(This book review first appeared in PN Review 35 (1983) pp.78-79.)
Robert Minhinnick and Mike Jenkins belong to the youngest generation of Welsh poets writing in English who may be said to have established themselves in their native country. Minhinnick was born in Neath in 1952 and lives now in Porthcawl. Jenkins was born in Aberystwyth in 1953 and lives now in Merthyr Tydfil. Each is married and has a daughter. Each has now published three collections of poetry.
Their poems possess common factors. Both write much out of personal experience: both include, for example, poems on the births of their children in their books. Both find themselves drawn to the poem-portrait; both are natural elegists. Both explore natural landscapes which, though urbanized and industrialized, still offer the inspirations of wild nature.
Robert Minhinnick at his best renders physical events and objects with a vibrant immediacy:
So the martins soar from their high coign
And go voiceless through the air: ivy
Coils around the stone, brilliant, serpentine.
He is fascinated by regions in which the human and the inhuman touch, in which the mechanical intrudes upon, and may achieve unexpected relationships with, the natural:
Behind me it continued, the chain-saw
Motor thrumming like the black and pendulant
Bell of bees I discovered in this wood,
The voice of the swarm reaching to the pitch
Of some unguessable climax, and Reilly
At its mute centre, absolved again by work.
The observed present and the memoried or imagined past also touch in his poems: "The Boathouse" achieves a haunting, dreamlike moment of suspension:
Suddenly everyone
Had fallen asleep – nurserymen,
Chauffeurs, kitchenmaids – the hour
Went unstruck. There was nothing
But silence and the soft putrescence
Of the boathouse, the shoals of ochre
Mud where the water stood.
It's as if the poet has slipped through a hole in the fabric of time.
On the debit side of the critical balance, I feel that Minhinnick's poems lack tonal variety; that in some of them the relation between description and generalisation is unsure; while a number of poems in which rhymed forms shift unsatisfactorily into free verse look insufficiently worked on.
Ugliness and violence, which co-exist uneasily in Minhinnick's poems with their opposites, tend, though present in Mike Jenkins's poems, to be defused by the instinctive vitalities of his way of seeing. He's by temperament a celebratory poet; even his elegies are affirmative. He's a spontaneous maker of similes:
I was woken by the bells
at 5 a. m., dreams scattered
into the sudden dawn;
covered by the white sheets
of Dominican robes,
I felt the whole town
swing like a thurible.
Of the Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams, a memorable lecturer, he writes:
Sometimes his words would explode
as he stammered, but eloquence returned
spinning like a pit-wheel.
But when this highly metaphorical style is employed for darker subjects, it can be, for me, incongruously whimsical: in an elegy for his grandmother, for example, he writes: "The mice stole into her ears / at night, and nibbled away at her brain", and "In nightmares I'd strangle / a hen clucking like her dentures clicking". Determinedly objective stuff perhaps, but even in context these images seem miscalculated.
Jenkins articulates subjects rather than themes. His poems end when they've exhausted their observed, sometimes remembered material. Reading through this book, I was conscious rather of what the poet had experienced than of what he thought about his experience. But there are poems towards the book's end in which he's more reflective. His best poem, "I", is thematic, it orders experience:
I is the biggest word
in the English language –
some people yawn bored
as soon as you mention it.
I know people who erect crosses
made from it
and then refuse to carry them.
I know people who build extensions
onto it and call
those extensions their children.
And so on, wittily, for another five verses. Here the poet's mind isn’t simply a medium for language to pass unhindered through, but an agent that imposes intellectual form upon it.
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