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.
