Wynn Wheldon
Monday, 22 February 2021
Wednesday, 17 February 2021
Tuesday, 16 February 2021
PANCAKE DAY - CIVIL COMMOTION from John Taylor's 'Jack A Lent'
Moreover, it is a goodly sight to see how the
cooks in great men's kitchens, do fry in their master's suet, and sweat in her own grease, that if ever a cook be worth the eating it is when Shrove- Tuesday is in town, for he is so stewed and larded, roasted, basted, and almost over-roasted, that a man may eat the rawest bit of him and never take a surfeit. In a word, they are that day extreme choleric, and too hot for any man to meddle with being monarchs of the marrow-bones, marquesses of the mutton, lords high regents of the spit and the kettle, barons of the gridiron, and sole commanders of the frying- pan, and all this hurly-burly, is for no other purpose but to stop the mouth of this land- wheel Shrove- Tuesday. At whose entrance in the morning all the whole kingdom is in quiet, but by that time the clock strikes eleven, which (by the help of a knavish sexton) is commonly before nine, then there is a bell rung, called the pancake bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetful either of manner or humanity : Then there is a thing called wheaten flour, which the sulphery necromatic cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical enchantments, and then they put it by little and little into a frying-pan of boiling suet, where it makes a confused dismal hissing like the Lernean snakes in the reeds of Acheron, Styx or Phlegethon) until at last by the skill of the cook, it is transformed into the form of a flap-jack, which in our translation is called a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people do devour very greedily (having for the most part well dined before :) but they have no sooner swallowed that sweet candied bait, but straight their wits for- sake them, and they run stark mad, assembling in routs and throngs numberless of ungoverned numbers, with uncivil civil commotions.
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
THE DEVIL'S TATTOO by Brett Evans
My review of this pamphlet, from 2017, for Ink, Sweat and Tears, is no longer available online, so I'm re-posting it here.
The Devil’s Tattoo
by Brett Evans
(publisher: Indigo Dreams)
Reviewed by Wynn Wheldon
It is hard to escape the feeling that Brett Evans – or, at
least, the poet Brett Evans, if you will accept the delicate distinction - was
born in the wrong place at the wrong time, or perhaps in the right place at the
right time with the wrong constitution.
He is, properly speaking, a blues singer, part Delta, part Chicago, who
has found himself instead a “fat, pink alkie” in a small town in North Wales at
the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As he says in the same poem (‘Reading Sean O’Brien in the Bath’),
“something is amiss”.
This short
collection is very much of a piece, the themes pulled “over troublesome stones”
through it, like the Gele river itself: myth, Wales, pubs and drink, jazz,
religion, poetry, and desire. And perhaps
the displacement is perhaps not so great, perhaps he’s a Celt from across the
sea, and should have been a Dubliner.
His tipple after all is stout (even in his erotic fantasies he lathers
his lover’s hair “to a Guinness foam”). One
way or another these poems are written from the Celtic twilight.
The
melancholic confessional is a hard thing to pull off without self-pity, but
there’s none of that here. The
collection’s first poem, ‘Marshes’ starts in childhood – “we swashbuckled
summers across the weir” – and powerful fantasy, and ends in two connected
sadnesses which can never be erased: the defeat of Wales and the realisation
that “we’re who we are” – an end to childhood.
Dreams and
fantasy fuel much of Evans’s poetry, the paradox being that they earth him in
the single place he writes from. He
dreams of being in bed with the great blues “moaner” Ma Rainey; he rides “on
the trail of the buffalo” with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; he is an extra in a
Spaghetti western “with an unforgettable score”. He dreams simply “of a song”.
Do you notice?
Music is a constant – the devil’s tattoo. Most of the drunks are singing
(usually “A lament for, and from, the anonymous”), Ma Rainey is singing Jelly Bean Blues, Coltrane’s sax is here
beautifully kissing the breeze, Armstrong’s doing over ‘Stardust’, even a scarecrow sways like “a
metronome to an orchestra / of gale and sleet”.
Like the
dreams of music, the myths of Wales, and the “ugly, lovely children’s world”,
desire too keeps the poet busy. The
barmaids “come and go” (probably not talking of Michelangelo), and he dreams of
pampering them all. Or, peering from a pub window in the touching ‘Not Raglan
Road’, he watches a woman in suede boots: “There is only her moving through
this world”. The poet imagines “a
handful / of raindrops may just find their resting place / in her hair”. This image, almost clumsily described – “may
just” is perfectly awkward – is delicately erotic. As is also the “fantasized
unclothing” of the sycamore stem in ‘Carving a Lovespoon’. ‘Positions in Bed’ contains
not only “an imagined lover” but also “dream pubs”.
My favourite
poem, and one I think would do well in schools (that sounds faintly praising
but is not at all meant to), stands a little apart from the rest of the
collection. It is not confessional, and
yet, insofar as Evans does come close to self-pity it may be the most
confessional of them all. It is called
‘Scarecrow’. There is explicit analogy
with the crucified Christ – “arms outstretched, forsaken, / he wears his
unkempt crown”, and later “This son of Man // is blind to purpose, rooted in
solitude” – but here there is no redemption.
The suggestion is of a godless world, and God does pop up more
frequently in these poems than one at first notices. How could he not, given the presence of the blues,
of Guinness, of Wales? But he’s here in
passing, in ghostly form. The devil is much more real. There is, in ‘Anticipating Pints of Stout’ a
marvellous description of the drink lined up on a bar: “a lechery / of
pint-sized priests to knock back without repentance”. Drink, not religion, brings salvation.
The collection
ends as it began, in childhood, or rather in the memory of childhood, and
reflections on the present:
I haunt our stomping grounds, my shadow striding
out before me: a giant ghost, coat flapping in the wind.
And the water before the weir forever lapping at the child.
Do we have a
word for nostalgia without the fleck of sentimentality that makes nostalgia
kitsch? The Welsh word hiraeth is
often translated as homesickness, but it may also denote a longing for the
past. Might it do to describe the spirit
of these lines? I don’t know. I am not a Welsh-speaker, but maybe.
The devil’s tattoo drums through
all our lives, and the poet’s desire that “the familiar must become the
unfamiliar” – which I take to be one of the things poetry does - is what defies that beat and makes the real
tolerable. Sean O’Brien and Dylan Thomas
are both presences here, both poets capable of seeing wonder in the
quotidian. It is an ability, a tendency,
that Brett Evans aspires to, and often achieves, in this short, punchy,
thoroughly engaging and coherent pamphlet.
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
Tuesday, 5 January 2021
Monday, 4 January 2021
From'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice takes on a persona in the first part of 'Autumn Journal'.
Wednesday, 30 December 2020
Friday, 4 December 2020
Friday, 27 November 2020
Matilda Box
Searching for for my great grandmother, Matilda Box, I came across this one, whom I suppose may have been one of my 32 great great great grandparents. If so, thank you Mr Broderip
Wednesday, 18 November 2020
A MONTH IN SIENA by Hisham Matar
This is a remarkable, contemplative book. After finishing 'The Return', a book in which Matar returns to the land of his childhood, Libya, seeking, unsuccessfully, his father's fate at the hands of Gadaffi, the author goes to stay in Siena for a month to look at the city's art, which he has been longing to do for many years. He meets the city, he meets one or two of its people, and he looks at paintings for a long time. His look is not, however, strictly aesthetic, but rather that of a storyteller. His description of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's 'Madonna del latte' is a short classic of interpretation. As I read this book I found myself imagining I was inside a poem. Highly recommended.