Book review: Shared Origins: a Collaboration between Three Poets by Mike Jenkins, David Annwn, David Lloyd

Desmond Clifford

These three poets were brought together through a shared experience of Aberystwyth in the mid and late 1970s.  Mike Jenkins, perhaps the best known of the three and with a long bibliography to his name, was from Aberystwyth originally.

David Lloyd began life in America, in Utica, New York, the child of parents who met at Aberystwyth University before emigrating to America. He made his way to Aberystwyth in 1973 on a study year. David Annwn was another student, originally from the north of England, who joined what was a lively poetry scene determined to make it even livelier.

All three were involved with “Dragon”, the university’s poetry magazine.

In his introduction, Jeremy Hooker, himself a poet, lecturer and lightning rod for poetry, describes Aber’s English Department at that time as “academic in orientation” and not at all encouraging of “creative writing”.

I can vouch for this. I was a student in this department only a couple of years after this period and I recall very shyly, and unbidden, handing my tutor a shorty story I had written over the holidays. He took possession of it gingerly, almost furtively, and the next week, equally tentatively, gave me one he’d written and asked for my feedback.

We weren’t quite swopping them in brown paper bags from under the counter, like consenting adults, but there was a hint of decadence and deviation from the day job of translating Beowulf.

Surprisingly narky

Eng Lit officialdom may not have encouraged creative efforts in those days, but Aberystwyth positively dripped with poetry and creativity. The number of students doing English (“doing” works better than “studying”, somehow) or Welsh Literature was vast – or so it seemed to me, there were few other distractions – and you would hear arguments in pubs about poets.

People got surprisingly narky for or against Dylan Thomas. You didn’t dare diss Saunders Lewis and RS Thomas was a living god – you could get beer thrown over you if you said the wrong thing. Amazing, really; a world mostly gone by, I’m guessing.

So Aber in the round was by no means an unsympathetic environment for poets even if the department formally responsible for poetry didn’t much want to play ball.

Jeremy Hooker, along with a few others, was a sort of fifth columnist, fulfilling academic duties while pursuing his own vocation as a poet and tapping into a community of like-minded students.

Of the three poets, Mike Jenkins had the closest relationship with Aber, growing up there before leaving and returning later to attend university.

I grew up on the hill

between two winding rivers

the Ystwyth and Rheidol.

The rivers shaped his contours and guided him rather more successfully, he says, “than parents, who never were never a confluence.”

‘Cruel voice’

His father features in a poem produced in both English and Welsh versions, a man with “a red face and cruel voice” who steered a car “like a boat that was sinking.” His parents, respectively from Barry and Somerset originally, seem never to have been comfortable in Aber.

His mother, amusingly but very unfairly, describes the Urdd (which for years had its HQ in Aber) as “The Welsh Hitler Youth”. Mike Jenkins seems altogether much more positive about Aber than his parents, learning Welsh and participating in the culture of that exceptional, multi-faced town.

“The Refugee Game” describes the plight of refuges as something like a board game, random chances and unsatisfying outcomes whether in success or failure.  “Po-tree” is a funny poem for National Poetry Day, playing with words and characters.

Each poet prefaces their work with a short essay on their time in Aberystwyth.

David Annwn spent a decade there. I see that we overlapped for a short period, and he describes people I know of and events which I actually attended, like Ned Thomas’s hosting of Derek Walcott, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember it very clearly.

Annwn pays generous tribute to some of the people who helped him and who built a supportive environment for poetry, people like Jeremy Hooker, Robin Young, Clive Meachen, Michael Munday and Ned Thomas.

Not a criticism of this book, but you can’t help noticing that 1970s poetry was largely a boys’ sport.

Eclectic

Annwn’s poetry is influenced by European subjects and experience but is eclectic. “Rogue Runway” is a scathing satire about a well-known bra magnate while “Durer painted the Virgin with a butterfly” is about the poet’s own mother and his birth:

“…the hidden baby who

seventy years later

will write her this poem.”

David Lloyd’s connection to Aberystwyth was through his parents but when he arrived there it was as a stranger, and he an alien:

“The Pen Dinas bronze age hill fort; the 13^th century castle ruins; the Old College with its ornate library and lovely, drafty windows; the screaming seagulls on Constitution Hill; the Victorian prom fronting an unpredictable sea..”

This captures very well the essence of Aberystwyth, a distinctiveness emphasised by its relative isolation from other towns. His poetry conveys a sense of hovering between two worlds – America and Wales – and indeed two times; the past lingers more heavily in the stones of Aberystwyth than in most places.

In “Once Again in Remsen, NY”, the experience is reversed as he ponders his home area (while hosting Welsh poetry friends) originally populated by Welsh migrants, “the ghosts of the emigrated Welsh”.  “Nothing lasts”, he says, “We come, we go.”

This volume does two things. It brings together work by three poets connected through a time and place – Aberystwyth half a century ago. It serves, too, to record something of the environment for poetry in the age before creative writing courses developed and absorbed the actual creation of literature alongside the appreciation of it. It was a world on the cusp of revolution.

Shared Origins is published by Seventh Quarry Press and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.