The Beauty of Inflections
Review: Matthew Welton The Book of Matthew
Carcanet, £7.95, ISBN 1857546431
The Book of Matthew is a joy. Here, for instance, is a poem called “Van der Kerkhoff”, which I will quote in full because it consists only of a single sentence, composing itself meticulously across fifteen lines:
It matters how some afternoon late into spring
the voices around the café tables lift and fall
like sea birds or low winds, and a smudge of orange light
plays slowly through the window; and it matters how
the houses along the yellow ocean, drifting out
of darkness as the day assembles over the hills,
seem, kind of, to draw quietly backward from the beach;
and, also, in the months between the summers, with
the weather in the zeros and the starch-coloured cloud
absorbing into the evening sky, it matters how
the conversation in the kitchen falls towards
the need to know – in the unendingness of God
where is it man begins? – and what else matters is
the crazed, credential sun; the insects around the trees;
the chance of rain; the shadows in the short, chalky grass.
“Van der Kerkhoff” has a number of qualities which recur, happily,
throughout The Book of Matthew. The long sentence is itself characteristic: several poems here taxing syntax, without collapsing into breathlessness. Welton punctuates faultlessly, and his rhythms are quietly emphatic, so that while, not infrequently, one reaches the end of one of his sentences not quite certain how it began, one is confident at every stage of an over-arching shape. A Welton poem discovers, it doesn’t disorientate. You don’t know what’s coming next; but you don’t have to.
Also characteristic is the music of “Van der Kerkhoff”. The sun is “crazed, credential” not least because it is alliterative to say so, just as is the “weather in the zeros and the starch-coloured cloud”. Much of the pleasure of Welton’s poetry is to be found in such gratuitous effects, in the way sounds play around the ear and on the tongue. But so is its precision. The “conversation in the kitchen” comes to our attention because the play of consonants separates it out: likewise the “darkness as the day assembles”. Language, as Welton presents it, is a series of accidents out of which a kind of accuracy can arise. It is in this spirit that his poetry rhymes, obsessively and conspicuously, the arbitrariness of rhyme nudging sense in a new direction, opening possibilities up rather than holding them down.
The colours in the poem are characteristic also, the “orange” and the
“yellow”, as is the sense of time passing and the attention paid to the light. So is the scene, both domestic and far-reaching; and so is the detailing,“the short, chalky grass”.Most of all, however, what makes this poem characteristic is the fact that there is another poem in the collection which is just, or almost just, like it, which is also called “Van der Kerkhoff”, and which I will quote in full because it consists only of a single sentence composing itself lucidly across fifteen lines:
It matters how some afternoon late into spring
the voices around the café tables lift and fall
like sea birds or low winds, and a smudge of orange light
plays slowly through the window; and it matters how
the houses along the yellow ocean, drifting out
of darkness as the day assembles over the hills,
seem, kind of, to draw quietly backward from the beach;
and, also, in the months between the summers, with
the weather in the zeros and the starch-coloured cloud
absorbing into the evening sky, it matters how
the conversation in the kitchen falls towards
the need to know – in the unendingness of God
where is it man begins? – and what else matters is
the crazed credential sun; the insects around the trees;
the chance of rain; the shadows in the short, chalky grass.
The Van der Kerkhoffs were twins who both played football for Holland. What we are dealing with here, then, are minute differences. The difference between the two poems, as far as I can see, consists in a single comma, “the crazed, credential sun” of the first poem becoming “crazed credential” in the second. Do such differences matter? Welton thinks they do. And so much so that he includes another pair of twin poems, this time the De Boers. The De Boers also both played football for Holland, although in a later team. The De Boer poems differ from the Van der Kerkhoff poems in that the “crazed, credential sun” has become instead “the still, uncertain air”, with the second of the De Boer poems separating “still” and “uncertain” not with a comma but a hyphen. I haven’t ever seen this done in a book of poems before, quite such deliberate emphasis placed on variation and repetition. It is a remarkable, confident, and in its way quite beautiful gesture. It is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.
Welton, for all his originality – and to my mind this is one of the most
refreshing first books of poetry to emerge in several years – has learnt much from Wallace Stevens. Stevens is there in the “squiggles” of his diction, in the comic grandness of such characters as “President Marbles” and Mr.Macaroni, in the pleasure he takes in error, and in his metaphysical drift.Mostly, though, he is there in The Book of Matthew’s variations, in the delicate alterations on a given theme. Take the title poem, for instance, which like the Dutch twin poems works by introducing minimal changes to a blue-print, only this time across some thirty-eight pages; each page a section, and each section taking its title from one of the divisions of Roget’s Thesaurus. The shifts are beautifully done, such that the procedure never feels procedural. A model for the poem might well be Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”. Likewise the model for the football poems is surely “The Snow Man”,Welton’s single sentence curving away from itself just as Stevens’s does, except that for Welton all the details “matter”, whereas for Stevens, who was always loss-adjusting, they barely can.
None of which is to say that The Book of Matthew is derivative. It isn’t. It is an original book because it has gone to school in and developed out of a major poet. Or to push the point further, in building on and out of Stevens, Welton shows an appreciation of the way poetry develops and originates which is entirely consonant which what, already, one might call his aesthetic. Just as many of his poems proceed, and become themselves, by slight variations, so Welton proceeds by taking Stevens into formal territories the American poet couldn’t have conceived of. He builds forms out of repetition in ways that recall Edwin Morgan’s concrete poems of the 1960s, but also the musical minimalism of John Adams and Steve Reich. Then there is the book’s title, which is itself a play of originality and similarity: the four gospels differing from and overlapping with each other while telling the story of one who came before. Then there is the way the poetry itself develops, through a series of echoes that are also accidents. The Book of Matthew is a story of incremental change.
Crucially, though, none of this is laboured. Welton is a clever poet aiming not to impress but to delight. He is one of a number of poets now writing – one might mention also Richard Price, Jeremy Over and Michael Haslam – who appreciate that seriousness is not the only way of being serious about language. Welton lifts words and lifts the reader. The Book of Matthew is a welcome change.
Page(s) 88-90
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The