Reviews
J.P. Ward
J. P. Ward: To Get Clear; Poetry Wales Press, £2.95.
J. P. Ward: Things; Bran's Head Books, 95p.
It takes time to get comfortable with J.P. Ward's poetry. Some of it is actually difficult to read, and much of it is difficult to judge quickly. To Get Clear is an important publication for the Anglo-Welsh audience, but it will not establish a satisfactory relationship immediately, and readers approaching for the first time may be deterred from making the necessary effort.
The obvious problem is a deliberate oddness of expression, demonstrated, for instance, in the poem 'Christmas Day':
Two seldom more
Frosts in this glen and temperate
Each year exceptions none;
I assume that winter in the neighbourhood seldom (and without exception?) provides more than two frosts, and I wonder why Mr Ward couldn't say it more simply. I wish it were an uncharacteristic lapse, but I see the same stanza offering this untidy bundle of inscrutable metaphor:
No month, no week one can presume
To live, less still foresee such late
Gift tabula rasa like this crumb
Of cut-loaf sparrows might expect,
Sensible punctuation would help, but this is not efficient writing. It is a tortuous eccentricity, creating unnecessary difficulties, making poetry a struggle, like solving a crossword puzzle, as though the author were worried that simple clarity is not sufficiently poetic. One wonders whether it is worth the bother. Does he know what he means? Is what he means interesting anyway? I read:
Wet maps our guttered house, our boys,
It sweeps the home-made paths, deploys
Grit sand and mud and is my wife.
I need her candid destinies
Enchancing me with dripping guile.
Bold experiment? I admit defeat. I read:
Orion's elbow dents a hill.
I object. I don't see how it could. But now I am simply looking for blunders. I read:
White doves assembled arduously
Sweep to a gravel turn
And dove-cote clearing at her calling them.
Flight unexpectedly in air
Arriving in the grain's path-making there.
I find this construction a little bizarre, but reading onwards I find myself touched, impressed, finally moved. At the end of 'The Fan-Tails':
As though by bargaining, a void is left.
Or as from work we snare that shattered blank.
No epitaph tires that gravestone.
No prolix line recalls her.
Whiter than sky the fan-tails come.
It will clearly not do to suggest that our author should simply be less enterprising, and I wonder if my objections were hasty and superficial. But I still feel that he produces his most satisfying work when he is most direct. In 'Chess':
The woodmen step and drill across the board
In rows of cautiousness.
I love this world
Of formal thought and fireside and pearled
Rook-battlements...
An elegant, crafted speech, simple and satisfying. 'Here, Home' is equally pleasing, its wit arising out of authorial perspective rather than extravagant metaphor. The narrator returns home late at night, and wanders about the sleeping house, eventually reaching his wife:
and by her, in the double bed,
was a space, the shape and size of a man,
into which I climbed, fitting it, exactly,
and lay half-asleep, templating it, or would
seem so, to a further fox or man who arrived.
This is an example of the prosaic speech that mixes with solid sonnets and robustly rhythmic stanzas throughout the collection. Formally, Mr Ward inhabits various houses. Does his shifting suggest an uncertainty of intention? Perhaps. But there is also a consistent seriousness. 'The Party' might not be much more than a list of foodstuffs, but it holds the attention:
...and there were three red
tulips actually, at the slab's edge, and
I made this into a poem, for poetry is
a necessity, as is food.
And, yes, he is a worthwhile poet. Eventually we find ourselves at ease with the particular individual behind the voices. ‘Although', as the publisher tells us, 'the poems follow many paths, literal and metaphysical, they constantly return to their source in the poet's family and family home on Gower.' We are invited to enter the civilized world of a thoughtful middle-ageing middle-class family man. It is a world of comparative ease, written out of leisure rather than work, and concerned with modes of relaxation; travelling, enjoying hobbies, sitting about admiring landscapes. Poetry may be a necessity, but it is experienced as a luxury, amidst other luxuries, demanding unhurried reading if its qualities are to be recognised. It is a poetry that avoids the city, and ignores the workplace, and does not concern itself with urgent public issues. The political world is scarcely more than a brief unwelcome intrusion over the radio. It is thus limited, but no more than most worlds, and it is grasped firmly, given flesh by its author's eye for the pertinent detail, and granted atmosphere through his sense of wonder. Mr Ward likes to show himself as the lone observer, musing quietly in the midst of some astonishing landscape. The common teeters on the edge of magic, another sort of oddness, but satisfying:
...he
flicked his rod, from behind him,
and it went up, and the apex of
its cast, touched the North Star,
then fell, past Sirius, past the
meeting of black sky and hills,
sliced into two a farmhouse and
its milking sheds, sliced down
through clumps of deciduous trees
and oaks, and a stone well, into
the lake,
He takes delight in such lists, in recording the barely perceptible facts that illuminate experience. He seems entirely satisfied with nature, loving it in calm or in storm, and needing only to encompass it in language. He often succeeds. This reader, at least, .has found his images lingering in the back of the mind, and reappearing unexpectedly, providing a continuing pleasure.
Things provides an interesting supplement to the main volume. Familiar subjects (bees, chess, food, the children, etc) all reappear, elaborating on partners in the major collection. It's a prettily produced booklet, essential for collectors chasing a complete collection of Ward-works, and likely to be welcomed by most readers who value Anglo-Welsh poetry.
Page(s) 81-84
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The