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Lyrics about roses and moonlight, a love of fancy vocabulary (sapid, graptolites, tenacula), more semi-colons than you'd find in a Henry James novel, a fearless use of adjectives that reaches its climax in the sheer gall of 'these foreign familiar ineffable transcendent seas' . . . Don Rodgers's poetry ought to be terrible. In fact, his exploration of the domestic sublime is wittily ironic. Reading the first poem in this book, 'Suburban Heat Wave', with its ponderous opening, 'A torpid underbelly undulating;' and stately personifications ('where once / pale forms of cooler evenings strolled'), I found myself reaching for a favourite postmodern critical term that one doesn't often associate with poetry, 'retro'. And indeed the knowing adoption of a period voice, all nuanced sensibility and heavyweight diction, is one of his specialities. In 'Available Light', for example, the poet conducts a deliberately artificial dialogue, against a background of conventional twilight: '"Yes," you agree, / "its indeterminate greys are / lovely in this kind of light."'
At times the wordplay gets a little tiresome, as in 'Corsage', where his wife's French joke ('Mon corps sage te plaît?') doesn't really merit the laborious translation into English, let alone a whole poem to itself. But Rodgers's search for unusual approaches to his subjects is refreshing. 'Missing the Bridge' uses obsessive repetition to convey the difficulty of matching our internal maps against the realities of landscape. His formal experiments with prose poetry and sequences of haiku-like poems allow him to balance his playfulness with a genuine lyrical sensitivity. And in the title poem, above all, his quirky view of the world reveals its intellectual ambition. Do we, he wonders, inhabit a universe or a multiverse? The theme is Blakean, the poem a series of variations on the idea of seeing a world in a grain of sand. A blood stain on a table-top, the bubbles in a glass of water, the surface of a tub of margarine 'artexed after the knife' – each in turn unveils its potential for disorientating complexity. Even here, though, the tone remains self-mocking, as the poet is plunged into confusion by the flick of a switch: 'Fingers tripped, tongues / stumbled over chairs like koans. / Then light. A hand burst into applause.'
Considering so much contemporary poetry is a painstaking chronicle of everyday life in the plainest of language, a poet as distinctive (sapid?) as this deserves to be better known.
Matthew Francis
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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