The Wolf Reviews
Jim Dening
Pebbles, Debris
Published by Arcade
Suggested Price £7.00
When I first met with the Metroland group of poets at founder Christopher North’s house in Buckinghamshire, I was a tempestuous nineteen year-old who was suspicious of poetry workshop facilitations. Half-way through the night a slightly gawky man who seemed to be forever hiding a sideways smirk, proceeded to read out a few of his poems. His name was Jim Dening, and it was there that my mistrust began to dissipate.
I remember Dening offering the Metrolanders a first read of two very different, yet equally captivating poems, The Ghosts of Canons Ashby and Waiting by the door. Gladly, when Pebbles, Debris came out last year I saw both poems included. While the Kafka-inspired Waiting by the door is a surge of lifeblood for anyone who misplaced the dusty old mantra of ‘carpe diem’, the elaborate Canons Ashby sequence proves truly inspirational for anyone interested in the spiritual or paranormal. In Canons Ashby, and indeed throughout this collection, we are cleverly interwoven into the narrative, not just as onlookers, but as ‘ghosts of the future’.
Yet to identify Pebbles, Debris as a collection purely reliant on Dening’s fascination with otherworldliness would be wide of the mark. Throughout are poems of love, family, geology and casually-dressed wit. The delicious opening poem (describing a chess match with his young son on a train to Chester) sets an extremely high standard not always matched by subsequent poems. One reason for this is that it is perhaps one of the most touching poems in the book. Here Dening describes how his wrong move in the game signifies a pivotal condition in the kaleidoscope of parenthood. I knew what a bad move it was…/I played my part/the difficult good father’s part / that gives him life / and lets me die. This is Dening at his most lucid, at the height of his range; breathing fire on the bones of mortality and history.
Though seemingly slender there are sixty-five poems in Dening’s first collection, perhaps five too many. For someone whose work is usually steeped in originality, I was surprised to find the odd gnawing ‘love is…’, or ‘poetry is…’ poem. This could be an editorial flaw, but ultimately an author of Jim Dening’s calibre should know when to steer clear from such exhausted subject material.
Nevertheless, just when you think you’ve finally found a lapse in the momentum of Pebbles, Debris, Dening suddenly throws in another gem of a poem as if he were merely toying with the reader. A stunning back-to-back duo, The quiet mother and Shaking weeds, display a crispness of family memory that few contemporary writers can so well enunciate. So perhaps Dening is having the last laugh. The biography on the final page suggests so. Dening refuses to say ‘where he spent his formative years…what he does for money or whether he lives some of the time in France…’ Above the bio is a picture of Dening himself, wearing that same half-smirk I first caught at Metroland all those years ago. Fittingly, it compliments the entire collection.
Page(s) 16-17
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