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Tim Liardet: Competing with the Piano Tuner. Bridgend: Seren, £7.95.
Paul Henry: The Milk Thief. Bridgend: Seren, £6.95.

     In the title poem of Tim Liardet’s third collection Competing with the Piano Tuner, the speaker is (unsuccessfully) attempting to ask a “difficult girl” out to dinner. His “wooing sweet potential” is drowned out by the piano tuner’s efforts to render the instrument pitch-perfect. It becomes a contest for the attention of the girl, who is

                                                           being well entertained:
She’s sniggering in silence, fingers through hair, as if to reflect
Upon two men simultaneously at pains
to crank or tune a machine grown unmusical in neglect.

The scenario is rich with comic potential, not all of which is exploited. The speaker half-realises the ludicrousness of his situation: “like an imbecile’s attempt to emulate perfection/ or Ride of the Valkyrie at several times slower than normal speed.” What is striking about this poem, though, is Liardet’s belief that “Somewhere beyond the din,/ Beneath the tuner’s fat fingers and my script drifts/ A perfect scale, a yes.” In this era of hyper-ironised simulacra, faith in Platonic forms is touchingly rare, but Liardet really seems to have it, or at least a yearning nostalgia for it. His work displays a curiously old-fashioned symbolic investment, and chief among his symbols is Woman. For Liardet, older women tend to be salt-of-the earth types (‘Lines to a tolerant Charwoman’, ‘The Scutters’ Song’) whereas younger women are usually sexualised fertility symbols (‘The Clockmaker’s Daughter’, ‘Olga Speaking Broken English’). Both types, it seems, exist to “do for” the speaker in some capacity. When Liardet writes, “Months now without a woman”, it’s as if he’s writing “months now without a fag”. The girl in ‘Competing with the Piano Tuner’ is a mere cipher; a prize for the victor of the macho-aesthetic psychomachia taking place around her. In which, predictably enough, the speaker and the piano tuner are revealed as allies, united in their platonic quest for customer satisfaction. This is old hat muse-poetry, and the result is an amusing but weirdly tuneless exercise. The poem teeters perilously on the brink between bathos and self mockery, and its concluding piety is uneasy:

                                The girl’s living room’s the singing
Of slowly refining truth, where the lid lifts,
The convalescent home for harmony and winners of women.

One just wants to say “no it isn’t!” With symbolic vision of this kind (for which the only known cure is large doses of Marianne Moore), there is the omnipresent risk of sounding forced and flat: the author’s intentions are palpable, elephantinely so.

     A symbolic approach also implies the fundamental security of the speaker, who is the omnipotent controller of his meanings. Liardet shifts perspective convincingly and when he renders detail he renders it with accuracy (a description of dried ink from ‘The Celsius’ rings particularly true: “a little block rattling in its pot,/ a rock cake, a clot, a blue hardened cube”). But throughout one never gets the sense that the speaker has been displaced or discomfited by the objects in his poems. Even the impressive ‘Mirror Angled at Sky’ possesses a whiff of benign Stevensian pomposity:

And so I think this bit
of junk’s not just the still reflecting point of art

but may be likened to a certain juncture in
the history of clouds,
at which formations such as these might part to glimpse

maelstroms both human and equine, far below…

These lines are so in love with their own rhetoric that they mar an otherwise fine poem. And why “equine”?

     However one might bemoan the philosophical attitudinising, though, it would (as with Stevens) be a mistake to underestimate the piquant humour that animates Liardet’s work. ‘The Bourgeoisie in Crisis’, ‘Doing Julius Caesar’ and ‘Olga Speaking Broken English’ are bitchy and funny:

     Now I am having to let the punsters put inside their looks and allowing
     Them to slide all their paper dollars into my friendly camisole
     And am opening it to show them while my little husband he is living
     In Estonia and is keeping for me all deep trusts in his lonely heart.

Liardet’s best poems highlight the tension between his idea of perfection and the flawed, all-too-human world he records. In church the fastidious clockmaker worries about his pregnant daughter: “How her belly will stick out in the row, like his head and shoulders, above it…/ All he ever wanted her to do was sing in harmony”; and in the excellent ‘Lumm’s Tower’ Liardet describes his uncle’s stammer as “the edifice of mis-hit notes which rose/ towards the unified language, so tall”. Competing with the Piano Tuner is most impressive where this humorous and sympathetic vision is allowed to dominate.

     Paul Henry’s is a very different voice. The Milk Thief, also a third collection, is quite disarmingly free of literary self-consciousness. “Impressionistic” is an over-used term, but it is a justifiable description of Henry’s technique. The first section of the book, ‘Aber’, contains oblique, idiosyncratic memories of an Aberystwyth childhood. Absent figures are conjured metonymically, by means of associated and dear objects. Thus, in ‘Calcutta Sandals’ Henry writes of his father,

you’d slap their soles together
like a self-applauding seal

then put them out
to dry on the back step.

While the ending of this poem is over-obvious (the sandals “came apart in your hands”), the image is simple and moving, highlighting Henry’s great strength: his sense of mystery, his ability to present suggestive and often very beautiful images without dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. This is most obvious in the book’s central, and to my mind strongest, section ‘The Visitors’, where a string of Welsh names (the cover informs us they are “female relatives”) unleashes a welter of association which is both lyrical and stirring. Again, the contrast with Liardet is striking. Henry, in a more or less traditional invocation to the muses, resolves to passively “lie back, let them haunt,/ the soft pulse of their lips/ against the stone wall I’ve become…”. The resulting sense of communion, of a hermetic and deeply private vision manifested in winningly simple language, is remarkable.

     Henry’s work owes something to his singer-songwriter past, with its lyricism, its overt (and very Welsh) interest in music, and its relaxed rhyming. Henry is less of a formalist than Liardet, there isn’t as much meat-and-drink poetry here, but with the fine originality of poems like ‘Pissing on Graves’ and ‘Something Beginning With…’, one scarcely misses it. The main concern is with liminal, dream-like states, for which the poet’s fluid and imagistic style seems entirely apposite. The book’s closing section shows that Henry has an eye to more worldly matters also (avoiding the pit-falls of the Celtic Shaman stereotype). ‘The Park Girls’, the protagonists of which

Belch like toads at closing time
and pitch their laughter in keys
sopranos dream about

was particularly enjoyable. Despite some minor infelicities (notably an unfortunate “rooves” in ‘Six Houses’ which should have been expunged, and a grammatically confused final couplet in the title poem), The Milk Thief disarms by stealth. For its quiet achievements it comes warmly recommended.