Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

“Every tale has another chapter”

In her blog at https://www.catherine-fisher.com/culhwch-and-olwen/, Catherine Fisher explains what drew her to this particular Welsh legend and made her want to write a version of it for today’s children: “Culhwch and Olwen is not one story, but many different tales, held inside a framework. It’s a heap, a tapestry, a tangle, a hedgerow of stories”.

It begins, in fact, with a noblewoman giving birth in a pigsty because she has fled her home for reasons not plain even to her, never mind anyone else, and which would clearly make a story of their own; it ends with a young man and his wife returning to a court where it is hard to imagine him being safe, let alone happy. Along the way, there are all manner of other stories peering round corners and asking to be investigated, and some are, taking the reader down various byways, but others are tantalisingly unexplored: what became of the kind swineherd; who was Tywyllych’s dead husband; where did the great boar end up?

Being a writer very much disinclined to talk down to children, Fisher does not minimise the harsh elements of the tale: the pain of childbirth, the grief of an early death, the animosity bred in individuals by war and conquest, the clash of generations. But she does show how love, friendship, generosity and gratitude can mitigate these. Her favourite character in this huge galaxy is the Arthurian knight Cai – prickly, arrogant, dangerous – for whom she has shown a partiality in other books, but my favourite was a lame though determined ant. It will be no surprise to those who know her as a poet that she is adept at conveying the lyrical side of the story, but for any adults not acquainted with the hard edge of her YA novels, here are Cai and Bedwyr fulfilling one of Culhwch’s tasks by making a leash for the hound Drudwyn. It must be made from the beard-hairs of the fearsome Dillus, and these must be plucked while he is still alive. Fortunately, he happens to be asleep and drunk when they find him:

“Cai took a spade from his horse and began to dig. He dug a deep narrow pit and rolled Dillus into it, upright, and filled in the earth and trampled it down so that only the man’s sleeping head remained above ground.
“Tweezers”, he said. Bedwyr handed them over.
Cai crouched and plucked out a hair from the bristly black beard. Dillus gave a yell of pain and his eyes snapped open. He wriggled and struggled.
But he was buried deep.
Swiftly Cai plucked strand after strand of the beard and gave them to Bedwyr, who was already weaving and plaiting them into a leash.
But the huge man’s struggles were causing earthquakes and tremors. The whole mountaintop was shaking. “When I get out of here,” he roared, “you are DEAD!” Cai kept plucking. Suddenly Dillus roared out and one arm came free. Then the other.
“Look out!” Bedwyr leaped back.
“Do we have enough?” Cai snapped.
“Yes! Yes! Plenty.”
“Good. Then he doesn’t have to stay alive any more.” Cai stood up. With one slice of his sword he took off the man’s head,
Then he turned and walked away.

In the blog, she regrets having to play down the “list” feature so typical of these legends, though she does manage to echo it in one of the poems scattered through the narrative. But given the intended audience, I don’t think she could have done otherwise; most young readers would be unwilling to accept such long pauses in a story full of incident and narrative drive. She uses the poems to echo points where the original narrative is “written in a heightened prose” and to change the pace. They can also serve to see the story from a different angle, rather as Kipling uses poems to comment on short stories, and the first poem, “The Priest Tends the Grave” is a fine example of this. Prince Cilydd has assured his wife Goleuddydd, dying in childbirth, that he will never remarry. She, rating this promise at its true value and not wanting her son to have a stepmother, makes Cilydd vow to remarry only when he sees a bramble growing on her grave; then, unbeknown to him, she lays a duty on the priest attending her to weed the grave. Only after the old man’s death does the bramble grow:

He's busy. Gets there late on an autumn evening.
There are shoots. On his neck her angry breathing.

A decade of dandelion, nettle-sting,
He has grey hair now. His hands, uprooting.

Who can stop this green life? It just comes.
A dead queen torments his dreams
.
Boys play on the graveyard wall. His knees hurt.
Thorns tangle around his heart
.
He’ll be as cold as her next winter.
Every tale has another chapter.

Several of the story’s themes are miraculously condensed here, notably the attempts of the old and dead to control the young and alive, and the resurgence of life against all odds. Like all Catherine Fisher’s books for children and young adults, this has plenty to interest older readers as well.

I am a woman of neither here nor there (“Lands of Mine”)

This is a first collection of 20 poems by a poet of mixed heritage from Wales. I was attracted to it partly because I lived many years in Cardiff and partly because I have a weakness for poets who don’t quite come from any one place, either because they are deracinated or because their roots are various – “lands of mine”, rather than the singular “land”, to quote the first poem’s title – and who, as a result, often don’t have a comfort zone.

The poems reflect the problematic elements in both sides of her ancestry. Her Welsh “nan” is the archetypal supportive Valleys grandmother, but Wales is also where, during the poet’s childhood, she has been racially insulted and regarded as “different”. This can lead to embracing more fervently the other half of one’s identity, but that too is not so simple, perhaps especially for a woman who has grown up in a culture that pays at least lip service to female equality:

 ‘Please, sister, stand on this pedestal just below me.’
 ‘But brother, paradise lies at my mother’s feet, not yours.’ (“Qawwam”)

Rather than choose one over the other, she decides that “finding the space in between/was the goal” (“I Don’t See Colour”) and several poems do in fact focus on connexions, likenesses between her “two lands”, which are not hard to find. In “Beauty and Blood” she likens Capel Celyn, flooded for a reservoir to send water to Liverpool, to the Hammar Marshes, drained by Saddam in his war with the Marsh Arabs:

  Imagine they drained the Hammar
 to flood Capel Celyn: an exchange of tears
 displacing people like chessboard pawns.
 Part the whispering reeds’ soft curls
 and watch smatterings of life drift lost.
 As the little Welsh town fills with water,
 hear the pained goodbyes of women
 who tattoo each other’s stories in secret.

This does a good job of reminding the reader that the terms “us” and “them” properly apply to ordinary folk all over the world (“us”) and those in power (“them”) who regularly mess up our lives. Sometimes her language is less powerful, because in her drive to convince, she forsakes the poetic for the didactic. For me at least, “Croesawgar”, though it has its moments, is more of a political lecture than a poem, all rhetoric and no music. This urge to convince is something most poets need time and a lot of practice to learn to control; it comes with increasing confidence in one’s own voice, so that the words on the page no longer feel they have to shout to get their point across.

This is a lively, promising collection, mostly in free verse but with some experiments in shape and a couple of rhyme poems, of which the ghazal “Paradise for Poets” is handled so well that I hope she will experiment with more of them. The final poem “Watching him eat strawberries”, about her small son, ends with a verse that repeats a significant phrase:

  But I want to stay here,
 with his dirt-filled fingernails,
 juice trickling down that little chin.
 Wallahi, I want to stay here.

Clearly in this context, “here” is not a place but a situation, a way of being; she wants to stay in the moment. And she knows, of course, that this is impossible; there is no staying anywhere or anywhen. But then if there were, we would have far fewer poems.

This is an anthology of poems published in aid of Ty Hafan, a hospice for terminally ill children in South Wales. All proceeds from sales go to the hospice; the publisher and contributors gave their work gratis. These contributors include several big names – George Szirtes, Philip Gross, Tamar Yoseloff, Rowan Williams and Pascale Petit among others, and a few poems are, fittingly, in Welsh. They also include one of mine, but as usual I have decided I can reasonably review the rest of the anthology.

The poems are themed around childhood and parenting. There is an introduction by Tony Curtis in which he outlines how the anthology came about, and one by the director of Ty Hafan in which she explains its remit. There’s also a third, which might seem like one too many, a foreword by Ilora Finlay which I think might be unintentionally misleading. Many poetry fans would read phrases like “this beautiful gentle anthology” and “poems to bring calm warmth to the reader” with apprehension, fearing that they heralded acres of sentimental undemanding hygge – I knew this couldn’t be so, but only because I knew the work of many of the poets. 

In fact most of these poems are by no means “gentle”, nor aimed at providing warm fuzzies – how could they be, with such a powerful and challenging theme?  Some of the children in these poems were wanted but never born; some died young or became estranged from their parents. Even in the happiest cases, children grow up and leave, while parents don’t live for ever – one of the most powerful poems here, or indeed in existence, is the late Emyr Humphreys’ “From Father to Son” with its almost unbearably moving vision of a dead father: 

    There is no limit to the number of times
   Your father can come to life, and he is as tender as ever he was
   And as poor, his overcoat buttoned to the throat,
   His face blue from the wind that always blows in the outer darkness

The anthology is in three sections; the first concerns conception (or failure to conceive), birth and infancy. In this section, poems that particularly struck me were Zoe Brigley’s “Name Poem”, about the feelings of would-be parents who go home empty-handed 

     and intimate as a gun to the temple:
    your name sounds the trigger click

and George Szirtes in his most playful and joyous mode for “New Borns”: 

    What child with foreknowledge would enter the world?
   I would, said Geraldine,
   For gooseberries, geckos, goldfinches, gorgonzola,
   I would enter the world.

There’s a whole alphabet of this, and knowing that among the names are those of the poet’s grandchildren somehow adds to its delight.

The second section concerns childhood and schooldays, and the standouts here for me were Jude Brigley’s rueful musings on why children seem to recall the times one failed as a parent better than the times when one succeeded (and how appropriate that this anthology should contain poems by a mother and daughter!), John Barnie’s “Standing By”, with its perfectly judged rhythms that make one want to read it aloud, and above all, Paul Henry’s spare, taut “The Nettle Race”, short enough to quote in full:

    Tilting into the garden wall
   three boys’ bicycles,
   frieze of an abandoned race.

    Briars cover the chains,
   their absent riders’ chins.
   The tortoise rust won with ease.

    Slowly the sun leans
   towards its finishing line.
 

In the last section, focusing on increasing distance between child and parent, the scope widens and we hear, through the words of writers like Abeer Ameer, Lawrence Sail and Jo Mazelis, the voices and concerns of the displaced and endangered elsewhere in the world. In Sail’s “Childermas” the hand-holding gesture of two refugee children becomes iconic, universal:

    They are following the bent backs
   of grown-ups with bikes and bundles, heading
   for Cox’s Bazar; as always, they are holding hands. 

    The last time they surfaced was in northern France, at the tail
   of a struggling queue on a beach.
   They were waiting to board an already laden
    black rubber boat – and holding hands, as always.

There are many fine, powerful poems in this anthology, and plenty of reason to buy it even without the impetus of a good cause. It can be ordered direct from Ty Hafan here.

Sound of leaves not falling

The title of one of the poems here, it could well also stand as an epigraph, for there is a lot of space, absence, not-happening, right from the beginning of this collection:

When you step in to the empty room
you interrupt whatever it was
that the room wasn’t doing (“Standing place”)

These first few poems are also much concerned with memory, its unreliability, the way it fictionalises and casts doubt on reality.

No no, they say. You never saw him.
He couldn’t stand, and you were far too young.
But you did. He could. (“Still”)

Solid furniture is “ruffled”; a sofa stares at “where you seem to be”. But amongst this doubt, insubstantiality and shifting, another possible epigraph, from “In this stilled air the turning trees”, would be “the shape we make in time”.  Mr Meredith has been a remarkably busy bee of late, bringing out both a novel and a poetry collection in the same month, and it is natural to look for correspondences between them. The novel, Please, reviewed here, is much concerned with the shape we make in time, its impermanence and how it may be differently seen, not only by different people but by the same person at different stages of life. These concerns also haunt this collection; it often seems to be trying to establish what locus exactly humans can claim in “their” landscape, “the standing place/where you can’t stay”.

It is a collection very aware of landscape, as this poet has always been, but while sharp, observational language like “the inimical gorgeous cold” (“Even in dreamscapes”) could have come from any of his collections, the sense of the vastness of landscape compared to its temporary human inhabitants in “North coast swing” seems new: 

the nuances of grey stretch out immense, unhuman
into the toppled corridor of air
that rifts the sea and cloud.  

Various ways of memorializing the dead – statues, photographs, writing, cherishing mementoes, human memory itself – crop up, and all, in the end, seem inadequate, erased. The narrator of “Upstairs” looks for traces of a dead woman in her former rooms:

Something in us builds imaginary rooms
the walls somehow exhaling truth
a rippled glass reflecting
a familial face.
And on the battlements must be a ghost,
mustn’t there, with a remembered voice  

But in the end:

I could think of nothing
but a steep path down a cliff
all rock and light and moving air
and at its end
the sea.
 

Dry humour is still, as ever, a feature. In “Village birds”, our jackdaw-narrators assume human civilisation has evolved purely for their benefit: 

We bring meaning
to your heapings of the curious rocks.

Those chimneys are evolved
for purging jackdaws’ ticks.

The privet rooms are meant for us.
We hold our councils on your walls 

But the sardonic humour is darkened by our realisation that this assumption is no more fanciful than our own habit of supposing (like Don Marquis’s toad Warty Bliggens) that the planet we live on was created for our convenience. In one of the last poems, “On Allt yr Esgair”, the human is more or less assimilated into the landscape, with an acceptance that, inadequate as they may be, pen and brush are the only ways we can make our mark on it: 

Under the serpent galaxy
the motifs of stone hills recur
in scoops and curls across the sky
cutting the landscape’s signature. […]  

What else is left for us but this?
With pen and brush to shape our track,
like moths and streams and hills and stars,
a human shadow on the rock.

 Technically very subtle and varied, with an unobtrusive tracery of half-rhyme running through it, this collection has moments where it veers into ballad, legend and folk-tale territory. “The train north”, an account of a journey not taken (how characteristically for this collection) during the poet’s time in Finland, is a stand-out poem for its strangeness and edginess, while “Nightfall” is a very powerful eco-poem that manages to be menacing rather than preachy:
 

Light cools
on the hill above the villages.
The shadowline
is flowing up the field.
See the wounded
limping from the ridges
with rags tied
round the remnant of a world.
They watch
the houses’ gradual effacement
under the shadow
as each light goes out.
The villagers
are shuttering the casements
and call
for barricades across the street.
 

It’s interesting that both the novel and this collection have monosyllabic titles. This certainly is not because Meredith’s lifelong fascination with, and delight in, words is diminishing, but there is at times in these poems a sense of spareness, of a view pared down to what matters: the bones of a landscape, the space where a person is, or sometimes is not. 

“There are at least thirty people around a large fire; some of them dancing to drum and bass being played off a portable Bose speaker, some of them sitting on small camping chairs, talking to each other with focused facial expressions. Hill stops walking and immediately feels self-conscious.

Please, a tidal wave, Hill thinks.”

 I had heard a lot about this novel, before reading it, from various people, few of whom agreed about it. A word that cropped up again and again was “marmite”, ie you’re either going to love it or hate it, and I think that may be true for many readers. It is even true of certain elements of it – for instance, the protagonist Hill, known by his surname, introverted, desperately uneasy in company, struck an immediate chord with me; I found him relatable and interesting. By contrast his girlfriend Trudy was, to me, dislikeable and irritating in the extreme. I know, having read some reader reactions, that many have just the opposite experience (rather like real life, then).  

Some who dislike it cite the writing style, finding it unduly “clever” and affected. In this I think they are mistaken, for Roberts is using no stylistic device without a reason. It is true, for instance, that at times there is a great deal of repetition, also that often the syntax is broken down into individual thoughts and actions in a deconstructed, Janet & John sort of way:

“A medium-sized motorboat picks up a group of eight people from the pier. The people are happy. They are happy because they are going to see dolphins swimming in the wild.”

Both these techniques are mirroring the point-of-view character’s state of mind. Hill’s life at this point is full of fairly aimless repetition, as is his brooding on past events, notably the death of his wife. And he is living not just from day to day but pretty much from minute to minute, hence the stop-start syntax. In fact, this technique works well both for mirroring Hill’s hesitant, self-analysing attempts to move forward and for pointing up the disconnect between words and feelings:

“Stuart looks at his watch and says he has to get home to his wife and kids. He takes his phone out of his trouser pocket and suggests he and Hill swap numbers.
 Great, Hill says.
Why, Hill thinks.”

It’s also, as will be evident from the above quotes, often quite funny, albeit in a dark way, perhaps never more so than in one of the many draft emails with which we must hope Hill, a film-maker, does not actually pester Jack Black. I have seldom seen tone of voice better conveyed in writing than by the apparently simple device of highlighting every cliché with quote marks: 

“Have you ever had to deal with a terminally ill person, ‘Jack’? Unlike, or like – I guess it’s subjective, your films, it’s not a ‘barrel of laughs’. It’s ‘really fucking awful’. Roger is not going to ‘make it through this’, this is one ‘battle’ that he is not going to ‘win’. What was/is your father like? Is he ‘belligerent’? Is he ‘for all intents and purposes’ the ‘reason’ your mother died? Has he ‘skewered’ your ‘world view’ ‘seemingly permanently’? Does he ‘suck’? Do we have this ‘in common’? I’m trying to find ‘commonality’ between us, so you can maybe ‘go the extra mile’ towards putting some ‘concrete steps’ in place to make my life ‘better’. I have less money today than the day we Skyped. Is that ‘bittersweet’ for me?”

This is, quite often, a novel about things that don’t happen: a film project that doesn’t look like getting made, a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, remarks not uttered, emails not sent, a conversation between father and son that (probably) never happens. If you want a novel with conventional narrative techniques, a lot of forward momentum and resolution, this probably isn’t the one for you. But it occurs to me that real life, right now, doesn’t have much of those either. I’ve heard this described as “millennial”, which sounds like one of those silly boxes that critics try to cram art into against its will. But it could certainly be called a novel for our times. As so often happens, this at first seems accidental, for it was written pre-pandemic. 

However, any novel that manages to catch a zeitgeist has probably tapped into current concerns at a deeper level than just keeping up with the news. This one was voted winner of the Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” by its readers. No doubt it was happenstance that many were reading in lockdown, feeling their lives were on hold and wondering where, if anywhere, they were going, both literally and otherwise. Hill would have resonated as an avatar with them. But perhaps also the enforced pause of the pandemic caused them to begin wondering if they had been going anywhere before, in which case Hill and his novel would have even more relevance to them.

Kit, a young social worker, and Vernon, her mentor, are in a meeting with legal adviser Sue about a difficult case. Vernon, in his sixties, is getting a bit jaded with officialese:


"Vernon briefed Sue Sullivan while they waited for the Coopers to arrive. Kit handed her a copy of the proposed supervised contact agreement and she scanned it.
‘They’re going to want mother supervising contact. That’s going to be a major sticking point. Why don’t you trust her to do it?’
‘She’s arsey,’ Vernon replied.
‘Right. Or as we will perhaps put it, we don’t feel we can rely on her cooperation as yet.’
‘That’s it.’"

It is this kind of dialogue which tells you at once that you are listening to an author who knows whereof they speak.  Its easy assurance reminded me of Mike Thomas’s police procedural novels, and this novel is indeed also set in South Wales, but here for “police” read “social workers with special responsibility for childcare”.  Kit and Vernon spend their days trying to protect children, knowing that if they read one of their overload of cases wrong, they will be crucified by the press for either breaking up a family or failing a child.

Kit has been assigned a case that is really beyond her experience, because her department is understaffed and what staff there are, tend to burn out and go sick. A man has been accused of abusing two young girls over a decade ago. Since then, he has married and had three children, one of whom is the same age his accusers then were, hence the interest of social services. To make matters still more tricky, he and his family are educated, articulate middle-class with influential connections, not the sort to be overawed by authority.

I don’t think it’s any spoiler to say that from the outset it does look as if there is something not quite right about this family – the question is what, from whom it emanates and most of all, whether Kit can find any proof for it. Indeed, the alert reader may pick up some hints more quickly than Kit does, mainly because we do not have 15 similar cases to think about at the same time. Even then, though, we shall find our opinions of people constantly shifting, as hers do, and having to remember Vernon’s warning that nobody is all of a piece.

These salutary thoughts will not stop the reader occasionally yelling at Kit, “listen to X”, or “find out about Y”, because that is where much of the tension resides.  Kit is herself a survivor of a neglectful mother and a care home, and one of her siblings, Tyler, is still haunted by childhood events which Kit is trying to help him cope with. One thing that comes over very clearly from this novel is how easily an inexperienced, overworked person with worries of their own might miss, or misinterpret, something vital to a child’s welfare. It is significant, I think, that some of the most important things Kit finds out, both about this case and events in her brother’s past, she discovers by illicit, or at least not-approved-of, means - if she went wholly by the book, the ending would be very different.

This is a whodunnit, a did he dunnit, and if he dunnit, can they prove it? Which makes for a constant page-turner.  It is also a Bildungsroman for Kit, a likeable and credible character, but above all it is a testimony from a very hard place to work, by someone who quite clearly has been there, done that. Please don’t shy away because of the difficult nature of the material – the book, cannily, does not, in fact, dwell on harrowing aspects; it is enough to hint at them. There is humour, too, in Vernon’s battle with tidier souls who talk in management-speak and care more to protect their own backsides than anything else. But above all, there is this assurance, the feeling that we are listening to an author completely in control of their material, as we see from the first time Kit enters her open-plan office:


"The noise level was rising as dozens of phones rang and social workers rushed out on urgent visits, or in to make phone calls and get advice from their seniors. Impromptu meetings were going on all over the place: at desks, in corridors, in the coffee area and outside the toilets. Snippets of conversations reached Kit above the hubbub as she passed each team. One social worker was anxious about a teenager, a regular selfharmer who had gone missing from care over the weekend and had not yet turned up. In another team, the manager was trying to allocate the usual batch of domestic-violence referrals resulting from the weekend’s rugby-related drinking, her staff trying not to meet her eye. Wales had lost, Kit remembered, so no wonder they were reluctant to volunteer.

As Kit passed the Youth Justice Team, she spotted a young social worker sitting in silence with the phone to her ear, tears rolling down her face. Even from a few feet away, Kit could hear the furious shouting at the other end."

   He smiles. Calmer than he thought he would be. Shrugs off his rucksack and places it on the ground. Reaches inside and pulls them out. One, two, three. Enough for now.  Digs out his lighter, sparks it. Watches the dancing women, the happy families. Taps his foot and nods his head in time to the beat from a nearby sound system.
   Lights one of the fuses and tosses the IED into the crowd.

Penarth didn't do sink estates. The closest it ever had – the Billy Banks flats, a failed sixties development of dog-turd-encrusted grass patches and pebble-dash the colour of smog – had been demolished at the tail end of the noughties to make way for stratospherically expensive apartments and townhouses. replete with private security patrols and a propensity amongst the occupants to wear sailor hats and shorts, possibly because at least three of the buildings offered a glimpse of the Bristol Channel.