Review
Full Gallop (some recent books from Galloping Dog Press)
FULL GALLOP
(Some recent books from Galloping Dog Press )
Blues and Heartbreakers, Peter Finch (1981).
Perspectives on the Reach, Alan Halsey (1981).
The Word from One, Ralph Hawkins (1980).
Work, Tony Jackson (1980).
Ghostie Men, Tom Leonard (2nd Edn. 1981).
Elegies, Eric Mot tram (1981).
Unearth, William Pryor (19801).
A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course, Colin Simms (1981 ).
There is a cosy theory that small presses fulfil two functions. Firstly, they provide a space for writers to experiment in, where anything goes, and nothing is final. Secondly (says the theory), the small presses act as a 'springboard' for the best young writers to publication by the larger, more established, ' proper presses.
The first part of this theory holds. In these days of cheap or easily accessible printing equipment, anyone can (and sometimes it seems like everyone has) set up their own press.However, the 'big' publishers in Britain today are picking up hardly at all on the large amount of genuine writing that has been done in the last twenty years or so, and which has appeared erratically via the small presses. Basically, they are not interested. What little has been given wider circulation e.g. Tom Pickard's Hero Dust (Allison and Busby), or that regrettable damp squib from Penguin, the Children of Albion anthology, or Neil Oram's prose trilogy The Warp (Sphere) - has been unimaginatively, and often downright nastily, produced.
Doubtless there are reasons for this unprecedented neglect, from money through to 'the end of literacy as we know it', the state of the nation, and the sunspot cycle. I am not even sure it is a bad thing. But with the 'big boys' so obviously going through a crisis of imagination, or a failure of nerve, over British writing at the moment, what actually happens is that a small percentage of the little presses move on to achieve better production and a measure of stability. Despite perpetual financial and distribution difficulties, and still in small print runs, they manage to make the core of current exciting writing at least accessible, if you're prepared to root about. Fifteen years ago it was such presses as Ferry, Fulcrum, Goliard and Trigram. After the flowering comes a dying back – and renewal: recently, names like Oasis, Great Works, New London Prid, Aloes and Pig Press have been making the running; and the press under consideration here, Galloping Dog.
Galloping Dog began life as a Swansea-based small press. It was founded, and is still run single-handed, by Peter Hodgkiss, who has previously proved his worth with that essential review of the '70's, Poetry Information. He is also currently co-editor of Poetry and Little Press Information (ALP). His books retain a basically duplicated format, but their professionalism is beyond doubt -excellent covers, square lettered spines, clear printing, editorial maturity, and value for money. The Press also publishes Not Poetry, a good magazine with the accent on prose. Three years ago the Press moved to Newcastle; but that didn't mean that writers in Wales were forgotten. Galloping Dog, for instance, has taken over (beginning with Book 3, The Diary of Palug's Cat) the publication of Chris Torrance's Magic Door sequence -surely the most interesting long poem currently on the go in Wales. Peter Finch has recently had a book out too. No, the Press has continued its policy of publishing good British writing (with a sprinkling of transatalantic work) which reflects the real situation today -at its best, an energetic mix of local and global concerns.
The batch of books published in the last two years by Galloping Dog seems to me to indicate the 'flowering' of this Press. Three books in particular reflect this clearly.
The first is Tom Leonard's Ghostie Men, a short book of Glasgow dialect poems. Ghostie Men is outrageous, therefore attractive. Leonard gets the rhythm and sound of actual speech down on the page as neatly and unselfconsciously as, say, the Geordie of some of Tom Pickard's early pieces, or Barry Mac Sweeney in Black Torch. The method is a direct phonetic transcription of speech, without comment; an exploitation of the chasm between reality and grammar. But Leonard's characters are individuals; they are more than the place they live and the way they speak. Sometimes the speaker is the poet himself, a spiky but not uncompassionate figure, to whom 'all living language is sacred'. At other times, various voices soliloquise their opinions and dilemmas, as for example in the poem 'it's awright fur you hen', a funny and subtle monologue of a loser in today's tougher world, where the women at least have men to blame for their sense of oppression (and the jargon to prove it); whereas all he has is himself, and can finally say only 'but ahm no iz bad iz summa them'. Ghostie Men is, I understand, a relative best-seller in Glasgow, and deservedly so.
The second is Blues and Heartbreakers, by veteran Welsh experimentalist Peter Finch. Appropriately enough for such a visual text, Peter Hodgkiss has done a brilliant design job on this book, with its cover suggestive of a 45 r.p.m. record, a strangely nostalgic image, incidentally, which says something about the ever-narrowing gap between the present and the past. In a sense, nostalgia plays a large part in this book – an invocation of nights in London R and B clubs in the early sixties - though what Chuck Berry would make of it I don't know! There is an excellently recorded cassette available (Big Band Dance Music, produced by Balsam Flex) which should be heard in conjunction with the printed text, since it adds at least two more dimensions to the visual side -namely, the sound of the thing in performance, and the extra dimension of studio effects: echo, multi-track, slow-down and speed-up, etc. Side one of the tape is an improvisation on the text, featuring Peter Finch and that other seasoned performance poet, Bob Cobbing. They work together well, exploring the oddity and delight of words and sounds in a series of climaxes and quieter interludes, getting a 4-square tribal beat going in places that is in keeping with the rock band theme.
Incidentally, the other side of the tape features Barry Edgar Pilcher, saxophonist and poet, who has recently moved back to Wales from Wiltshire - hopefully we'll be seeing something of Barry again performing in Wales.
The third is Eric Mottram's Elegies, a book plump enough to lose yourself in, a major collection of nearly ten years' work by the critic and poet whose energy has been so central to recent British writing. These elegies are not lamentations, but 'directed to love and war', open reflections of people, issues, words and landscapes past and present, converging on the page in all their vitality and complexity. This is a sophisticated book with an enormous frame of reference, soundly based in both the 'contemporary tradition' of longer poems and, in a real sense of those two much-maligned words, culture and history .
The other five books are mixed in intent and success. Work, by Tony Jackson, is a tight, intense book, a book of echoes and shifting realities, decadent and innocent by turns, bouncing images by poetic radio between Berlin 1931 and a small town in Scotland. I enjoyed it immensely. It contrasts strongly (and favourably, I thought) with the more direct approach of Colin Simms' A Celebration Of The Stones In A Water-Course, whose long long lines swing erratically between Native America and the North York Moors. Simms is a naturalist with a string of publications (both prose and poetry) behind him; his work in this book is as open to the pulse and concerns of the twentieth century as Mottram's Elegies, yet it somehow lacks the depth; words skim across the page in a relentless mind-diary of rather predictable interests which some readers will find incoherent and inconsiderate. But of course it isn't necessarily the method which is at fault, but the way it's done.
Ralph Hawkins' The Word From One and William Pryor's Unearth do not present such a contrast. Both poets are careful technicians, aware of the problem of saying anything, and perhaps the larger problem of saying nothing. The advantage of such an approach is that craft and care never come in wrong. The disadvantage is a tendency to coldness and self-consciousness: the avoidance of verbosity can make the real world so cerebral.
With Alan Halsey's Perspectives On The Reach we are in territory pioneered by those two remarkable London poets Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher - particularly Sinclair: a mix of antique vision and contemporary horror, Blake via Burroughs and Brakhage, a landscape of giant figures and psychic webs of the darker sort. Halsey lives in the Marches; he has connected locally but also nationally with the consciousness of Albion and all the dreams and nightmares that implies. Technically this is an impressive book: powerful, diverse, uncompromising, and ultimately quite stark.
All these books have virtues which I haven't space to bring out here; the main point, considering them all together, is that it is a pleasure to see a publisher doing things as well as this, with skill and determination, and with imagination and sympathy.
Page(s) 107-111
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