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John Welch began writing in 1957, so this volume contains
some fifty years' work. Welch's poetry is informed by Modernist and
postmodern concerns, with echoes of some of the other poets of his generation
- Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth, in particular - and a clear influence on a
generation of more linguistically innovative writers who have followed after
him. His landscape is mostly urban, planted up with laurel and lilac bushes;
shrubs that grow in suburban gardens and that will 'thrive in fumes of
traffic'. His poems are also inhabited by the ubiquitous buddleia, 'Seen from
the top of a bus / Where it flourished among the rubbish'. The landscape is
mostly, therefore, one of suburban and urban decay; scrubland; that 'inner
city mix / of quasi-pastoral and light industrial', characterised by:
Industrial
decline -
Its huge
and desolate machines.
The seeding rose bay willowherb
Along the embankment's
a cloud of silver
(from
'Five Preludes').
and signs of human habitation that include not only houses, parks and
gardens, but signs of our neglect as well:
A plastic bag
that will fade
Over months
of an urban summer
Whose nights
are a fabulous
Inheritance
of dew
(from
'Iris').
The urban is specifically recorded in the strong, longer poem 'Out', which
sits comfortably alongside Roy Fisher's City as one of the best poems of its type. Welch's subjects are not
exclusively urban, however, with a good number of coastal and estuarine
poems, as well as mountains and other natural landscapes.
There's a certain notational mode to the best of Welch's writing; direct,
accessible and enjoindering confidence:
A windy day,
the page was cleared,
I went out
walking,
A van was
parked by the boarded-up flats.
The radiant
blood of afternoon -
My mind
stretched out into its quiet,
Like signs
from nowhere birds descended
(from 'The
Roads').
These are often flaneur-like, observational poems:
Victoria
park,
Entering
there, as if on bloated wings.
Beyond the
railings
Deer nuzzle
crisp bags.
A stag is
losing its velvet.
Children with
ancient bodies strip and lunge
Into the
Union Canal.
It's nearly
dark now, drunken laughter
Floats over
the shrubbery
(from 'Fresco')
often with little gems of surprises hidden in Welch's terrific phrase making
and imagery: in one poem, four flat fish lie on a kitchen table 'gutted and
tidy like mittens'; in another, 'Someone's mother / Was bending down to say
hello like lilac. / On the wind's blunt knife our blossoms cooled' (from 'The
Drops of Wind'). It is through images and musical phrases such as these that
the poet feels joined 'to the things of the world'. Of course, the flip side
of feeling joined to things, is the fact that it is language - unreliable,
slippery, conditional language - that joins us in a poem: 'Language the snare',
as Welch writes. Lots of poets seem to find this relationship a problem,
pretending that the contingency of language somehow makes the world
unknowable (and, in their worst excesses, that it renders reality
nonexistent!). That's rubbish, and John Welch knows it is too: 'How long /
Can you hope to fend off meaning?' he asks. What is so strong in Welch's
treatment of reality is that he has such a strong feeling for the artfulness
of the poet's attempts to embody it - as Orpheus returns from the underworld,
Welch writes:
he looks
straight ahead, safe in the knowledge that he is
leading
someone, it is the Real that lives and breathes and
walks behind
him, and moves steadily towards the creation
of some final
meaning. But, should he look round, all he will
find in his
hands is this meaning clearly stated, which is to
say,
lifeless
(from 'The
Dreamer Restored').
In poetry, the Orphic tendency aims to name, to create, to sing the Real into
being, without enchaining it; without rendering it lifeless. For the most
part, I think Welch achieves this aim, negotiating that space 'Where language
came to collide with the world'.
There are also many poems here detailing domestic relationships ('an
institutional quiet, in which // Our lives are played'). In the poem 'Family'
the poet asks:
Whatever was
it, the meaning
Of all that
closeness, being at home together?
It's as if we
were not sure
Quite what to
do with it,
there was so
much that went without saying
And I still
find it hard to explain
the silences,
surrounding us
like pools of
dusty light.
whereas the estrangement and doubt of this poem is replaced by an estranged
tenderness in others:
After a week
of migraines, you are better you say,
Doped and
smiling, smelling of soap and tiredness.
The new sun
is a rose rooted in valium.
(from 'Treaty')
These are poems in which lovers, husbands, partners, friends are both
together and strangely apart: 'a telephone // Wakes, and our voices / Rub
together, like grasshoppers. / A rusty bird starts up' (from 'Voice'). These
relationships are often coupled to a language of quiet disruption, as in:
Meanwhile
turning another page
Indoors a
clock discreetly
Chimes, some
leaves
Blown inward
into the hall
Await the
little storm
Of our return
(from 'A
Walk in Winter'),
but they can equally be celebratory, as in the excellent poem 'Birth Right'
about the birth of a child, which encompasses location, history, the natural
world, the language of medicine, and the deeply personal, or the paired poems
in 'For the Births' which ends with the fabulous quatrain:
A mild rain
fell
Back on to
the exhausted streets, she lay
Her eyes feathered
with sleep
In the arms
of an explanation.
Welch does not shirk his responsibilities to take on big existential concerns
through his personal, quotidian observations of people and places. In
'Buddleia' he writes:
We take
refuge
In the
helplessness of being a spectator.
Rising on the
forgotten strata
Our art is
how to survive
Into the next
future,
the landscape
crackling beyond the mist
a metaphysical tendency in his work that is balanced by a nice wit: 'Today will
be new / And not in the old way either' (from 'Panels'). Welch also balances
a humanistic exuberance - 'And we will do wonderful things!' - with the
nostalgic sadness that can sometimes tinge a life:
The swifts a
long way up
are swimming
in a warm stream
of air and
insects
sometimes
descend
to garden and
house level
while down
here we hold
a vigil of
all the pieces, afraid
(from
'What He Said').
In such poems, Welch seems to hint that he conceives of consciousness as 'a
trick of the light'; something to which we can duly attend but, perhaps,
never fully understand or get a grip on:
His life? He
felt it was like
A novel of
which he had never
Read more
than the first few pages,
Such fullness
of expectation
Being caught
in the morning sunlight
And he could
never quite bear to read more.
it is still
there,
A book that
waits all night beside its owner
(from 'The Good
Things').
In a later poem in the book, we read some lines which, perhaps, encapsulate
the poet's lifetime ambition, to pay attention to the real world, but to
render it in words:
it is as if
I've moved
Among
discarded things
Growing into
the world
Taking so
many meanings into myself
[É]
the language a
calling to itself,
It brims its
depths
(from 'On
Orkney').
Attention is the poet's true task, as many writers have reminded us. John
Welch reinflects the notion, asking us, 'Is there a reward for all this watching?'
The reward is, of course, the attention itself; a 'seeing emptiness':
There cannot
in the end be any explanation for happiness.
Days of such
strong seeing, in the abrupt end-of-summer light,
irregular stain of love, and a brief smell of blood on the wind
(from 'Here').
As the poet notes in his excellent poem 'Out': 'It is hard to stay wordless.
/ Description, I'd say that it's like / Laying siege to an empty fortress'.
At times this Collected Poems
can feel a little like a fortress - it is very big at 451 pages! and, as with
any poet, and any Collected,
there is a certain amount of sifting and selecting that a reader will
inevitably have to do to find the real gems amongst the rest. With John
Welch, however, the task of scaling the fortress is definitely worth your
attention and effort - in this case it most definitely isn't empty.
© Andy Brown 2008
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