John Hartley Williams Assault on the Clouds
David Clarke Gaud
reviewed by Ian Pople
Much is made on the blurb of John Hartley Williams’
individuality. He’s described as ‘one of
the great originals of contemporary English poetry’, and ‘joyfully anarchic and
surrealist’. In fact, Williams and
Clarke share a love of quirky narrative. Thus, a range of characters populate
both poets work, sometimes with names that wouldn’t have shamed Douglas Adams. In Assault on the Clouds: Hartley Williams has produced a group of
short stories in verse, in which a group of characters react in varying ways to
wild and surreal events in their ‘lives’.
Eggwold Zunn, the auto-didact, meditates on Cleopatra’s nose, and is
asked to comment on many things from the deposing of the Emperor, to the nude Saint Ronda of
Arboa. The General rides his donkey
around an imagined country, Arboa, which, I’m sure, we are meant to assume is a
mythical China. And a ‘poet’ who also comments laconically on the action going
on around ‘him’.
I’m assuming that the poet in the texts is a him. This is as much because the writing as a
whole is muscular and direct. I hesitate
to call it ‘masculine’, but actually it does come across as rather
masculine. The humour seems of a piece
with that slightly common-room satire which has provided a rich vein of English
writing but can be a little exclusive and public school.
That is my reservation about this collection. But there is no doubt that Hartley Williams
is hugely inventive and has created a ‘world’ in these poems that is often
fully realised and involving. Hartley
Williams also invents words which nicely fit in the worlds of the poems, ‘The
travellers are spying with their vanderscopes/on the geisha and her poet./She
retains a single comb in crowblack hair;/ he roams her apricot thighs with his
tongue.’ ‘Through the Keyhole’. This
excerpt illustrates some of Hartley Williams’ method; the clipped sentence structure containing a
clipped portrayal of events; the deft
use of an unusual adjectives, i.e., ‘apricot’.
David Clarke’s Gaud is a winner in the Flarestack
pamphlet competition. And there is a
muscularity to Clarke’s writing too.
Where Hartley Williams has a clipped, snappy style, Clarke uses a more
impacted, costive syntax. That sentence
structure is much more populated with adjectives than Hartley Williams’,
‘Haggard teenagers/in threadbare chinos riffle/Blu-Rays of gaudy murder,/as the
in-store DJ spins a/ retro Osmonds cut.// And the result of this density is
that the charge of over-writing might sometimes be laid at Clarke’s door. That said, Clarke, like Hartley Williams, is
entirely capable of creating an adroitly imagined world in his poems; for example in ‘Notes Towards a Definition of
the Revolution’ Clarke reports ‘an earnest// panel of intellectuals consuming/
meat-paste sandwiches in a Sheffield Labour/ Club in the mid 1970s;’ There’s a loving detail in that which is beguiling
and strong. And here too, is an example
of Clarke’s way with line-endings where adjective may be sheared from their
nouns.
Ian Pople's Saving Spaces is published by Arc. His first book of poetry, The Glass Enclosure (Arc, 1996), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, An Occasional Lean-to, was published by Arc in 2004. He teaches at the University of Manchester.
Comments