Bob Mee
Review:
The Never-Never - Kathryn Gray
Seren, Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales CF31 3BN 64 pages £7.99
Kathryn Gray is a writer of great promise whose talent was marked out by an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Douglas Dunn likes what she does and has put his name to the back cover, too. I think she’s intriguing. There are images are of small town Britain, of the social nihilism of those who steal cars (The Joyrider) of the ignorance of communal heritage ( Bethesda ) of the sudden memory of a childhood incident when a swear-word produced the violence of having one’s mouth washed out with soap (Guilt). Unlike Polley, there is a width to what she does, a modesty in her willingness to experiment with the sound of the spoken word, as in the dramatic and purposeful use of the stammer in History 1984, an otherwise straightforward memory of school: and Anne-Marie stammers the length of the line/ A m-man p-possibly a v-v-victim of so-som-me c-crime,/ and the words are wet fl ecks of peat as picked off/ by the gloved and studied hands of archaeologists... I like the range of the book, its uneven journey through a making past, ending with an ironic poem called The Prodigal: My friends, we came to put this town in its place,/ to leave the hard-faced/ local hills to blunt the sun and render their rain/ We are above any blame. Inevitably, there are some pieces that don’t work as well. The caricaturing of a heritage - in her case her Welshness, with its pit-villages and women supposedly breeding men to be like their fathers, do what their fathers do - is weaker. I felt, for example, The Cwtch, in spite of its interesting title, should have been left out. However, I don’t want to nit-pick when there is so much to enjoy here.
Kathryn Gray is a writer of great promise whose talent was marked out by an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Douglas Dunn likes what she does and has put his name to the back cover, too. I think she’s intriguing. There are images are of small town Britain, of the social nihilism of those who steal cars (The Joyrider) of the ignorance of communal heritage ( Bethesda ) of the sudden memory of a childhood incident when a swear-word produced the violence of having one’s mouth washed out with soap (Guilt). Unlike Polley, there is a width to what she does, a modesty in her willingness to experiment with the sound of the spoken word, as in the dramatic and purposeful use of the stammer in History 1984, an otherwise straightforward memory of school: and Anne-Marie stammers the length of the line/ A m-man p-possibly a v-v-victim of so-som-me c-crime,/ and the words are wet fl ecks of peat as picked off/ by the gloved and studied hands of archaeologists... I like the range of the book, its uneven journey through a making past, ending with an ironic poem called The Prodigal: My friends, we came to put this town in its place,/ to leave the hard-faced/ local hills to blunt the sun and render their rain/ We are above any blame. Inevitably, there are some pieces that don’t work as well. The caricaturing of a heritage - in her case her Welshness, with its pit-villages and women supposedly breeding men to be like their fathers, do what their fathers do - is weaker. I felt, for example, The Cwtch, in spite of its interesting title, should have been left out. However, I don’t want to nit-pick when there is so much to enjoy here.
Page(s) 54-55
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