sheenaghpugh | Review of "As If To Sing" by Paul Henry, pub. Seren 2022 (Reply)

Tut-tut
says the metronome

Two words I’ve used before in reviews of Henry’s work, “fugue” and “elegiac”, are becoming ever more appropriate. He has always used recurring themes and images in a fugue-like way, and the more he does it, the more they resonate. And of course, the more life one has to look back on, the more elegiac one’s poems are liable to become. Certainly this collection is pervaded by a sense not just of time passing but of mortality.

The collection is in three parts. The first, As If To Sing, is indeed very music-centred, and though the wider world makes an appearance in poems like “Tauseef Akhtar’s Harmonium” and the title poem, which references the Great War, this section is mostly haunted by the poet’s own past. It contains “The Well of Song”, in which the poet, listening to a woman’s voice (very possibly his mother’s) on a gramophone record, observes

The needle works towards
the hole time slips through.

Even more conscious of the passing of time is “Last Move”, with its image, like a dream or fantasy, of lost parents:

    It is too cold to stop and talk.
    Their mournful steps leave no prints.
    My mother smiles at my greying hair,
    half-raises a gloved hand.
    Songs hibernate inside her.
    We may not pass like this again.

The effectiveness with which he uses heavily end-stopped lines here is typical of this collection’s concern for technique. There is a line in the second section:

    Your cot a tight fit in the white Fiat (“The New Tenant”)

which is a positive Persian carpet of sound patterns and might, at first sight, look like a tongue-twister – but say it out loud and it flows musically off the tongue without a hitch. Part of it is his feeling for rhythm, which is faultless and much to the fore in a couple of ballad-style poems from the second section, “The Boys in the Branches”:

    Your weekly gift, these minutes
    alone, that pass into years,
    a small park’s blinding light,
    and you not waiting there. (“The Winter Park”)

As usual, though, you have to look for the technique; it doesn’t advertise itself like that of some poets who like to leave the scaffolding up. Henry tends to make it look easy, though if you try to emulate him, you will soon find it isn’t. Phrase after phrase, in his poems, sounds right, without it being all that obvious why:

    a flock of cellos settled
    on the saltmarsh
    and remembered us

    to the sea’s applause (Cave Songs)

or the end of his Mari Llwyd poem for New Year:

    and the bells in the valley hold their tongues
    and the ghostly snow horses thaw
    and the mice bed down in the walls. (Dust o’clock)

He seems, in this collection, to be getting ever more spare in his utterance: Catrin Sands, a figure familiar from earlier collections, is “Cat” here, and the contraction feels appropriate in a collection where passing allusions like “three conifers” recall whole poems from elsewhere. In fact, if you are new to Henry’s work, don’t begin with this one, because many motifs, images, even individual words, in it will resonate more if you already know them from his earlier work. If on the other hand you are already acquainted with Penllain, Brown Helen, three trees, a haircut, Newport and many other old friends, go ahead and enjoy both the craftsmanship and the nostalgia. Its final poem in English (there is a brief coda in Welsh) is “Cei Newydd”, which brings us back to mortality:

   We drifted out one afternoon
   on a dinghy’s water-bed,

   woke to no sight of the shore.
   We had not been born.

   A panic of oars
   scratched the wilderness

   and the harbour came back to us,
   our mothers on the pier.

   The salt on the fishing nets
   tasted the same.

   Soon, Brown Helen,
   we shall drift out again.