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Second review follows
Variety, complexity – but not reader-excluding complexity – and the joy of words that we expect of our imaginative writers, are in this collection of poems.
They are accounts of experiences. Familiar experiences such as a taxi ride in a thunderstorm, of love, and of natural things like flowers, trees and water. Experiences of unfamiliar – sometimes exotic – things too (London life and conversation with Tracey Emin, for this reader).
Poems “Hissing with secrets” (to quote a line from our poet), poems full of pictures, theirs (Magritte’s, Fra Angelico’s and Hokusai’s) and hers. And a certain sadness, too, but a sadness tinged with love of life, with life experienced, experienced and reflected upon. “There’s always time to stop.”
I’m not sure about the cover picture of the dog, and the title of this collection (the reader being, sensibly, a cat person). I am sure about the quality of the poems. I read them at a moment of need – the sober moment of autumn feelings (the ageing of the year, the ageing of the self: you know that moment). They met my needs beautifully. I am recharged. I think that you will be too.
John Spink
* * *
The cringey title is not the only thing I don’t like in this slim volume from Seren, who seem to be inexorably bound to bringing out their quota of young poets whatever the quality may be.
The eponymous red rubber ball, chased by a dog who also appears cutely on the jacket, occurs in a poem entitled ‘The Teenager Trees’, from which I quote: ‘Through the gaps we see the children perform their parents – miniature and true – mimics who’ll grow to rival the shading of this sadder plot.’ I have typed these lines as prose because it seems to me they are prose but made to look like verse on the printed page because they are cut up arbitrarily and with no relation to their meaning, whatever that may be, or to their rhythm, which is unclear. There is too much of this sort of writing here.
The other thing I don’t like is the poet’s failure to distinguish between sentiment, of which there is too much, and real emotion, of which there is little. I have a sense of a writer tied up in the small epiphanies which go to the making of most of her poems but who is unable to reach out and touch the lives of others. One reads her work and thinks, ‘So what?’. This is a severe judgement on a poet who will probably hone her skills over the next few years and, perhaps, produce poems that are more compelling than these somewhat vapid offerings.
Frances Williams, I understand from her biographical note, is a trained painter and sculptor, and from the number of poems collected here which deal with themes from twentieth-century art I conclude that she finds inspiration in the visual and plastic arts. But this is what comes out: ‘All I’ve read about today is art: the Abstract Expressionists. The seriousness of their scene. The all-over-ness of their canvases.’ (Again I have typed these four lines as prose.) This clumsiness is avoided in some of the other poems dealing with art and artists, as in ‘Old Man on a Perilous Bridge’, but I find these curiously unengaging, as if the poet is intent on merely putting into words what has already been conveyed better in paint.
I am sorry to be so brutal, or brutish, in my failure to appreciate these poems better. Read them for yourself and see whether you agree with me.
Meic Stephens
It is possible to use these reviews 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 adolygiadau hyn 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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