Lost Realms by Thomas Williams puzzling over value: style

 

Lost Realms by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) 

Warning: Opinionating in progress.

Lost Realms  is a book with much to recommend it. The basic approach, ‘histories’ rather than ‘history’ is the only one that can deal with the ways in which Roman Britain became something else.  

What intrigues me most is two aspects of William’s style. He can write very well; evoke the landscape of post Roman Britain; negotiate the tangle of evidence and contending theories that characterise the period in clear and unambiguous prose. But so much of the book relies on the reader not paying attention. 

 

The following is a characteristic example of general style, and it illustrates two problems. The author is remembering climbing the steps to Tintagel as a child:

 

It felt endless that stairway-like the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. (p.146)

 

You could delete everything from the dash to the full stop and the information would be conveyed successfully: 

 

It felt endless, that stairway.

 

It’s a common experience, especially for children. The author can rely on most readers  to understand his point (even if his intrusion of the memory into the narrative adds nothing especially relevant to the subject at hand). What follows the dash is superfluous in terms of information and is an attempt at ‘style’ but it's a strange thing to find in a history book. 

 

If this were a personal memoire of reading Tolkien, then the comparison would be at home if it were reversed. ‘When I read about the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers I remembered the steps that lead to Tintagel.’ p.146

 

This would be the normal movement, illuminating the fictional by comparing it with a real, repeatable experience that is not unique to the individual. Williams consistently goes the opposite way, trying to illuminate the historical by comparing it to the fictional. (More about this in the next post.)

 

But what happens to the reader (me, for example) who has no idea what Morgul Vale or Cirith Ungol are? That question points to an underlying assumption, and an impossible one: the assumption that the reader shares the writer’s fictional knowledge and his attitudes. Williams’ range of reference is eclectic: The Wicker Man, the Shining, Star Wars, the complete works of Tolkien. But no concession is being made to the reader. At one point rather than rewrite an unimportant but obviously obscure reference, he would rather add a footnote to explain his explanation. 

 

…that will embody an oddly retro-futuristic aesthetic, like the neo-Byzantine fantasies of the Trigon Empire…(p178)

 

The overall impression is that the author is not making an effort to communicate, rather, he is putting on a performance, and the performance assumes the reader shares his references, his fascination with his own memories, and his opinions. Which effectively means the Model Reader of this book can only be a model Thomas Williams. 

 

Sometimes this positioning is insidious: an anecdote will be introduced as ‘comic’ or ‘blackly comic’ rather than simply left to stand alone. Sometimes it’s unintentionally funny.

 

The story of Uther and Ygerna is, for modern readers, an uncomfortable read.

 

Stop. Which modern readers? All modern readers? Are we expected to believe that those who watched Vikings and Game of Thrones, or read Fifty Shades of Grey are disturbed by this? Some modern readers? Students in universities who are told to feel uncomfortable? 

 

But our author confesses:

 

I remember finding it troubling as a child and it stills leaves me feeling queasy. Not I think because the tale is in itself unusually unsettling (there are many, far more violent sentiments expressed in older Welsh and English poetry) but more for the horny relish with which Geoffrey tells it and the enormous appeal he clearly expected it to have for its intended audience…p146

 

I must admit I laughed aloud at this. The thought of Geoffrey writing 12^th century erotica is almost as funny as thinking that what he wrote could have aroused your average clerical reader or titillated his ‘aristocratic’ listeners.  

 

Leaving aside the thought that horny relish sounds like a strange kind of novelty pickle, I wonder how many people reading this have read Geoffrey, or how recently or how carefully Williams has? If you’re reading this and have a copy of Geoffrey handy, stop now and read what Geoffrey wrote about Uther in Tintagel. It’s only a few lines. Does this sound like ‘horny relish’?  Then go back and read Vortigern’s meeting with Rowena: it’s not long either. Then remember what Geoffrey did in his day job. 'Deceived' is not a positive term.

 

But most people won’t stop and read Geoffrey. They won’t wonder which readers are disturbed, or whether horny relish is an accurate description. It sounds good. It sticks in the memory. The book, like many recent ones, relies on the reader never stopping to consider what the words on the page mean. The glib references aren’t meant to be examined, or even given any thought. The author is entertaining himself and scattering his references with no real interest in ‘meaning’. If the reader isn't meant to think too deeply about this; did the author? 

 

This might sound like I’m being over critical about trivial detail, but it leads to a discussion of how the material is presented and understood, for which see next post. 

Review of A Man of Heart by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart is reviewed in the December print edition of Quadrant. The text of the review is on line, you can read it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page, which will open a new window. 

Heart of the Island Nation

 ..'.a celebration of long-neglected narrative traditions – an epic for an era which ironizes everything, a tribute to this once and future island and its stoically enduring people.'

...Guilar tells of Vortigern, king (fl. ca. 425-450) of the newly independent Britons who, according to traditional historiography, used the Saxon leaders Hengist and Horsa to protect his kingdom against Picts and Scots, and granted them land. Vortigern has been mythologised, but here feels eminently real, thanks to the poet’s sweeping historical sense, and convincingly gritty detail of how those long-lost landscapes must have looked, how those nation-building lives might really have felt.

...We open in shadows suited to descending ‘Dark Ages’, as kingdoms fade into view, and a strategic marriage is being considered sadly in a crepuscular columned room:

“There was never enough light. / Even in summer, shade / and shadows contour brightness. / At night, torches and lamps / shiver the edge of sight.”

A Romano-British matron is thinking of her daughter courted by unrefined “men of power” – regrettably necessary allies in a province turned upside down, where the uncivilized hold the sword-hand, and sophisticates overnight have only squatters’ rights.   

You can read the rest of the review by clicking on the link. It will take you to the author's page. 

Review of a Man of Heart

Michael Alexander.

 

Sad News. I heard today that Michael Alexander died last month. 

A translator of Old English, writer of one of the most judicious books on Ezra Pound, historian of literature and a fine poet in his own right. His interests ranged widely. There's a good book on Medievalism, a fine history of English Literature, and a book on Shakespeare that stands out amongst the flood of books on that subject as being both thoughtful and thought provoking. 

I bought this copy of Beowulf in 1976. I liked the cover. I knew nothing about Old English. 

But I was hooked. There was something strange and intriguing and I wanted to know what the original sounded like. It was one of the main reasons I studied medieval literature.  

Many years later, banging my head against Pound's Cantos I found his book The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. He'd met the man, dedicated his Old English Translations to him 'without irony'. But his discussion of Pound's Seafarer is the most level headed I've read. 

Even more years later, when Pn Review published my version of 'Wulf and Eadwacer' in the same edition Michael was remembering his meeting with Pound,  I thanked the editor and told him that I owed  my interest in Medieval Literature to Michael's translations. The email was passed on, a correspondence followed. 

I was the awkward school boy staring at that Penguin book in W.H.Smith's in Coventry trying not to write fan letters.  He was generous with his time. Stories about meeting Pound, and David Jones. Links in the chain. 

When he read A Presentment of Englishry he was complimentary, but he also wrote; 'It wasn't all plague rape and pillage'. He was right. There's a poem in A Man of Heart called 'These are the good old days #1' which begins 'There must have been sunshine./  Good days when a man unbent from his work/ and smiled to see the healthy children play'. Originally 'For Michael Alexander' I removed the dedication, thinking the piece wasn't good enough. I wish I hadn't. 

It's strange the debts I owe to strangers. Sometimes I'm given the chance to thank them.

Safe travelling.

Review of Taliesin Origins by Dr. Gwilym Morris-Baird

Wales can boast one of the finest literary traditions in the world and in the poetic tradition of Wales, Taliesin is a vital figure. There are, intriguingly, two ‘Taliesins’. 

 

The first is an historical character. A Briton who (?Probably?) was a court bard in ‘The Old North’,  during the sixth century AD. He composed praise poems for ‘kings’ like Urien Rheged and was well-rewarded for his songs. 

 

There is a second Taliesin, who is a character in a legendary tale. He benefits from a concoction in a magic cauldron and having been pursued by its irate owner, through several animal transformations, is finally eaten as a grain and born again to become the greatest of poets.

 

In the long Welsh tradition, it seems that ‘being Taliesin’ became a persona that later bards could adopt. The poems were memorised, recited and passed on. The poems associated with this practice tend to be 'visionary' and for a modern reader often baffling.  Poems like 'Armes 

Prydein' or 'Cad Goddeu' remain obscure even after they have been 'explained'. 

Scholars have tried to separate the ‘Historic’ from the ‘Legendary poems’ in an attempt to see what the historical poet may have composed. Not everyone agrees on the selection but they do agree the Historic ones are few. They do however contain gems like 'Marwnat Owein';  the great lament for Owein Rheged which is not only a great lament, but a master class in metrical finesse. 

 

There’s not much that can be said about the Historical Figure, though the book gives a good introduction both to him and his context. Morus-Baird’s focus is the story or stories that survive about the legendary Taliesin. In an eloquently written exploration of the myth, he reads the symbolism of the stories to establish links to other stories, and to older and wider themes in a broadly ‘Celtic’ history. 

 

He knows that interpretation, especially interpretation of myth, legend and folklore is an art, not a science, but he is too well-informed and too sane to drift off into the twinkly-eyed excesses of others. 

 

Reading discussions of medieval literature and folk lore, it often feels like being a passenger on a tour bus in a foreign country. Too often the tour bus arrives at a junction and the obvious progression is to go right. You can see the Hill of Tara which is where you thought you were going. The bus goes left. 

 

This happens far too often, and the reader becomes mired in the kind of arguments that C.S.Lewis mocked as: ‘Apollo was a Sun God. He rode in a chariot. Cuchulainn rides in a chariot. Therefore Cuchulainn was a sun god.” At which point you get off the bus, hike back to the intersection and wait for someone going in the right direction.

 

This never happened for me with Morus-Baird’s book. The tour guide is eloquent, entertaining, and obviously very well-informed. When the argument arrives at the intersection, he may go left, but you will be glad he did, because he will take you to places you hadn’t considered and while objections will occur to any reader, he always stays within the grounds of possibility and is very explicit about when he is speculating or stretching a point. 

 

The writing navigates a territory whose boundaries are mapped by the meticulous linguistic arguments of cautious scholar and the wishful thinking of the ill-informed. As such it’s very valuable not least because it's readable. He cares about his subject. Part of his argument is that the Taliesin tradition is built into the Welsh Language, and therefore its diffusion and perpetuation are essential parts of a thriving Welsh culture. 

 

This might sound like niche marketing, but the ‘Taliesin tradition’ has a lot to offer anyone; especially those interested in folklore, or interested in one of Medieval Europe’s great poets.  

Hopefully before the next Robert Graves blunders around in that tradition, he or she will have read this book.  

(My only criticism of this book is its lack of an index.) 

Review of David McCooey's 'The Book of Falling'

 

Three reasons why you should read David McCooey’s poetry.

(This review originally appeared in The Brazen Head, September 2023)

David McCooey, The Book of Falling. Perth, Western Australia, Upswell Publishing, 2023.  109 pages. $24.99 (AUS)

The Book of Falling is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programs can’t write.

1) He’s very good at what he does. His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, 

Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection, a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:

The unseen night creatures -scaled and feathered 

for their occult ceremonies-rasp and call outside

in the dark beyond the half dark that

surrounds this marbled, half lit house

(Questions of Travel)  

 

This deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in The Book of Falling and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th Birthday; Marilyn Munroe divines the future and amongst other things,  ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’ 

These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs.  

The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.

2) Variety. 

On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read and unusual in single author collections where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is. 

Rain Poem.

And as if someone uttered the trigger word

rain begins without ceremony.

But it’s not ‘driving rain’;

it’s just sitting outside

engine idling over the neighbourhood.

The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.

It doesn’t give a damn

And then, like a poem ending

you look out the window 

and the rain has stopped.

The birds have returned and the wind 

has begun its invisible cover-up job. 

Many of the poems present  the everyday and familiar but altering the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world. Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.

When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: ‘Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity’.

What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world . And above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required. Or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.

 

If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example:

Australia

Dropping my son at school.

It is ‘Art Day’;

students are to dress up 

as their favourite artist. 

I see a kid dressed in white.

He has sunscreen on his nose,

And carries a cricket bat.

Both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. The traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports mad country; a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art’; or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.

And finally. This may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review.  

3) McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable.  You should read them. 

Culhwch and Olwen.

 

I have loved this story since I first read the Jones and Jones translation many decades ago. Now I'm working my way slowly through this magnificent edition, which has the text in Middle Welsh but the introduction, notes and glossary in English. (The same two scholars produced an all Welsh edition but despite the ongoing effort I still can't read Modern Welsh.)

The story begins as a folk tale which wouldn't be out of place in the Grimm's world, and then the hero gets on his horse to ride to Arthur's court.  You can almost sense the anonymous genius who put this together realising here was an opportunity to show off, and the prose shift gears. (Marked for me by the sudden increase in the number of words I have to look up).

I particularly like this description of Culhwch's dogs, gambolling around him:

And before him, two white breasted brindled greyhounds

each with a gold collar from shoulder to ear

And the one that was on the right would be on the left

And the one on the left would be on the right

Like two sea swallows frolicking about him.

After this, the porter scene which is another favourite. 

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

 

Memory, narrative and identity. 

 

Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved? 

 

Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it. 

 

Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator? 

 

But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.

 

The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.

 

As the book progresses  the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own. 

 

The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past. 

 

‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author.  

What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)

 

For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly,  if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’  

 

In the same essay he wrote:

 

…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’

 

Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’.    

A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:

 

‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)

 

He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around  stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’.  In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time? 

 

One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s not trying to achieve.

Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life  out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’ 

 

 

As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in Diary of a Stroke, he was also working on Imagining Wales and these two books complement each other. Imagining Wales is the publicly endorsed critical approach, Diary of A Stroke  contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life.  

 

Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers  provide unusual models  for anyone writing about his or her past. In his Autobiography Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s Story of my Heart is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting

 

If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes Diary of a Stroke more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about. 

Transformation, magic, the conception of Arthur, a digression.

 

At some point, things that people accepted as real pass into their stories, and survive only as ‘something that can happen in a story’. The idea that human beings could transform, or be transformed, into other humans or other animals, seems to have been almost universal. But gradually the idea passes into the world of the storyteller. 

This doesn’t happen at a specific time in a culture’s history. And it happens at different times for different groups and different individuals within the same culture. If you are one of those who believe in the ‘contextualising of texts’ to identify ‘values and attitudes and beliefs’ this should make you reconsider what you’re doing. 

 

The stories in The Mabinogion were written down in the 14^th century.  

 

in 2023 Amazon is selling books of magic spells, and if the reviews are anything to go by, people not only buy them but expect them to work. ('Where am I supposed to get wolves teeth?' asks one reviewer.) 

 

A very tentative google search reveals that on Fiverr I can hire a powerful practitioner of black magic (his sales pitch) to cast a transformation spell for less than ten dollars. For fifty dollars, another expert will transform anyone into a physical beauty. 

 

Astrology is still popular, not just in the free versions that turn up in most papers, or online, but in versions that require payment for a horoscope. Tarot readers flourish.

 

So before tracking ‘contemporary’ attitudes to magic and transformation, and puzzling over what it means to ‘believe a story’, it’s worth pointing out that while the stories in the Mabinogion were written down in the 14^th century, a belief in magic is not something that disappeared from our society at some vague point in the past. 

 

 

   

What's great about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur

My attempt to explain why I admire Malory's book, and why I've been rereading it since the late 1970s, is published on The Brazen Head Website. Clicking on the link below should take you there.

https://brazen-head.org/2023/06/27/thomas-malorys-civilisation-shaping-chivalry/ 

The Conception of King Arthur. Transformation, magic, belief. 2/3

What is the audience being asked to believe when Uther becomes Gorlois?

 

The first Branch of the Mabinogion illustrates two types of change: disguise (Pwyll pretends to be a beggar) and transformation (Pwyll is Arawn for a year while still remaining Pwyll) (see previous post).

The Fourth Branch offers several examples that refine the concept of ‘transformation’. 

 

The first of these is illusion. This is the explicit use of magic to confuse two things for effect. Gwydion offers Pryderi 12 horses and twelve hounds, with saddles and bridles and collars and leashes and golden shields. The story teller inserts the comment ‘y rei hynny a rithassei ef o’r madalch’ which Sioned Davis translates as ‘He had conjured those up out of toadstools’.  

Fleeing Pryderi’s court, Gwydion tells his companions they must hurry because the magic will only last ‘until tomorrow’. Later, he creates the illusion of an invasion fleet to scare his sister. In neither case does the illusion last.

 

The second type is transformation as Pwyll experiences it in the First Branch. Gwydion and his brother are turned into three animals over three years. In this case they are specifically told they will have the nature of the beast they have become, but the implication is that they remain conscious they are men and they only return to human form when Math wants them to.

 

The most famous transformation in the story is Math and Gwydion’s taking flowers and turning them into a woman. This is not an illusion. The Flower Lady is fully human, and as she is human she has speech, and free will, and the power to choose. When Gwydion punishes her, she isn’t changed back into petals, but transformed into an owl.

 

So a suitably threefold division. 

Disguise (without magic)

Illusion ( A Magic trick.)

Genuine transformation, permanent. (With Magic)

 

 

What this allows us to do is now is to look at what people seemed to have believed about transformation at the time these stories were circulating. It's not at all straightforward. And it should eventually bring us back to Laȝamon and Uther. 

The Conception of King Arthur. Transformation, magic and belief.1/3

  

 

The story of Arthur’s conception may have been Geoffrey of Monmouth’s invention. (See previous posts about how was King Arthur's father.)

 

Uther, love sick for Ygraene, and at war with her husband, Gorlois, is transformed by Merlin into Gorlois and as Gorlois, Uther is able to enter Tintagel castle and spend the night with Ygaerne. 

 

The story opens Malory’s 15^th Century version. There are classical, biblical, mythological and folk tale examples that might have inspired Geoffrey, but most academic commentators seem to note the parallels, discuss possible sources, or how it fixes Arthur into ‘The Hero Paradigm’ and then move one. 

 

But the longevity of the conception story obscures how bizarre it is. It’s worth stopping and considering just how bizarre.

 

Looking at another literary example makes explicit what the audience is being asked to believe. 

 

In the First Branch of the Mabinogion, the story of Pwyll consists of three episodes. In the first two, Pwyll adopts a disguise. 

 

In the first episode, Pwyll becomes Arawn, and lives as him for a year.  

In the second, he arrives at the wedding of Gwawl and Rhiannon in disguise. 

 

The second is an example of ‘being disguised’ that most people would accept as credible. 

 

Someone acts a role, altering appearance superficially to avoid recognition. At a time when even Kings would not have been recognised outside the limited circle of their close acquaintances, Pwyll can easily hide his identify by wearing a disguise (rags) which he can throw off. He is playing at being something else. The charade is made easier because he’s playing ‘generic beggar’. This disguise hides his real appearance without in anyway altering who he is. Pwyll is not a beggar, but a Prince pretending to be one.  

 

The first transformation, however, is much more complicated.

 

Pwyll doesn’t just take on Arawn’s appearance and pretend to be him. This would be impossible. There would be so much he couldn’t know. 

 

Before they change places, Arawn reassures Pwyll that he will have the fairest woman he’s ever seen (Arawn’s wife) to sleep with every night, and neither she, nor the chamberlains, nor the officers of the court, nor anyone of his retinue, will know it’s not Arawn. In other words, the people who know Arawn intimately, will not notice the deception over the course of a year. 

 

So Pwyll becomes Arawn, not just in his appearance. He knows the court and its inhabitants, and its rituals. He must therefore have access to Arawn’s memories. Even when he acts ‘out of character’ Arawn’s wife does not suspect it’s not her husband, but that something is wrong with him.  

 

For a year.

 

But he also remains Pwyll. Although Arawn has essentially given him his wife for a year, and judging by his reaction at the end of the episode he fully expected him to take that offer in all the ways it could be taken, Pwyll turns his back on her every night, and doesn’t even speak to her until the morning. 

 

Pwyll remains Pwyll in the body of Arawn, with access to Arawn’s memories. This is the  transformation that occurs when Uther becomes Gorlois so he can spend the night with Ygraene. (Euphemisms are wonderful things. ) 

 

And like all good stories, it raises interesting questions.  Which will take us via the Third and Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, to Saint Augustine and others, and then back to Uther. 

'Layamon's Last Interview': Publication in Long Poem magazine

 

'Laȝamon's last interview', published in issue Twenty Nine of Long Poem Magazine, will be the final chapter of the last book in the series that runs from A Presentment of Englishry, to A Man of Heart. (Both published by Shearsman in the UK). 

After he finished his book, what did he do next? There's no evidence he wrote another line. Was he proud of his work? Was he disappointed by its limited reception?  Was he bitter?  To contrast two very different story telling traditions,  Gwydion son of Don meets the old man who wrote the Brut, and 'interviews' him. 

Long Poem Magazine, published in the Uk, is one of the few print outlets for someone like myself who writes very long narrative poems.  So i am delighted to have work published in this edition. This is the third time this has happened, and if I ever finish this project I will owe the editors 'a debt of gratitude'. 

A short extract.....

Gwydion, stooping to enter, 

‘You’re a hard man to find.’

 

‘I didn’t know anyone was looking.’

 

The woman blocks the doorway;

her shadow and the priest, 

two darker stains on the rough wall.

 

One stool, one bed, two bowls,

two wooden spoons.

No books. No writing materials.

He can taste the damp.

 

‘She looks after me. I don’t know why.’

 

‘Because you need looking after.

Don’t wind him up, sir, please.

He’s a bugger to settle.’

 

‘The Lateran council forbade the priest his wife or concubine.

Gerald made the usual Latin puns so few could understand.

But why shouldn’t a man hold someone in the dark?

And how could I survive without her patient charity?’

 

‘They called you latimer, not priest.’

 

‘I translate at those sad times 

m’lord shouts at his tenants

and they need to understand

or when he’s feeling threatened 

by the written word. 

 

You’re Welsh? Kyuarwydd? 
A professional storyteller.

Trained in the tradition. 

Valued. Honoured.

How very easy for you. 

How very lucrative.’

 

‘You know as well as I,

no one stands on the summit

who hasn’t sweated the slopes. 

I read your history. 

I liked it very much.’

 

‘You must be the only man who has.’

 

‘You wrote in English. 

Did you expect an audience to rival Monmouth’s?’

 

The woman interrupts.

‘They feed us; bread, cheese, honey. 

Sometimes meat and wine if he’s been useful.

I’d offer you some but there’s nothing in the pot.’  

Bonfire Books' Anthology of Australian Verse. Publication.

 I have three poems in this Anthology of Australian Poetry, published by Bonfire Books.  One of them is this one. 

The book is available from https://bonfirebooks.org/product/anthology-of-australian-verse-2023/

Testimony of One of Sir John Franklin’s Officers

 

When I was a child I was promised the ocean:
a trip to the coast, so we rode down to Hastings.
The clouds sagged like a dirty tarpaulin. 
The waves rattled the shingle. The sun 
bradawled a hole though drifting grays
to spotlight the place where sea became sky.

Nanny’s screams were baffled by the wind
but shifting pebbles under stubby legs 
betrayed me to strong hands before the water’s edge. 
Not safe, not saved, restrained. Returned 
to Nanny where I howled. Her voice: 
You big girl’s blouse: big boys don’t cry.

I have forgotten much; first this, first that;
things I should remember. But I do not forget
the sea and the sky and the line where they met;
or that need to stand where the light fell
and peer over the edge of the world. 

The winner of this year's national poetry competition (UK 2023).

You can read the poem here.

 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/29/poem-of-beauty-wit-and-grace-about-fathers-and-sons-wins-national-poetry-competition

 

The headline reads: Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition” and continues:  Ex-New York cab driver Lee Stockdale wins £5,000 after My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert beat 17,000 other poems ‘

 

Poetry competitions are a lottery. In the absence of a stated criteria it must be very difficult to distinguish between 17,000 poems. The thought of having to read 17,000 poems is frightening. How could you pay each one the attention a poem requires? How easy would it be to miss subtlety? 

 

When you read the article, the events behind the poem, and the author’s comments on the poem, come before it and that will inevitably colour your judgement.  But the judges were reading without these, and every poem should stand on its own, without any external information about the writer. 

 

Apparently this poem exhibits: ‘beauty wit and grace’. 

 

As a description this is vague, if not practically meaningless. It’s the kind of thing people say about poems when they have nothing specific to say. How would you quantify those qualities? How would you explain how one poem has more ‘beauty’ than another? How would you make your draft more ‘graceful’? 

And when you read the poem you’re going to wonder how any of those words apply to it, especially ‘wit’.

 

As an occasional editor, my very rough way of assessing any poem is to start with the basic idea that writing a poem offers the author the possibility of manipulating diction, syntax and line endings for effect. Content can be put to one side. 

 

This is not a precise criteria. If you read a lot of poetry you will have your own but it’s flexible enough to accommodate the many different kinds of poem that are in circulation today. It’s possible to look at any poem, in any style, and ask what does the writer achieve with these three possibilities. Their interactions will, in skilful hands, bring about the effects that can be associated with good poetry and deliver the pleasures that only a good poem can. 

 

I see little happening in this poem with any of these three.

 

There is a possibility that the diction is being deliberately used to blur the age of the speaker. 'Bullshit’ sounds like a contemporary adult, 'mean to me' like  an eight year old, 'a dear sweet man' like a stereotypical maiden aunt. But it’s not consistent and it doesn’t tie in with the rest of the piece. 

 

‘The judges called My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert a “remarkable” poem that “caught and held our attention from first reading”.

 

Think of the great opening lines you know. Your choice, not mine. You’re reading 17,000 poems, and you read:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, checking off things done and left undone.

How does it measure against your gold standard? Why is the poet telling me his father is not my father? What purpose is served by the abrupt pauses in the 2^nd and 3^rd line? What is gained by setting the lines out like this and not:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, 
your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, 
checking off things done and left undone

Unless it’s to keep under the 40 line limit?

Think of the great lines you remember, and the images that stick in your head even if you can’t remember them word for word. 

 

Now read this:

 

I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.

The first line sounds very clumsy to me and the abrupt break in the middle calls into question why it’s such a long line. The is/Is is awkward. You’re forced to stop after one to pronounce the next one calling into question the unity of the line. The third line jangles to be/to me/personally with the second half hanging off the first. Word choice? Do you need ‘personally’? Isn’t that implied in ‘mean to me’? Is there a meaningful difference between ‘I wish he were alive again’ and ‘I wish he were alive’? 

 

Would these lines lose anything written like this:

 

I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead? I wish he were alive again. I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.

 

Is this even good prose? 

 

Arrange the lines like this, 

 

I begin to see what 

a dear, sweet man he is. 

Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself 

to be mean to me personally.

The first two are a guess but the others follow the abrupt breaks in the long line There’s nothing wrong with declarative statements in a poem, or a conversational diction, but these staccato statements of the obvious would not be out of place on a post card. 

 

In the article, the poem is placed after the poet’s biography. And we realise this writer experienced an horrific trauma as a child when his father committed suicide. But while we must sympathise with the writer, it doesn’t redeem the writing. It would be grossly inappropriate to perform acts of literary criticism on a poem written for a funeral or a wedding, or written as a private way of coming to terms with a trauma. But once that poem is offered for publication, or entered into a competition, then the writer is claiming this poem is worthy of a stranger’s interest, and inviting critical scrutiny. 

 

15,000 entrants must be wondering in what way this poem is better than theirs.

 

(For the record I did not enter this competition and I have no desire to be a judge. And last year's competition winner seems so much the better poem.)  

The Punishments. Publication in The High Window

My version of an incident in the Middle Welsh story Math uab Mathonwy, the fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. I was plodding my way 'translating' the Middle Welsh prose when I started wondering about the punishments. Clicking on the link will open The High Window in another window.

https://thehighwindowpress.com/2023/04/04/liam-guilar-the-punishments/?fbclid=IwAR1AvEgjbh-DsP4TbpmlfPeI5JzKTNVoPsVmX1rrQqTGbcSd8AcfaIzA9sU

Every time I read this story, I'm perplexed by the character of Gwydion. If the stories originally had a mixed audience, then I can't imagine how a woman in that audience would have 'read' his actions. I can't see a male audience reading him in an entirely positive light either. He consistently puts his need to prove his competence before any thought of the possible consequences. And his indifference to the three women in the story drives the plot and leaves the cliched 'trail of misery' in his wake. He assaults Goewin, humiliates and then insults his sister, and then makes the lady out of flowers and never once considers that as a human she has free will and might want to exercise it. 

There is nothing in the story to suggest that he learns anything from the Punishments. Hence Math's choice of words at the ending of my version.

The Punishments also fit into a medieval discussion of shape shifting. While many thought it was not possible, others were not willing to say that God could not do this if He wished. At the same time there was a discussion about whether or not someone who changed shape, became a werewolf for example, remained essentially human in a wolf's shape, or became a wolf and forgot being human. . 

In the story, the punishments wouldn't work if the brothers forgot who they were in their various transformations.  It's nasty. But appropriate. 

I understand the significance of the Deer 9living in fear) and the Wolf (nothing that harms the pack), but the pigs elude me.  

My thanks to David Cooke for publishing this.