Poetry review. Gwyriad: Poems by Nigel Jarrett

Derek Littlewood

Anglophone readers might meet Gwyriad, the title of Nigel Jarrett’s second poetry collection meaning ‘diversion’ as a roadworks sign, but he adds a note that he is using it ‘metaphorically to indicate paths not taken, or, if taken, then leading to confusion and/or catastrophe.’

Jarrett’s poems are often oblique, but there is no avoiding the ultimate destination of our human journey.

These poems reward close reading by their ingenuity and range of cultural allusion. Most of us think of reading as a passive activity, but engaged reading is a creative interpretive process.

Such poetry demands creative effort from readers, but their dark matter of the fragile nature of human existence beset by threats of mental illness, suffering and death can strike home to all.

A central sequence Y FENNI/FISHPONDS explores the implications of two psychiatric hospitals. Pen-y-Fal in Abergavenny built in 1851 and was converted into flats after closure in the 1990s. (Nigel Jarrett now lives in one of these flats, I understand).

Then the institution Jarrett calls its sister, the Bristol Pauper Lunatic Asylum which eventually became the Glenside campus of the University of the West of England. The former asylum church contains a museum with patient records, artefacts and photographs. Some of this material is available on line.

The front cover is a portrait of Alice Kate, a servant admitted to Bristol Asylum in 1894. ‘Patient Record: the Photograph’ recalls her:

By bringing her home, I imagined                                                                                         

she might lose the misery shaping                                                                                     

her features, like Uncle Lionel did                                                                                      

when making a clown’s sadness elide                                                                                 

to jollity in a downward sweep                                                                                                

of his hedger’s raw right hand.

But no…

Alice Kate’s melancholy image persists. Uncle Lionel’s hedger’s hand is raw from his ungloved work with his bill hook. Her sadness can’t be elided. Uncle Lionel plays no further part, but we have an impression of him moving his hand down his face to puzzle or amuse children.

These poems are enlivened with character, stories, wit and a shifting frame of reference. The freezing of time in a photograph is a recurring theme. Of course, Uncle Lionel may be a figure from the poet’s childhood or wholly invented.

Most are in free verse, but some poems are tightly rhymed as in ‘Diagnosis’ which begins the Y FENNI/FISHPONDS sequence: ‘Depression Guilt Hostility/ Pity Remorse Disgust/ Loathing Shame  & Apathy/ Boredom Fear Lust and which terminates at Melancholia Melancholia/ Melancholia?/ Melancholia.’

The overall emotion of this collection is reflective melancholy, but there is plenty of humour too; the fruits of a lifetime of curiosity about the world and about language.

Memoir

There is a short prose memoir, ‘Fleeing the Sight of Blood and Other Departures’ which gives insight into Jarrett’s childhood.

Many poems display an intimate knowledge of the social and political history of South Wales. ‘Transporter Bridge’ draws on fellow feeling with the grafting workers when Jarrett shares his memories of his grandfather who once worked on the Newport Transporter Bridge over the River Usk.

In his memoir, he describes how his grandfather then in his mid seventies, would take him aged eight across, not in the gondola, but up the metal steps of the pylon and along the high-level walkway over to the other side  ‘…my little mouth an ‘O’ in the gale. It was popular with suicides.’

In the poem the image is extended:

… while I saw my zealous grandpa and me,                                                                     

dots crossing the bridge to subvert                                                                                     

his daughter’s authority, my mouth                                                                                       

a protesting minnow’s in a jam jar.

We might think of this collection as Welsh Gothic with its unflinching focus on the processes of memory, suffering, insanity, incarceration and finally approaching death which awaits us all as the destination of our life’s journey.

There are a variety of verse forms and excursions beyond Wales, to England and Continental Europe. ‘Sam. Johnson in Uttoxeter’ is a lighter hearted sketch of Dr Johnson’s penance standing in the rainy marketplace, his tics, depression and odd gestures now suggesting Tourette’s (which was not an available diagnosis in Johnson’s lifetime.)

More uncomfortably, ’Kempsey Murals’ alludes to serial killers Fred and Rosemary West who returned home via Much Marcle. ‘A smile wounds this place’s silence…’

For me the most uneasy poem is ‘Sylvia’s Eleventh Hour’ which imagines a last minute escape for Plath after a ‘diddy’ (didicoy — often used as an offensive slur) offers to do a proper job on her railings for twenty quid.

The Irish traveller ‘who behind her can see two kids/ premature in PJs, and gets a whiff,/ dontcha know, of something not quite right.’ The smell is coal gas, but I won’t be the only reader who finds this poem steps over the line. But Jarrett bravely explores risky subjects elsewhere in ‘Saddo’ and ‘Observer’, so uneasy tone is part of the game here.

Suicide is also a theme of ‘Infanta at her Achilleion’, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, known as ‘Sissi’ had a palace, the Achilleion, built on Corfu to escape the tragedies of her life.

Her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, apparently killed himself at the imperial hunting lodge Mayerling in 1889 after murdering his young lover Mary Vetsera in a suicide pact.

Genetics

This poem explores the issue of genetics and in-breeding by the character of Doctor Lenz who runs mad, scooping fruit flies from the air. They are a classic research subject for genetics. (Sissi had married her first cousin Emperor Franz Joseph.) A lens is, of course, essential equipment for an entomologist. Jarrett is unafraid of puns — wordplay is the stuff of poetry.

Gwyriad is a challenging yet rewarding collection, which repays repeated reading and reflection. The final poems are poignant as the shadows thicken towards old age and death.

Nigel Jarrett’s first collection Miners at the Quarry Pool was published by Parthian in 2013.

Jarrett is an acclaimed short story writer and novelist. He had a long career as a newspaper journalist.

Nigel Jarrett’s Gwyriad :Poems is published by Cockatrice Books and is available from all good bookshops.