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I’m sure
you’ve read all those news stories about schoolchildren answering GCSE
exam questions in txtspk (that’s ‘text speak’ for the
uninitiated)… Well it’s hardly surprising; we’re surrounded by
billboards, print and television advertising that encourages concision
above all else. Because words cost money. Which I’m not against per
se – wasn’t it Ezra Pound who said, ‘Poetry is a language
pared down to its essentials’?
It’s always
exciting to come into contact with new work by younger writers and I now
find myself in possession of two books that answer all those news
stories, displaying not only economy of expression but also great
lyrical flair and emotional integrity.
Both poets currently
live in London, but the first was born in Nigeria and educated in Dublin
before arriving in the big smoke. Inua Ellams’ Thirteen
Fairy Negro Tales (Mouthmark, 2005, £4) is a slim but handsome
book; the cover, designed by the author, an energetic mêleé of images
– from turntables to skyscrapers. Which is a pretty good description
of the contents. With his transnational background, Ellams’ is a
bustling, inclusive vision of the world. Icons of black consciousness
(Ghandi, Martin Luther King) and popular culture (‘Tupac, Biggie and
Jim Morrison) mingle with Heaney, Beethoven and more Biblical characters
than you can shake a stick at.
The influence of the
Ginsberg school of oratory is apparent in the pacing of lines,
breathless rhythms and constant barrage of imagery. There is also
Ginsberg’s concern for the marginalised of society and his desire for
mystical elevation through and beyond the mundane.
‘I HAVE
SEEN GOD!
she was disguised as Shawana
a single mother. She rocks two jobs
three kids, two cars and
gives change to homeless
others. She can go from corporate to ghetto
she rocks red stilletos with earth brown badus
and has cowry shells laced
to her laptop carry-case.’
(‘The One About God’)
As the title indicates, this is a collection of poems as fairy tales,
and a kind of deliberate naivety is ever present. It’s the stuff of
teenage introspection, the stuff that gets most people hooked on poetry
in the first place: young love, starry nights and so on. But Ellams is
perfectly in control here. His twenty-one years know the difference
between fiction and reality.
‘I cowered
beneath the defunct light
and attempted to bend Saturn's rings
around my mind.
[…]
But I realised it was just beer and wine.’
(‘Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales’)
Ellams has a powerful
voice but one capable of, if not accomplished at, dramatic irony. The
weakest points in the book occur where there is no ironic conflict to
rein in his impulse for passionate but unchallenging rhetoric, the kind
of self-confident posturing of the rapper or performance poet; indeed,
Ellams lists his influences as Keats, Shakespeare and hip-hop. So,
assurances to ‘pose and prose and speak word’ or ‘[wield] my vocal
sword’s echo’ (‘Babylon Battle Babble’) fall slightly flat on
the page.
This aside, Thirteen
Fairy Negro Tales is a must-read for anyone interested in future
developments in English poetry. Inua Ellams is a talented writer and
performer with an eye for detail and an ear for the melodic, percussive
and dissonant effects of language, as these exhilarating lines
demonstrate:
‘We played like a dead French kiss reincarnated
as a saxophone
with tendencies to hiss
galaxophonic secrets through the tombs of
trombone
reborn as the
lower bones of Bojangles, dancing
on base drums prancing like songs of the
railroad
set
free…’
(‘Midnight Music Marauders’)
Whilst Ellams’ work
relies on the pace and effervescence of his thoughts, sparseness and
restraint mark a new book of poetry by Dorset native James Wilkes. ex chaos (Renscombe Press, 2006, £12) comprises eight poems by
James Wilkes based on Japanese creation myths, accompanied by eight
abstract paintings by Lynne Wilkes, his mother. Wilkes has drawn on both
Japanese literature (remember, this is the land of the haiku) and
Modernist poetics to create an engaging, elegant and economic poetry.
You can see the influence of Dada in his use of found text and collage
techniques, and of Pound and Bunting in his precise, concentrated
language. This is reflective poetry, informed by Eastern traditions of
intellectual abstraction, but this doesn’t prevent its reek of the
fields, mountains and ‘sea spray’ of an island nation. In one of his
strongest poems, ‘From the Floating Bridge’, Wilkes moves
effortlessly from the delicate – ‘A drift land /adrifting on the
endless’ – to the visceral:
‘to beat waters,
to their curdling thickening, KOWORO
unpacking of
tightly ravelled matter, KOWORO the piling of brine
meringue in
beauty the first land’
Throughout ex
chaos Japanese names and places are dropped into the poetry; and not
merely for the effect of their unfamiliarity on the English eye and ear.
As Wilkes explains in his useful notes, ‘Japanese has a class of
sound-symbolic words that systematically assign connotational values to
certain phonemes’. It’s that point of convergence between sound and
sense that all good poets aim for. Wilkes is concerned in this book with
language not merely as an imperfect system of representation, but as a
means of getting to the heart of the matter. He undertakes this through
rhythmic incantation, carefully observed descriptive poetry and
injections of direct speech.
This sort of
objective, self-critical poetry will suit some readers’ tastes but not
all, and Wilkes is equally comfortable in first-person mode. The world
– or world-to-be – he invokes may be all bleak, wind-swept
landscapes, but it is peopled. One of the most startling poems, ‘Anecdote’, starts
with what Wilkes describes as ‘an inaccurate retelling in prose of [a
poem] by Nishiwaki Junzaburō’. The poet spent a year living in
the village of Junzaburō’s birth and this has clearly informed
his sensitive interpretation. This is the opening line, beautiful in its
simplicity:
‘I was sheltering in the lee of a farmhouse from the rain and
I noticed
a bush with red berries.’
This is followed by a
mysterious encounter with the woman whose farmhouse he’s sheltering
in; it’s like something out of a Raymond Carver story, ending with the
line ‘I felt so near, yet at the same time, so distant’. Wilkes then
switches his approach with a list of place-names and brief descriptions
sourced from the Glossary of Carter’s Traditional
Japanese Poetry, and finally a line from Basho.
‘on Ina Moor,
famous for its fields of dwarf bamboo;
on Iwase Moor, precise location unknown;
on Mika Moor, an area in Sōraku-gun,
Kyōto…’
This is a brilliant
example of a collage poem, because you need the poet’s notes to know
it’s a collage at all. The integration is effortless in what becomes a
moving meditation on the theme of physical and spiritual exile. And
despite the apparent impersonality of the collage technique, the poem
brilliantly conveys Wilkes’ own sense of being, as an outsider, ‘so
near, yet at the same time, so distant’.
These are remarkable
debuts by writers in their early and mid- twenties that disprove the
claim (and I’ve heard this said on several occasions) that poets only
get into their stride in their forties and fifties. It’s significant
that neither has won the Foyle Young Poets or Eric Gregory awards (two
of the very few sources of new talent exploited by major publishers),
although Wilkes has been through the famed Creative Writing MA at UEA.
My guess is that we’ll be hearing a lot more from these two. So go,
buy their books before they sell out. Oh, and before you open the
covers… make sure you switch your mobile to silent.
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