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Gary Bills
The Ridiculous Nests Of The Heart.
Bluechrome Publishing £7.99.
       When earth opens up to the promise of rain,
        Leaking the fumes of its own fecundity,
        Its aching dark says “soak me - soak me
                                                                   deep”,
        And the rain, when it comes, is shocking with
                                                                   heat.
This, the shortest poem in the book, entitled After the Drought, employs a subject used by generations of poets to convey literal
meaning, as well as spiritual or sexual longings. But I give it because it captures some attributes of Gary Bills’s work that I admire. One is his natural use of words, highlighted here by the oomph of ‘fecundity’; another is emotion communicated subtly through the focused description; and the use of music and structure, bending all to the discipline of form, but never compromising the essence of what is to be conveyed. The 82 poems offer a broad spectrum of subjects: sex, loving, being loved, being a father; death, war, pain, confusion; earth, sea and space; a fascination with (and perhaps a longing for) whatever lies hidden behind our eyes, or “out there” but out of reach of our senses, perhaps even of our hearts and minds. The traditional ingredients of poetry, you say? Yes, but with it a powerful adherence to music, to rhythms that bind up the lines, the stanzas, the shapes. Perhaps the most estimable of attributes is lightness of touch with heavy things, and an effort to reveal itself honestly, like an autumn leaf which dissolves to the touch. This is the work of an empathetic mind which possesses the attributes of both male and female to an unusual degree.

It may be that this last named characteristic is heightened by his closeness to his wife and young daughter, whose presence permeates several parts of the volume. A number of his wife’s black and white drawings give an added dimension of feeling to the seven named sections of this handsomely produced book. When I am given poems to review, I list the most notable: I’ve chosen thirty-three, which speaks for itself. Sadly, quoting a line or two is a bit like offering part of Van Gogh’s ear. But here are three, taken almost at random:

             Those heavy, pregnant candles of horse
                                                     chestnuts,
          Alight for half of every May, no more,
          Are rising from swept holders of green
                                                      leaves,
           Supported by such dark, arthritic hands.
                                                    (Dark Experience)
           Those shooting stars are mending holes in
                                                       space.
           Like silver needles quickening through cloth,
         They hold the dark together with their passing;
                                                                   (Watching)
           My infant’s cry is like the rain
           and drenches me awake all night.
                                                                      (Awake)
          This is his second collection. Such a lengthy one must stem from the most intense immersion in his work, while living to the full as husband, father, friend, salaried slave and eternal student. It’s  hauntingly beautiful, an intriguing collection; something worth
finding and holding onto.
                                                                   R G Felton

Religious overtones
Alan Morrison: Clocking-in for the Witching Hour. Sixties Press £3.50.
Stuart Flynn: Temptation in the Desert.
Agápe Publications £3.00.
Alan Morrison’s long poem is about a father whose failure to achieve his own true potential seems to have deeply affected his son. Its sections are connected by the theme of the father setting off for poorly paid work as a security guard; the reflections that arise during a boring and uneventful night; and his return home to ‘dream of better things/ than shifts and punished lives.’

The punishments appear to have started at the age of three when he was badly burned and ‘condemned to being nervous all his life.’
Despite this, he became a corporal in the Royal Marines, unhappy with barrack-room culture and at not ‘belonging somewhere/
suited to his sensitivities.’

He was
     A nervous boy groomed for the clergy
     prone to morbid love of the holy
– but now this naturally good and humble man has ended up ‘forgotten, discarded, obscured like Jude,/ destined to regard
himself as a Failure…’

Hardy’s hero had a plan to put his case to those he naïvely believed might help him. He also had to contend with Sue Bridehead. The hero of this poem seems merely to have been ‘existing instead of living’ with little comfort or inspiration from a long-suffering wife. He
does not attract the reader’s sympathy in the same way. Many lives are thwarted by misfortune or wrong decisions, without any sense of tragic intervention by fate, and this remains one of them.

Others see it differently. To Barry Tebb the poem is a tour de force that reminds him of Mallarmé. I am more inclined to think of Wilfred Owen. When he broke free of a religiose background of faded gentility, he found his true voice. This poem may yet come to be seen as a step in a similar direction, for it leaves little doubt about Alan Morrison’s own potential.

The Lenten tinge of Stuart Flynn’s title poem proves to be a mirage. As a hermit tells how he let himself be tempted by the Devil, who seems to have wanted nothing in return, all his hearers depart – except one, who ‘could never be a saint’ and decides to follow in his footsteps. So what do we have – a bland and impotent Devil, a totally gullible speaker of the poem, or both? Or something more subtle? Should we mistrust such voices and look for shrewd irony instead? It certainly sounds like it when ‘Slave’ presents us with one who has come to prefer his lack of liberty.

Several poems feature characters from myth and history, viewed with a contemporary slant. But as Carol Ann Duffy shows, the real art lies beyond easy humour, in making the stories of these ancient figures sharply relevant to present-day dilemmas.

There’s irony again in ‘Just Another Day in a Poet’s Study.’ The poet declares
   […] I must write about myself.
   In times like these, there can be no better subject
– only to face interruptions from Cupid, Homer and Dante, who fail to persuade him otherwise.

‘Omens’ tells how the ending of a relationship can transform trivial details of daily life into constant reminders of unhappiness. It makes one wish that Stuart Flynn had indeed written about himself more
often in this collection.
                                               Martin Blyth

Tadeus Pfeifer
The Basalt Womb, selected poems translated
by Pamela Hardyment and Vishnu Khare
Jay Landesman Ltd. £8.95.

I start from deep pessimism, knowing it is impossible to translate poems from one language into the mirror image of themselves in another. It’s an immeasurable tragic loss. For that reason, I am not deterred from trying myself; and I welcome the combined efforts of the German poet (born 1949) and his two translators, whose  impressive credentials are given on the inside cover, to see that we have an English version.

For the purposes of this review, I make it clear that I am reviewing the translations as poems and doing my best to ignore most aspects of the German text. This is not easy, because the texts face each other from opposite pages. But it’s better to leave pedantic quarrels on one side over the rendering of this or that, not least because the translators are clearly better qualified in the German language than I am.

The volume comprises 34 poems, two of which are much longer than the others and would alone make me recommend this book. Udayagiri, like several other poems, arises out of the complex impact of certain aspects of “India”, and Ode To Nothing is about learning to die, a Baudelaire-type encounter with a corpse and the death of the poet’s mother. Both these poems are written, and translated, very movingly in free verse, which works well in an English which reminds me of some of William Carlos Williams’s meditative poems.

I have mixed feelings about a number of the translations of the shorter poems. Some I like; some I do not. The reasons vary: an occasional awkward collision of the two (three?) cultures, the clear difficulty with some of shaping the English into an adequate similar form, the choice of English words, the sad loss of the richer, denser German sound patterns, occasionally the supply of what seems to be extra meaning to a good poem like Language Mine, in which the wind and rain are personified overtly, seemingly without justification. I have no information about the precise nature of the poet’s participation. Perhaps he was happy with the change. In adult English verse, we speak of “Mr Wind” and “Mr Rain” at our peril.

Others provide greater pleasure and spark admiration, so on balance I must express joy again that we have some of Tadeus Pfeifer’s
precise and controlled, but deeply felt, poems in our own language.
     But the dying of a mother is without time,
     the second of death not measurable by a
  clock,
     only a single tear flows
     out of the staring eye
      into the furrows of the wrinkled cheek.
                                              (Ode to Nothing)

                                                   R G Felton