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Frinite  Heat Poets
Chris Torrance-Words. Chris Vine-Music
Canna Press, 3 Cardigan Road, Dinas Powys, Cardiff, CF24 4PN. 
£10.90  postal.

Chris Torrance is a poet whose work I’ve been following and savouring since the early sixties. His writing continues to change and mature with deceptive simplicity. As it harmoniously manifests in a seemingly more accessible and direct form — it becomes increasingly multi-layered with profundity, insight and wisdom.

     Both creativity and man are musically erudite and much of  his public reading and performance has long involved music and musicians. Frinite CD is now available in a revised edition; including an extra balancing track. Its publishers sport a new address (above)  and the Wobbly Chair and Hermits collections, reviewed in #27, are also available from this  location.

     Frinite kaleidoscopes headlong into inner and outer human geography, mental landscapes, physical terrain. Treading that convoluted path between dream, vision, electronic media, unknown world, cosmic universe. Which is reality? Which is fantasy? Taking in the philosophical cul-de-sacs of conventional wisdom, accepted belief, encyclopaedic history, spiritual and secular religion, psychology, science, technology, mythology, folklore. Going beyond all of that into a greater clarity. Directly. How he sees it is how he tells it.

     Meditation, psycho-active ingestion, sitting in a midnight winter wood. Each one sculpts infinitely different views, contrasting interpretation, unique and unrepeatable experience. Likewise many listeners will tread gingerly through this recording and extract, understand , empathise, be exhilarated or disturbed, in completely individual personal fashion.

     This is altogether an intelligent and sensitive fusion of powerful poetry and reflective music. No posturing ego, no falsity, no bullshit. It certainly grabbed me by the psychic balls and sucked me into its gentle convulsions. It contains and embraces that shared history — birth, life, death —that we seldom confront or understand. Like peeling a large onion. Layer after layer. It’s all there but nothing much is usually seen.

     An ancient truism is that most poetry reviewing reveals much more of reviewer than reviewed. So be it. In the dark night, suspended between reflection and sleep, is just where Chris Torrance and Chris Vine took me.