poems in this spare and admirably short collection, she has to fight her way through notes and quotations, which cram the cover and its flaps. With access to such skill, and having the nerve to ask for his readers’ trust in these demanding works, it seems ironic that Morley may not entirely trust his poems to say what he wants them to. Themes of colonialism and oppression, as well as the coolness of the outside observer, are obvious without notes, not least because of the ‘savage satirical voice’ the blurb identifies. Even in the poems, Morley is sometimes heavy-handed. In ‘For Lee Miller’, otherwise very effective in its selection of details, the irony of the luxury bathroom at Berchtesgarten in the context of recently discovered concentration camp showers is surely portentous enough in itself, without the underlining last line, ‘fecit Hitler’s bathmat with the mud of Dachau’. The sudden, late reference to nude photographs Miller’s father took of her, perhaps an attempt to invoke Plath’s ‘Daddy’, also tends to capsize the poem with too much weight, when the theme of Hitler as voyeur and Miller’s ambivalence to it has already been more subtly developed.

Individual poems in this collection glitter with cleverness, craftsmanship and erudition. What I missed sometimes, though, was a unifying voice and a sense of the poet’s humanity bleeding through the virtuosity. Even so, Morley seems destined for a prestigious career. If he comes to be regarded as one of the leading poets, perhaps, of his generation, there’s no doubt that Backra Man will have been the starting point for that trajectory.

Barry Patterson seems to be the subject as well as the author of Nature Mystic, which also comes from Heaventree, in the more traditional folded A4 format. His portrait appears on the front cover and the title seems to refer to him as much as to the collection. Notes tell us that he is a scientist and a spiritual practitioner. Patterson is certainly a compelling performer, but the reader who hasn’t experienced his work in performance can only respond to the words on the page.

Striking, at first glance, is the poet’s use of long, Whitmanesque lines which, at their best, flow with energy like the current of a swollen river:

That grey wind, that brown wind, that whitening wind whips up the tree crowns into a riotous roaring; scares the dark starling wave out over the water. (‘Brandon Marsh Winter Light’)

These lines are full of joy in the sounds of language; there’s a sense of the poet exultantly rolling words around in his mouth. But long lines must be well stocked to keep the movement pounding along. Occasionally, Patterson finds himself relying on padding — repetition, explanation, platitude: a ‘moment of recognition’ is ‘like déjà vu’ (‘The Snake Charmer’). And there’s a tendency to resort to cliché: ‘red in tooth & claw’ (‘Big Bill Blake’); ‘whips it into submission’ (‘The World Wind’s Wall’).

There’s no denying Patterson’s huge enthusiasm. ‘Big Bill Blake’ is a dramatic piece which asserts his sense of kinship with the great political poet and mystic:

‘Head on fire, eyes burning, voice rising & falling in the song that he must sing.’

Patterson clearly hopes to share his mysticism, described on the cover as the ‘shared ethos of Dharma and Druidry’, even to encourage his readers to embrace his beliefs. However, what much of the collection lacks is any precise observation which might put the reader in touch with the world that engenders that mysticism. Though some description is sharp and unexpected,

Yellow sodium jingle jangles bouncing beyond car windows (‘From Past to Present’),

there’s a tendency to rush too quickly to the spiritual without allowing the reader the sensory experience that precipitates it. Places, birds and plants are named but generally described in only the broadest terms, if at all. I’m intrigued, for example, to know what sound ‘only starlings in winter can make’ (‘October on Hearsall Common’) but there’s no clue. In ‘Canley Brook’, an otherwise interesting and accomplished poem whose distillation of ideas in short, compressed lines is a direction Patterson should consider exploring, the otherwise engaging image,

Gravity pulls you,
Ever so gently, like a hair
From butter,

contradicts the laws of physics, unless the butter was upside-down. Perhaps more assiduous editing might have picked this up; what’s easily missed in the throes of a thrilling performance can become all too apparent to readers able to stop and reread.

Nature Mystic is not without its pleasures. Vigorous, passionate and driven by the poet’s very personal vision, it nevertheless does not preach. It’s an attractive book to take home from a reading and would be even more so with tighter editing and more diligent proofreading.

Lady Godiva and Me by Liam Guilar comes from Nine Arches, a newly established press based in Rugby, Warwickshire, which is building up an impressive pamphlet list, including titles by Jane Holland and David Hart. Born in Coventry, though he has lived in Australia for over twenty years, Guilar comes back to his West Midland roots with a sequence that examines history and mythification through the stories of Lady Godiva and Coventry. It might be wrong to consider this sequence on the same terms as most poetry pamphlets; with 62 poems and a six page epilogue, it’s as long as many full collections and also includes characteristics of historical and biographical non-fiction, documentary films and memoirs. Guilar, like his characters, has much to tell us, and poetry is only one medium he is using to do this; indeed, the poetry comes less from the expected inventiveness of words, their ambiguity and distillation, than from the connection and overlay of stanzas, of characters’ voices across time. Even so, there’s a touch of Geoffrey Hill in the juxtaposition of mediaeval recorded history, figures from legend, recollections of a twentieth century childhood and the living memories that surrounded it. But unlike Hill in Mercian Hymns, Guilar tends to keep mediaeval and modern in two separate halves — ‘Lady Godiva’ and ‘Me’ — though some characters span both. Peeping Tom, for example, is a shady Everyman figure, a discoloured thread that runs through the multi-textured fabric of the sequence:

And me? The patron saint of curiosity,
Tom cat, but blinded, never killed. (16)

Everyone here has a tale to tell but it’s not a conventional narrative, more a montage of voices and themes, though there is a tendency sometimes to spell out and explain, as when Leofric speaks of Godiva in her more historically accurate incarnation as Godgifu,

God’s gift, my lovely, rarest of women,
companion and lover, counsellor, friend,
who wakes in the dawn, in our bed, warm beside me,
as now and forever, together as one. (7)

In the second, modern part, the majority of voices come not from the great and the legendary but from the people of Coventry with their various, widespread origins,

from the crumbling ends of an empire,
from enclosed fields, from feudal landscapes. (27)

This Coventry is no less mythical than Godiva’s, seen through their different cultures and aspirations, their own legends, filtered at the same time through the poet’s, many years away. The most inventive language appears in this section, for example when Tom is confronted by women he has wronged:

And me a good Catholic girl, me mammy’s darling,
I thought wan king the capital of China.
An alabaster virgin blushing at the tampon ads. (58)

The epilogue, ‘Talking Nothing to the Stone’, also includes concentrated writing that raises its poetry closer to the spiritual and universal,

I know this place but wouldn’t claim it mine,
Mine is the space between the rising and the falling foot.

Lady Godiva and Me is a brave and admirable attempt at a new form of collection. If it doesn’t always succeed, perhaps this is mainly because it tries to do too much. It’s a good read though, not exactly a Richard and Judy’s Book Club selection converted into poetry, but definitely a page turner.

These collections are a reminder of Coventry’s significance in the resurgence of West Midlands poetry and also that the city of Coventry can be as intriguing and exotic as it seemed when I was growing up not far away in Birmingham, envious of its startling modern cathedral and its romantic mediaeval past.