Review of A Darker Way by Grahame Davies, pub. Seren 2024
And, yes, they did those murals. You can tell?
No, not to everybody’s taste, but then,
neither was flaking whitewash, come to that.
The voice in “Traveller” is surely that of a schoolteacher, but behind it I hear two Roberts: the ventriloquism of Browning and the seemingly ambling narratives, with pinpoint phrasing, of Frost. The latter also feels like the presiding genius in “Happy Larry":
one of those characters, born middle aged,
that never stray five miles from where they’re born,
and in “Colleagues” - “The irreplaceable is soon replaced”.
Quite a few of the poems in this collection were commissions, some for songs (indeed the collection’s subtitle is “Poems and Songs”), which may partly explain the prevalence of regular metre and rhyme. It opens, however, with two poems about losing the impulse to write poems, seemingly because of a more untroubled life - “peace makes no poems” (“Scar”). The second of these, “Farewell to poetry”, would in my view be outstanding were it not for that title. It is really about the waning of desire, any desire, and the image he coins for it, of planes coming in to land, is perfect:
They used to stack up,
waiting in the sky
a long perspective of receding lights
out of the blackness,
coming in to land.
Stare at the dark for long enough,
you’d find
a star detach itself and float to earth.
And always more to come.
But that was then
Tying it to one kind of desire, the urge to write, with that title not only looks unnecessarily histrionic but detracts from the universality of the powerful ending:
Without knowing why,
I find this better:
silence after sound,
and solitude after society,
simply to walk out on the empty field,
feeling the wind across the open land,
expecting nothing from the empty sky.
Davies uses both rhyme and metre most skilfully, but there’s no denying that to some eyes and ears, they may give poetry a formal feel in more than one sense, and some readers react against that. Personally I rather like the classical vibe of epigrams like “A Marriage” - the title is from an R S Thomas poem on the death of his wife, and this clearly alludes to it:
For thirty years she loved him, or she tried,
but what she gave him, without price or pride,
was just a hazel staff cut from a hedge
that at the journey’s end is set aside.
And being myself a fan of Frost, I find the echo of his wry elegance ideally suited to the description of a sort of informal poetry event (“Centenary Square, Birmingham”)
It seemed, I thought, a special ring of Hell,
reserved, perhaps, for those who’d used their wit
to hurt, not heal, and sentenced for all time,
to bawl banalities through broken mics
with no-one there to hear, no audience,
except unsympathetic passers-by
to witness that they had no audience.
Now and again, I think he could trust the reader more. I didn’t need the photos that accompany some poems, and there are a couple of poem endings that seem too keen to tidy things up and press home a point already made, particularly “Speedway Eddie”, where to my mind the ending
I’m not so sure. From what I’ve heard
he never was a racer, just a fan.
Maybe we need to think that tragedy
must be the only way to break a man
could do very well without the last two lines. The poems about loss of faith, a recurring theme in this collection, don’t suffer from this; their uncertainty seems to have defied tidying up and gives them a fruitful ambiguity.
Another recurring theme is the poet’s Welsh identity, and indeed some poems here were originally written in Welsh and are the poet’s own translations, he being one of those enviable souls who are truly bilingual. But the two poems “A Welsh Prayer” and “A Welsh Blessing” are, surely by design, anything but intrinsically Welsh; they could refer to absolutely any country and the message of both is “be ready /to answer for this corner of the earth”. Davies is not an overtly “ecological” poet, but behind most of what he writes is a sense of the spirit of his surroundings, an urge to find “a better way to share this land, this light”.