DRAMATIC FICTIONS
Adrian Green
Blood in the Thistle Bowl by Rupert Mallin, Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH, £6.95. Perfect bound. 48pp. ISBN 0-946980-34-9. Alchemy of Passion by Steve Anderson, Big Bear Publications, 6 Ashbrook Crescent, Wardle, Rochdale, Lancs OL12 9AJ, (e-mail: rsvp@bigbear.u-net.com), £6.00. Perfect bound. 80pp. ISBN 1-900026-02-3.Of Sawn Grain (ed. Anne Cluysenaar), an anthology by The Collective Writers, Penlanlas Farm, Llantilio Pertholey, Y-Fenni, Gwent, NP7 7HN, (e-mail: AberColl@aol.com), £5.00. Perfect bound. 63pp. ISBN 1-899449-35-3.
Rupert Mallin has a sense of the dramatic and offers to engage the reader and critic a couple of times in this collection by saying he has been told his poetry is not ‘tight’ enough, as if inviting you to agree or disagree. To do so, however, would be to accept that the narrative voice of the poems is his, rather than that of a dramatic persona, and to further assess these poems as part of the 20th century tradition of lyrical observation. But it would not do justice to this collection which is more a development in the tradition of the Victorian dramatic monologue than of the 20th century lyric, for all its use of colloquial speech and contemporary reference. Carrying the sub-title ‘Letters to Heather/Letters out of prison’ there are 36 pieces, all addressed to Heather, and suffused with nostalgia, longing and a sense of the East Anglian countryside, but in a thoroughly modern idiom.
Providing you can suspend your disbelief, it doesn’t much matter as a reader whether Rupert Mallin’s protagonist is real or imagined, whether the prison is real or metaphorical, or whether Heather exists. Not so with Steve Anderson’s book. Alchemy of Passion is a collection of poems specifically located in the town and history of Knaresborough. It is annotated with footnotes of local historical reference and a bibliography of relevant reference material. Its local interest is obvious, but how well does it stand up as poetry? The answer is: surprisingly well. The observation is always acute, and the language rarely inappropriately archaic. The reader cannot help but be caught up in Steve Anderson’s love of Knaresborough and the story of Mother Shipton, the legend behind Knaresborough's major tourist attraction. Somehow, though, there is less of a sense of the author filtering through these avowedly factual local poems than through the dramatic fictions of Rupert Mallin.
Contrasted with the focus and cohesion of these books, Of Sawn Grain appears at first to be somewhat directionless and inconsequential, but this is probably unfair because it contains more good work than most collections drawn together from the work of 17 different writers. This collection bears the evidence of poems which have been carefully honed and worked on until they are ‘tight’ in a way which could not be used to describe Rupert Mallin’s work. It is a remarkable collection for a group production with no obviously weak contributors, and they appear to have achieved what so many writer’s groups are aiming for with compressed and crafted lyrics. Outstanding in this respect are John Jones, Paul Austin and Leslie Lambton. But somehow the collection has almost had the life crafted out of it in what might be described, lifting the phrase from Huw Jones’ poem Schizogenisis, as "shapes of softly rhythmic stillness."
Copyright © Adrian Green