(This review first appeared in Poetry Wales 24.2 (1988) pp. 68-69.)
To the three sections of poems printed in his last Selected Poems (1975), Glyn Jones has added, for this handsome Poetry Wales Poets edition, a fourth – some forty pages of later work. Pre-eminent in length among these is "Prologue and Three Fragments", all that he appears to have completed of a poem in seven parts entitled "Seven Keys to Shaderdom". The fragments are presented as the poems of Shader Tom, "a painter, ex-and failed". Jones is himself a painter/poet, and this is not the first time he's made a painter/poet the central figure in one of his writings. (Shader Tom might be taken as an ageing counterpart to Trystan Morgan, the 'hero' of the novel The Valley, the City, the Village (1956). Shader Tom's style is in fact not distinguishable from Jones's, and Shader Tom's poems project the dilemma of the romantic artist/outsider. An observer frozen in and by the act of observation, he helplessly juxtaposes images of beauty and terror:
Beautiful the beeches' anger in autumn's burn.
Beautiful the loose mouth of the torn corn-poppy's scarlet,
The delicate dawn embrace of glittering night-spun webwork.
The landing-glide on cooling lakes of sea-duck.
Out of the golden block of uncut wheat thundered
Loud in sunlight blood of the trapped hare,
And the blood-soaked shadows rose, as the dead, the children,
Swarmed screaming across the shattered sunlight of every broken wall.
Shader Tom is an entirely logical development. Through him, Jones can present an objectivised version of himself. Tom's ecstatic epiphanies and intense despairs echo those of Jones's poetry at large. The passage I've quoted presents the reader with stasis rather than process, evocative statement rather than analytical investigation. Although images of natural beauty and human horror are set side by side, there's no tension between them. That this is so has much to do with the fact that Glyn Jones is a rhetorical poet. But The Valley, the City, the Village – despite its possession (foreshadowed in the title) of a formal structure that implies contrasts and comparisons – strikes me as no less static and tensionless: it’s the novel of a writer either lacking in or careless of the storyteller's art. I conclude, then, that the sensibility out of which Jones's writing comes isn't by nature analytic or exploratory; there may be a dialectic of a sort in such passages as the above, but this is verse that doesn't evolve anything from the oppositions it creates.
Jones seems from the first to have favoured a static rhetoric of celebration or elegy, a poetry of the lyric moment. Taking his cue from the highly-wrought Welsh tradition and the one great Victorian English-language poet who successfully anglicised elements of that tradition – Gerard Manley Hopkins (Hopkins's example again and again manifests itself in this book) – Jones's poetry continually declares the materiality of language. Language is for him a resistant stuff to be effortfully encountered rather than a transparent medium through which ideas flow and the reader may effortlessly move. Consider the crystalline opening of "Henffych, Dafydd":
Rain-bombed under bough, I crouch
By brown housebricks in ruins.
Jewels on gossamer, gems,
A spider's net-full, glazes
With glassy lace of diamonds
The ruin's smashed window-pane –
Sparkling sea-mist's insignia,
Rain's jewelry, encrusted brooch,
Lustre of fiery crystals
Glittering in first-water gems,
Brilliants minute as mousemilk,
Diamonds glowing in long rows.
This alliterative, heavily-stressed poetry is, as Hopkins's is, one of being rather than of becoming, a poetry in which the facets and edges of words coruscate with mind-light. There is no obvious reason why a halt should be called to it after twelve lines. It's rich fare, of course, and I find that after only a few such poems I'm glutted, ready to turn to writing of a more relaxed kind. In the fourth section of this Selected I tend to feel that Jones's style loses something of its freshness, that he gives way to the temptation to settle for a repetitious invoking of favourite words – like "beautiful" and "golden" – which he seems to feel will simply by their incantation produce the effect he wishes. For me, however, they fall prey to a poetical law of diminishing returns.
But it wouldn't do to suggest that Jones's poems offer only surface delights. There are poems with ponderable depths too. And it’s remarkable how often such poems take women as their subjects or (still more daringly) choose women to speak through. Jones is notable among male Anglo-Welsh poets for the empathy his work extends to feminine sensibilities. I still remember being knocked over more than a decade ago by the splendid "Profile of Rose". One line in particular lodged in my head – the witty, and arguable un-Joneslike
Charles's surface was very beautiful.
There again is that favourite epithet – but here doing an ironic job rather than simply expressing an enthusiasm. The shorter pieces "Esyllt" and "Marwnad" seem to me perfect of their kind, and in their restraint imply depths of unarticulated feeling that for me (hwyl-resistant Englishman that I am) make the writing more resonant than that in later poems like "Spring Bush" and "Envoi", which seek to compel a response, and where feeling is equivalent to an insistent rhetoric. Here is the wonderfully poised and poignant last stanza of "Esyllt":
Why have I often wanted to cry out
More against his going when he has left my flesh
Only for the night? When he has gone out
Hot from my mother's kitchen, and my combs
Were on the table under the lamp, and the wind
Was banging the doors of the shed in the yard.
Those unassuming familiar combs are surely worth their weight in gold.
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