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I've not read any new poetry by Bill Lewis for some years
and I was really pleased on approaching this recent collection of work to
realise that he's 'still got it'. His deep interest in Latin America is now
combined with a more international perspective and his poetry, while
influenced by magic realism, retains a sharp analytic strain which works well
with a more creative approach which is playful and imaginative. If some of
the raw energy and anger in his early work has been stripped away there's
still great inventiveness in
this material, aided by a sense of maturity which nevertheless retains a
sense of fun.
Take the following poem, for example, which is short enough to quote in full:
The
Futurists
A mob of
modernists
Manic for
movement
And
Movements;
Makers of so
many
Mad
manifestos;
Loco over
locomotion:
Railway
tracks
Bursting from
their
Ribs,
revealing a lack
Of heart in
their art.
Lusting after
one
Idiot
ideology
After
another:
Following red
flags
Liked doomed
bulls,
Then falling
for
Fascist
falsehoods.
Hating beauty
but
Making
beautiful art
By default.
When I look
at those
Paintings
it's like
Hearing a
tune I love
With lyrics I
detest.
It's a neat poem which expresses a viewpoint in witty language which is both
clear and energetic, suggesting a lot more than you would think could be
expressed in so few words. It's also a political poem which has emotional
underpinnings and which while creating an aesthetic experience for an engaged
reader, makes you think as well as feel.
In 'Rabbi' (for Leonard Cohen), he encapsulates the dialectic
in Cohen's work with an impressive brevity which finishes with the following
couplet: 'So secular in its nature that / it is holier than any hymn'. His
interest in various artforms - painting, film and music, for example -
provides fuel for his poetry, as does an interest in dreams and the surreal:
And still I
tried
To dial your
number,
But got
instead
Strange
voices telling
Me weather
forecasts
And cryptic
messages
Like those
sent to the
French
Resistance
Or from
Death's car radio
in Cocteau's
Orphee.
(from
'Dream Job')
Lewis' poetry is largely an affirmation, a secular hymn to 'the spiritual',
filled with intriguing contradiction, unusual imagery and fuelled by a
rhythmic surge which is often intense, sometimes gentle, always witty yet
open to the world in all its outrageous complexity. He's a political writer
too, something which is not always recognised and this is important because
in a world where the gap between rich and poor is ever more apparent I often
wonder about the value of art which fails to question the purely aesthetic.
His work doesn't fit into any of the norms of what we might call the British
Poetry Scene, partly because his heart is elsewhere and more international
but also perhaps because of a certain strangeness in his phrasing and the
breadth of his influence. The energy is still apparent:
Managua,
Green by
default,
Has no centre
but
Many hearts;
I remember
All those
red & black valentines.
New York
fills
Me up like
forty
Cups of good
Strong coffee
and
Shoves a
paintbrush into
My impatient
hand.
(from 'Cities')
There's a quotation from Lewis in the introduction to In the House of
Ladders which goes thus: ÒWe were against art as an exercise
in formulism. We believed that authenticity was more important than
originality.Ó I want to argue with that apparent dialectic, partly perhaps
because I'm feeling argumentative but hopefully also because I think matters
are more complex than this suggests. In any case the use of the word
'authentic' in discussions about art is a loaded term which obfuscates more
than it helps to explain and I'd probably want to replace the word
'formulism' with 'formalism' but you get the picture. That said, as I hope
I've made clear in the above, I think Bill Lewis' poetry is of a very high
standard and he's certainly the most interesting poet to have come out of the
Medway scene. He's not a bad painter, either. The cover artwork is a rich mix
of colour, texture, shape and typography and the book is illustrated
throughout by Lewis' black and white woodcut-style images. I thoroughly
enjoyed reading and re-reading this book and hope you will too.
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You could say that Jay Ramsay's new collection from Knives
Forks and Spoons press is a mix of travelogue and commentary on Heraclitus'
paradoxical fragments. The first eighteen pieces - poems and short prose -
are each prefaced by a fragment which is then 'responded to' in the here and
now, based on a recent journey to Greece and the cyclades. So we get the
following, by way of example:
16. The oracle at Delphi neither hides or states,
but gives signs
And not the
signs you'd expect. The joy of standing on the
threshold of
a Doric temple high in the sun, like a memory.
A young cat's
mesmeric eyes gazing up under you in a
taverna of
dark blue chairs and tables. The black iconic
face of
Christ in an annexe chapel in the new monastery
that's like
an embassy. A lovely young woman with long
ringlets of
hair, in a schoolgirl check dress, riding a scooter
away into the
light. And you txt: you have found your
keypad voice
again, and you are ready to speak.
(from
'Heraclitus')
I can remember going to Delphi, many, many years ago, loaded with cultural
expectation, entranced at being in a new country and somewhat overwhelmed by
the heat which was drier than in England. Yet this was the long hot summer of
'73 and I'd just spent six weeks working in a factory to get the money
together to have a holiday, an adventure. Ramsay's reflections here are more
concerned with a mixing of the moment and what Roselle Angwin has called 'the
enduring', a philosophical/spiritual investigation which experiences the
'here and now' in a wider framework. Here we come to what I'll have to call a
problem of interpretation because although Ramsay is coming from somewhere
different to me in terms of 'belief', perhaps, I have to say that he's superb
in capturing those transient moments which often relate to an 'inarticulate
longing' which I can certainly respond to. Take these stanzas from 'Burning',
for example:
Tonight I am
in solidarity
with all
those who long
who cannot
appease their longing
and who sit
up late with their drink or song
wild-eyed and
waiting
for a
deliverance that never comes.
It is the
music, our music
that lingers
on
our fading
coal
in our
heart's flowering
that becomes
everyone.
There's a concern in his poetry to find a redemption within the human
condition, to suggest something more eternal which provides consolation and
while I have some difficulty with this in the abstract I also find Ramsay
convincing when he reads his work aloud. His quiet voice (both on the page
and at a reading) may lack the dramatic dialectical impact of an earlier poet
like Donne (wrestling with the secular and the sublime) but it's an
encouraging sound which soothes and perhaps occasionally cajoles in a
convincing manner:
And then the
sea is like the wind through corn or wheat,
waving as it
carves its mazy path, swept like hair from
side to side
careless of separation because it is all to phos,
one light.
(from
'Helios')
I can hear his voice as I read those lines. It's a long time since I've been
in Greece and I think I need to go back.
© Steve Spence 2014
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