Review: Street Fighting and Other Pastimes – Dai Smith

Tony Curtis

In the same month that Poetry Wales publishes its sixtieth anniversary issue, with “Sixty New Poets”, eighty-year-old Dai Smith of Barry might be miffed for not being among the sixty.

Dai’s reputation is secure as one the most notable historians of his generation, with a successful TV series, Wales! Wales?, a professional life of significant executive and academic positions, and volumes of autobiography and fiction published in recent years.

In recognition of these achievements, he was awarded a C.B E. in 2017.

The breadth of his scholarship is impressive, from The Fed, a history of the South Wales miners (with the late Hywel Francis) and Fields of Praise (with Gareth Williams), a history of Welsh rugby to critiques of Wales writers and thinkers from Raymond Williams to Ron Berry and Alun Richards. These and others, some unfairly neglected, have been championed by Dai.

Challenge

So why take this late by-road into poetry? Well, blame Peter Finch. Says the poet, for he prefaces his collection with a poem-sliced challenge laid down by the Real Wales series editor:

‘Only poetry

Left then

For you

To do,

I mean,’

He said.

So, you’ve done everything asked of you in addressing the culture of Wales – well, what about poetry? Dai has responded with “A late beckoning/From fading light.” Street Fighting and Other Pastimes is the result and it carries an endorsement from Peter Finch on both front and back covers.

Dai Smith make reference to the writer and critic Raymond Williams, in whose name he held a personal chair at Swansea University: “…Raymond says: he’d like his work to be taken as a whole, and I would make a plea, in a humbler way, that my work should be taken as a whole as well.” To that end, this late poetry completes a full hand.

Stellar

From the Rhondda to Balliol and Columbia, N.Y. via Barry, Smith’s career has proved to be stellar. Though the boy was taken out of the Rhondda, it proved impossible to take Rhondda out of the boy. So here he deals with that legacy.

In “Street Fighters”

The gloves came laced together at Christmas.

A rite of passage, as if by osmosis it seemed,

For all the eight-year-old boys in the street.

The young Dai is pushed into the ring of fathers and neighbours to duke it out against Roger. He wins by “Smashing his strawberried mouth open/To end it.” His knowledge of and commitment to the art of boxing is long-standing.

In an interview with Daryl Leeworthy online in Wales Arts Review (08.04.23), he said: “…my father had been a great aficionado and I knew various professional boxers through him.” Those would have included Billy Eynon, “Bantamweight Contender/Soup kitchen legend/Scrapping for pennies.”

As with many of these poems. The Rhondda of his childhood is evoked by memories of family and neighbours, and by tributes to painters such as Charlie Burton and Ernie Zobole.

The writer of that W.R.U. history praises, in “The Lost Boys”, the “youthful Titans” – J.P.R. Gareth, Barry, Gerald- heroes of a rapidly fading golden age. At a black-tied after match dinner he is swayed by the sort of easy pride by association that used to be the norm. As I write, we are on the point of enduring our longest ever losing run as a rugby nation.

That evening “A grizzled, black-tied prop, a survivor, oldest here by far…fixed us with a basilisk stare:” He tells Dai and his companions to “Fuck off home”.

There will be, through the Seventies, “A decade of confident revengeful assertion,” but it will not last, it has not lasted. That moment typifies much of these poems: the past while being remembered, even memorialised, gives warmth, then must be pushed away as we move forward.

Love poems

Perhaps taking his cue from Seamus Heaney, Dai Smith juggles the challenges of oysters and sex: some of the love poems here are, why should we be surprised, rather good. The public figure is entitled to a private life, and to share that too.

No rifts between us, my lady,

Only the cartography of love.

In a quartet of short poems “The Dark Arts: Lost and Found” four views of remarkable dissonance are pulled together.

We have some minutes of the Mountain Ash Urban District Council from 1948; extracts from an interview with the painter Charkes Burton, lines from a 2013 Eton College prospectus and, finally, a riff on an Aneurin Bevan quote.

Dai Smith is shoring such fragments against his and our ruin.

In “Assignments”, a list of autographed literary encounters emerges as his fingers prise signed books from his shelves: Alun Richards, Ron Berry, Al Gore, Norman Mailer, Seamus Heaney et al:

To pluck a copy down, to read my courted assingees

Induces unease at an ardent past of bibliophiliac pleas.

Duw, there’s words. And, in truth there are other lines which break under the weight of Dai Smith’s erudition, his sheer cleverness. And there are other occasions when his anger and frustrations with his nation and its political cheerleaders, the complexity of our nation’s challenges, bursts out of these poetic containers – “Tribal solipsism a misplaced fart.”

Some poems splinter down the page as he tries to resolve things with single word lines. That said, there are a number of well-realised, well-formed poems in this debut collection. Praise poems to characters from his childhood and Valleys writers and painters are measured and sincere.

Here is Nicholas Evans:

With his thumbs he gouged out eyes, planed cheekbones,

Limned the creased thrust of a nose, the gash of a mouth.

…..

One year for his wife’s birthday, as penance and in praise,

He painted in a glow of colour, a single vase of flowers.

(Autodidact i.m. Nicholas Evans)

Like Dai, I knew these artists and have lived with their work. Those readers who haven’t, can now check the images on their phones.

Salvation

I visited Nicholas Evans in his little house in Neath. His grey and black visions of the challenges of deep mining and the hope that for Evans a Christian vision, a Second Coming would bring salvation and some sense to the suffering: these were precariously stacked in several rooms.

Kept away from mining by his mother, who feared for his safety, he reluctantly worked all his adult life on the railways.

But in a retirement blossoming painting career, at one point he had to be rescued by his daughter from his front room when a sudden collapse of the heavy hardboard paintings nearly did for him.

We negotiate the challenges of where we are and what we are with the notions of what we might have been. Dai balances the dark underground visions with that vase of flowers and a redeeming lightness, recognising the penance and the praise.

In the “coffined houses” of Ernest Zobole and the “biography of chairs” in the paintings of Charlie Burton, Dai Smith has caught the essence of their vision. And it is his vision too, not just appropriated, but owned. He knows who he is and reminds us of who we are by these appreciations of writers and artists. Art is not that which we simply view, it is what sustains and instructs us.

There are poems here which will lead the editor of Poetry Wales to feel that she’s missed a trick by not including in the new issue this promising newcomer.

Street Fighting and Other Pastimes by Dai Smith is published by Parthian and is available here