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HOME ABOUT BRENDA KEATS HOUSE THE OVERDOSE LIFE AND DEATH IN CAMDEN DEATH AND THE MAIDEN THE ENFIELD SONNETS THE PAIN CLINIC THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT NEW POEMS PROTESTS ART GALLERY REVIEWS LINKS |
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THE ENFIELD SONNETS: BRENDA WILLIAMS SIXTIES PRESS I brought the lopsided baggage of my working past to this collection of sonnets, which itself is an extract from a larger sequence of 500 sonnets. This 88 page pamphlet - 3 untitled sonnets a side, 2 when titled - is dedicated to the memory of Christine Blake who died in her home in Fordwych Road a few doors away from the West Hampstead Day Hospital’ The sonnets combined ‘tell the story of how a protest against the managers of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust was mounted and maintained and brought to an end after nine months by the death of a friend.’ This world of circular conversations I inhabited for 14 years, as an 8 hour a day paid visitor to it - to Victorian asylums and to ‘purpose-built’ psychiatric units. Shades and echoes – people, states of mind, emotions - spring off these pages. Reborn anew too is my anger at the withdrawing - in the name of community. modernity - of resources for ‘those deemed to be mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually unwell, in need of help. (I am in danger here, in this review of mounting my own hobby horses. But which can only again, vouch for the veracity of these verses - in that they have managed to strike so many chords.) Let us put content aside for the moment. Written in plain speech these are true sonnets - with an unobtrusive Shakespearean rhyme scheme and a rich mix of language and concept I don’t think that I have ever before, in such a strict verse form, apart from John Clare, read despair so well, so consistently, articulated. Unless it was in the free verse of Stevie Smith. No; this is poetry for poets to be amazed at. After reading this will any of us dare to put pen to paper again; and, should we so dare, will we have the gall to call it poetry? Brenda Williams’ narratives cover maternal abandonment, the death of friends, post September 11th 2001... Post-modern almost in their self-regarding at times, yet this remains a poetry that cannot be separated out from its narrative content. Craft and discipline ensure that we become as caught up in her questioning of the whole of her life, and which includes her doubts’ over the expression of that questioning. Yet, neither didactic nor polemic, she leaves space enough in each of these sonnets for the reader’s own imagination/memory. Within these two hundred and more sonnets form and subject matter alone is bound to throw up ‘repetitions’ - call them themes, motifs, what you will. Recurring often are the words ‘neon’, insomnia’ ‘a folded fan’, ledges’... But this is not, as the soft-voiced therapist was wont to say, a complaint solely an observation. Presented with these 200+ sonnets I had feared a bludgeoning regularity. Not so. Judge for yourself: measure the distance between these 3 picked almost at random. Language alone manages to steer me Through the hidden straits and open peril Of insomnia where rhythms to be Are stored unknown and unwritten until Conjured piecemeal into reality, Attended by their lost experience And pierced to the heart by memory Remaining yet fading from existence, While the future crumbles into nothing As though propped upon its own far shadow Under a precarious scaffolding, A replica left empty and hollow Within and mimicking words forgotten, Splintered into time between now and then. from ‘The Fields of Killingbeck’ My mind tells me that only stupor is Worse but my senses say it is the pain, Either way, between these polarities, I live through days that will not come again And endless nights that will not go away, And however much I try to simply Hold on, my life is just another day Breaking into the dark infinity Of a void with a paralysing force Of its own that stuns me and propels me Into stasis, the arc of an early Existence nearing the end of its course^ The words echo mimicking airlessness And the long drawn ricochet of distress. from ‘The Pain Clinic’ It is difficult to negotiate The unfolding precipitous footpath Of the ‘talking cure’, too soon or too late And there is nothing but the aftermath Of a wrong turning, the slow circuitous Forgotten route back to the beginning Again, lost among the coterminous Echoes of life alongside existing Within the past tense of the verb to be. The future is seen as if in a dream Already there, not the reality Of falling through the air to things that seem, Experience is unalterable, Bewildering the battle of it all. from ‘Four Months’ Brenda Williams’ has been a life saved, so far, by the writing of poetry. That, in itself, would be enough to commend her practise of poetry. These sonnets, however, move way beyond their effect on their author. What more can I say in praise of the sonneteer Brenda Williams? She’d be inspirational if she wasn’t the Ozymandias of modern verse. Suffice it to say that I left this (part-) collection with thanks, and with my wish for her that being alive becomes an unquestioned habit. Barry Tebb’s Sixties Press has performed a public service in bringing these sonnet sequences together, where their massed weight is, aesthetically and politically, far more effective than would be scattered publication in small press magazines. My hope is that this is but part of the beginning of their becoming more widely read. Especially by those engaged in the funding and administration of ‘mental welfare.’ One final comment on the whole enterprise -poems, protest and publication - has to be that, in reading this, I was reminded of my working wish for a return to an emphasis on the caring for, on the looking after, on the offering of sanctuary and asylum to those in need of it; rather than the sole administration of therapy, on the push to make well, with targets and timetables inbuilt. In this country now, on both sides of the divide - genuine helper and would-be helped - despair squats on top of despair, with only the deluded having any faith in the future. And hearken unto this - in his day John Clare (1793-1864), spending the last 40 years of his life in Northampton asylum and being actively encouraged to write, was better cared for than has been Brenda Williams (1948-). So much for our small minded politicians and their mealy-mouthed apparatchiks. Sam Smith THE JOURNAL THE PAIN CLINIC PARTS 1 AND 2 Brenda Williams Brenda Williams’ Enfield Sonnets contained some of the sonnets from The Pain Clinic. I reviewed that in #9 The Journal. Together these two Pain Clinic booklets contain 229 sonnets. That’s 3,206 lines of poetry; which had to be an enormous task for the author and one equally large for the reviewer. I dipped. Even then I was only occasionally drawn in, and then only when I recognised aspects from the above or before. Just to sustain the reader’s interest, because there has to be a rhythmic sameness, if not tedium, in 229 sonnets, which became overkill in my case, I believe Brenda Williams would have been better served with a careful 'Selection', the full set of sonnets being saved for an on-demand special edition. Because, given the one form and the relentless subject matter, even read in conjunction with Kith and Kin, these 229 sonnets required a devotion way beyond these reviewers. SAM SMITH The Journal #12
ARGUING WITH THEMSELVES Simon Jenner on the poetry of Brenda Williams
Sonnets are arguments with ourselves. The original 'sonetto' or 'song' when taken from the Italian of Cavalacanti and others assumed a far tougher, didactic voice when imported to Britain in the 16th century, striped with rain and sore throats: Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and overarchingly, Shakespeare. A certain bloody-mindedness thewed the form, rendering the surface a kind of lawyer's brief. Milton experimented with endings and got nastily political and personal. Wordsworth and particularly Keats had extraordinary battles with this inheritance. We all know how it worked at its best. At its worst, it becomes a lean causistical business, full of half-winded abstractions. However you vary it - and Tony Harrison's attempt to revive Meredith's 16-line sonnet is notable - cod-piece stiffness (as it were) is a real and present danger. In The Enfield Sonnets, Brenda Williams has partly fulfilled Christopher Reid's criterion that those poets who achieve excellence do so through obsessive focus on a narrow subject-matter, perhaps in a single genre: Williams has essayed this in a way virtually no other poet writing would even dare, with (as Reid noted) the exception of Jeremy Reed. (Reed is, in fact, one of the few kindred voices whom Williams echoes at all, in certain key-words like 'panel'/ and they admire each other.) Her subject-matter in 'The Pain Clinic' and other of these sonnet-sequences is, rightly, the record of her own and others' suffering, external and internalised. That is, certain key events trigger a fluent corpus: hospitalisation or the lack of it, a curious literary feud or elegies for someone who died whilst being told not to bother the authorities. Born on the night in December 1948 that Eliot got the Nobel Prize, as she wryly informs us, Williams adopts a plummet-ride of sonnets, is only partly indebted to another Boston type, Lowell, whom this procedure most obviously recalls. The sheer diaspora of themes are nothing like so egoic, or self-centering, let alone self-serving. Williams is a consummate sonneteer, in the sense that this stiffness never afflicts her. Her natural, fluidly turned phrasing and clear perspectives on the argument of each sonnet makes it an easily-read poem, beckoning one to read on. The dangers are equally easy to summarise: a certain diffuseness, repetition that can mean repletion, and, being sonnets, a refusal to crystallise imagery, preferring to move the argument forward. Thus the last is a defect of its necessary strength. Without the dialectic, the whole sequence would groan to a halt. This Williams never does, but she can sometimes sacrifice a necessary richness on the way, tending to abstract nouns. Her themes are so concrete, though, and much of the local detail so inlaid, that this is less of a distraction than it might be. And Williams often transcends all this, striking out in superlative phrase-making. In the last sequence, 'Coming Through' - a doubly-edged retort to our recent anthology - Williams transcends 'The sound of poets standing their ground'/ to continue: Search for me in the shadows the silent Echoes of the outsider in your midst, A recurring sound that was never meant To be heard left in the shortfall and blitz Of time... Such Shakespearean phrases as the last has been its reward. 'Coming Through' is studded with a few of these, and more generally another excellence merges in a whole sonnet, the next one in fact, where:
The half-light, as the haze before morning Breaks its banks when sometimes stars still adhere Stalling through the surface of their waning, A blue residuum suspended near The origin of imagination.
Three of the last of the 500 sonnets that form 'The Pain Clinic' have for some reason been inserted after 31 from the opening sequence. 498 involves the memorable lines 'Love was never like this, such rain where / Once falling snow was curling in his hair', though dating from 1987 (the other two from 2001 and 2002, pre-positioned for the later thrust of the work). After a homage to Tsvetayeva, the first numbered flickers into life with 'The locked momentum of January / Surrounds me at every turn, marginal / Insubstantial yet without the right key / To let myself out.' This plumbs the truer note, more steely and wintry, occasionally permitting a fine-tuned accidie with falling leaves. Central are the 10 sonnets 'In Memoriam Christine Blake', an elegy that touches the fine point of anger for a woman who was told to go away, and did, for good as it were, 'the unlit future seen / By you alone.' The first sonnet eloquently expounds the 'slowly foundering' subject that 'something beyond fear / Failed to prevent what you finally meant.' The second attests: As a fan
Too widely opened you could not get back, The separate panels of your life were Locked into place, a surface on the rack Of being that could yet go no further While the arc that held it all suddenly Gave way to the last trace of its story.
Williams is at her finest here and often throughout these ten sonnets, where apposite conceit and imagery is made to work for its keep and illuminate the argument. The fourth, recalling the funeral with 'Chestnut leaves unspread, recently broken / Under hazed green smoke' varies the poems' themes and occasions as well as its imagery. It's ending underpins, too, Williams' register of seasons:
As you passed before us into the hold Of time where sunlight and material Darkness broke from the cordon of April.
Words themselves 'refuse to adhere' in the next, echoing the reduction of people 'still installed / In your day', like pills. Even a sequence for 9/11 can elicit remarkable writing, partly because the abstraction of sonnets demands a dialectic on immediacy, so that 'A towering city collapses through / The juvenile reach of a busy day' is peculiarly right for New York. 'The Enfield Sonnets,' a daring essay on 'The airlessness and the nowhere of those / Days, helpless in the currents of something / I am unable to bring to a close'/ strike into pure sonnet reasoning. Williams dares to leave the local behind, despite the topology promised in the title, itself a lodging of her protest vigils. But these are memorably lit, literally, by describing words that
Light up the darkness of their own shadow As the flickering of fifties neon Off and on and trapped in the mind's echo Unanswerable as a signal shone From the endless reach of a bad Morse code.
All these sonnets glean or literally gleam something of Williams' predicament, where a mirror renders her 'trapped with the distance of my own echo'. The 75 sonnets here embrace a different and more impersonal enquiry than, say, 'In Memoriam Christine Blake' or 'The Pain Clinic', and furnish grounds for real study. This is difficult, even given the excellent typesetting, with three sonnets to a page. Williams needs to breathe, and, dare I say it (I do) a revision and wholesale condensation of some, since other dated works prove Williams is a fine reviser of her own texts, and, as Keats put it, 'read the more richly for it'. There's a headlong power in The Enfield Sonnets as a book and as separate sequences that haven't been encountered in sonnet form for a long time. Much of this book is studded, shot through - sometimes to a whole poem - with superb lines. Faults are obvious and easily addressed, more a re-arranging of laurels than resting or garnering fresh ones.
Brenda Williams, The Enfield Sonnets Available from sixtiespress@blueyonder.co.uk
Brenda Williams, The Enfield Sonnets (Sixties Press) 83 pages. This modest-looking book-length stapled pamphlet belies an exceptional talent. The author details on the inside front cover mention the well-publicised protests that Brenda Williams mounted against Leeds and Oxford Universities in the last decades of the twentieth century. The Times Higher Education Supplement called her a ‘Well-Versed Protester’ and even those who have only a fleeting acquaintance with her work may well think of her as ‘England’s leading protest poet’. And protest Brenda certainly does! But then she has much to protest about. The collection is dedicated to the memory of her friend Christine Blake who committed suicide “a few doors away from the West Hampstead Day Hospital” where she was denied refuge. In the elegiac sonnets of ‘20 October 1964’ Williams commemorates her friend’s untimely death thirty-six years age, and the rain resounds through both Octobers: “Rhythm came as falling rain, as the pain / Then that I would not see her face again.” ‘Dismantling Fordwych House’ is a painful record of the reduction in care for mental health patients - “More than fifty places will be reduced / To only fifteen, a day hospital / Razed to the ground, uncertainty unloosed”. With characteristic directness Williams questions:
Is there anyone to have recognised That this is a proposal that will kill The most meek and the most vulnerable?
In sonnet after flowing sonnet Williams is the voice of those who “are ill and therefore disenfranchised”. She is upfront about her own long and painful years of mental illness:
Most of the time I exist in complete Despair andhardly able to leave my Home, the world lies before me at my feet The past is an echo answering why, Trapped always between these extremes I need To draw, the finished picture is no more Than a poultice to draw out pain, to bleed Into colour again from a far core In the monochrome region of the mind (from ‘Dismantling Fordwych House’)
I found myself rereading those striking lines:
the finished picture is no more Than a poultice to draw out pain, to bleed Into colour again from a far core In the monochrome region of the mind
and this is the haunting effect that many of Williams’ images have.
The title sonnet sequence, ‘The Enfield Sonnets’, tells the story of its author’s protest against the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust managers. But it is also much more than a ‘protest’ poem. Here and in ‘In Memoriam Christine Blake’ Williams piles image after image in her description of the poetry that is an “unstifled unwritten cry”. “A poem is about surrendering”, she writes in an opening sonnet; in others she claims “Like a dream and its journey the poem /Unfolds” and “poetry is anaesthesia / For a pain that cannot be reconciled”. ‘The Fields of Killingbeck’ and ‘The Pain Clinic’ are substantial but incomplete poem sequences from Williams’ work in progress. They contain the often harrowing pain and insecurity of her poet’s life, harnessed tightly by the control and maturity of her beautiful sonnets. These are among her most recent pieces and prove that the exploration of poetry and of its origins remains a compelling subject. Their loose and mostly unpunctuated style gives them a rushing and breathless effect that contrasts with the traditional discipline of rhyme and metre. The very act of writing these sonnets seems to contain a therapeutic healing. Brenda Williams’ sonnet sequence, ‘Coming Through’, is typically a protest against hypocrisy and rejection. It’s opening lines are: “You never let on when I spoke to you / But it was your hand that rejected me / When I reached out for recognition”. Woe betide the “Lack Lustre Director” and any other ‘gatekeeper’ of the literary establishment who may unfairly exercise their power to deny Williams entry or a voice! They underestimate this quiet and unassuming woman, but will soon be taught that she has a mighty literary voice. Hers is a powerful pen and she can easily turn the tables on her oppressors, at least through her poetry. In ‘Coming Through’ she castigates “a liar through and through” with the certain knowledge that: “You, who left me to anonymity, / Are tarred with literary infamy.” Elsewhere Williams searches in vain for “The sound of the poets standing their ground”, but if others will not join in protesting against injustice, she has the courage to stand alone. So let me salute this passionate poet of pain and give her the last word in my review – she eminently deserves it –
…. Out Of the gridlock of the literary World I had pushed back my mind and body To their furthest extreme while allowing Its rejection to run right over me, With my last breath I just kept on writing. It is too late I am the unquiet Guest that will never sit at your banquet.
Debjani Chatterjee
THE ENFIELD SONNETS - Brenda Williams
Most poets have a go at trying to turn a sonnet at some point in their writing lives;afterall, it’s the equivalent of the four minute mile— fourteen lines in which to get your rhyme, scansion and content together, hopefully making some sense along the way! Brenda Williams, however, composes sonnets that How out as if exhaled naturally from her lungs: urgent e-mails from the subconscious to the printed page, chiselled jewels forged in the kiln of her ‘pain clinic.’ She has made the sonnet form her own medium for exploration of the self’s battle between the forces of sanity and madness. Her latest compilation of over 200 (!) sonnets has just been published by Barry Tebb's Sixties Press. "The Enfield Sonnets” is dedicated to Christine Blake, who died in April 2002, and tells the story of a nine-month protest against the managers of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust Whilst Protest (and representation of personal voices marginalized by the inequalities perpetrated by crass and uncaring bureaucracies) is often a trigger catalyst to Williams' poetry. It would be doing a disservice to the complexity and range of her work to dwell too much on it as a defining feature. The poems search deep into the psychological and spiritual fractures of a self living close to the edge of sanity, always risking confrontation with the chasms of pain lurking within the psyche that defy the approach of language, yet seeking moments of resolution and hinting at epiphanies of breakthrough realisation that make the whole ghastly business of suffering just about worth it. Yet there's a cool knowingness present too, an ironic awareness of the artist's need to court crisis in order to develop a path - "This is not my 'West Street Jail1 for I chose/ To be here and like Lowell I have made/ ‘My manic Statement’ unable to close/ Or shut down something within myself laid/ Out in front of me before I was born", she writes. And this is where the brilliance of her work lies, I think: the sense of order and elegance belonging to a sophisticated literary mind brought to bear upon the rawness and chaos of harrowing psychological experience. No poems just entertaining themselves here! - these poems needed to be written. Characteristically, Williams' sonnets open by establishing an urgent angst-ridden voice which summons a reader's attention. Usually a locational context of a hospital room or ward is etched in, followed then by a probing search into uncharted chambers of introspection where language fights to articulate the inarticulate, "where I live much as a castaway/ Inscribing fleeting words into the sand". Reading a sequence of her sonnets can be unsettling as each one embarks upon another foray into the darkness, echoes can be detected in recurrent words and images, the reader is forced to experience the relentless movement back into the nexus of suffering which is her quarry. Anyone who has endured any form of mental illness will instantly know and appreciate the paradoxical blend of fragility and toughness that informs her stance. But, although there's a crucifix of pain at the heart other work, many of the sonnets are curiously uplifting despite being clearly rooted in depressive territory; an open-ended metaphysical resonance emerges in lines like: “The far monochrome region at the core/Of being, the sunless light in a dream/ In the starless darkness of things that seem." Ultimately, her poems calibrate (and celebrate?) the ongoing parallel search for healing to spiritual/ psychological fracture alongside the refinement of a lexical patterning that can often scale the heights of the sublime...and heck! in this age of pop-up ephemeral art where fatcat entrepreneurs have turned into the arbiters of contemporary taste through creating" the'cult of the personality' with their bullying cheque books, it's good to unturf the real thing: a poet who seeks to follow her muse to the 'far edge' without thought of fame or money. So, forget The Poetry Soc’s recommended top ten Collections or whatever, and get hold of Brenda Williams’ "The Enfield Sonnets". She's an artist writing at the top of her form and deserves a wider readership (meanwhile she will no doubt be getting on with the next 300 sonnets...!)
Mark Floyer
KONFLUENCE
ENFIELD SONNETS BRENDA WILLIAMS This collection is the collected and distilled poetic work of a considerable talent. It was a welcome surprise to encounter it. It is not at all an "easy read"; there is tragedy; but this is the centre of Brenda Williams' creative matrix, because a poetic work is here and this is whence it has been borne. This is a very coherent group of writing, the singer has one voice throughout but many tones. I think that among the authors influences must be Cavafy; I think I detected some structural similarities to that difficult but rewarding poet. The verbal felicities are quite remarkable and can be found on nearly every page. There are remarkable resonances; Ezra Pound at Pisa is one. This collection is very complete; the work is mature and musical. Every poem is created and crafted with the greatest care. It is almost composed rather than written. Although we always go through a book carefully, editorially, because ‘typos’ can slip in, it would be almost an insult to this work to suggest the alteration of a word. Mark Sykes Publisher’s reader
NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
BRENDA WILLIAMS: THE ENFIELD SONNETS This 83-page work comprises well over 200 sequential sonnets, dated between 2000 and 2003, under 12 titles. The first title, 20 OCTOBER 1964, contains four sonnets written at the start of this period, 36 years after Brenda's father died. This, the September 11th deaths, the sad death of Christine Blake, were among the influences which eventually triggered off the inevitabilities of an endemicity of poetry in 14-line parcels, seeming already inwardly gathered in and ready for page or speech projection. These are Shakespearean in rhyme scheme but with a footage of mixed metre, nevertheless possessing a natural rather than academic flow. An insistent undercurrent, buzz or hum — call it what you will — forms a kind of mini-rhythmic sonic baseline against which the words are the blips in a CRT display. One effect is that the poem words, being modulations of a carrier wave always present, or something equivalent to a tread mill on which she performs, have a passivity dependent for life on this undercurrent. e.g. in the title piece of 30 sonnets she is . . unable to close Or shut down something within myself laid Out in front of me before I was born, A trajectory left there to free-wheel From an open downward slope . . . and if there is no inspiration, there is always the dream undercurrent, viz: Why am I unable to face my own Silence the mute words will not go away They assail in dreams in rhythms alone Left over from an unwritten text, they Light up the darkness of their own shadow As the flickering of fifties neon ... The line languishes and rhymes beneath my Feet as an unstifled unwritten cry. To divorce this poet from her dream baseline is to destroy her, with fear instilled. The sameness, the moving dream material, membrane or strip on which she builds is a lifeline, and probably the reason why the safety of sonnet sequences is the form of her expression. If directional inspiration does not appear, the conditioned poetry base takes over: There is a floor that is interstitial Palpable between the polarities Of a dream stretching into terminal Darkness and left to plunge precipitous Towards its own infinity below. Silence that I am always on the edge Of, pushed so far there is nowhere to go To except insomnia, the last ledge To which I cling, veering on the abyss ... Out of the chaos the words come In their fashion and of their own accord. In a more objective climate of thought, even sad and in accord with the suffering of another human being, the poetry is more memorable, the vowel/consonant handling of verbal continuity excellent, as in Sonnet 4 of IN MEMORIAM CHRISTINE BLAKE: Our Lady's Candles were still emerging, Chestnut leaves unspread, recently broken Under hazed green smoke,were slowly drifting Upward through the grey pall of winter when You suddenly turned away from it all. A single candle in the space behind You at the last lap of your funeral Burned through the terminal silence . . . Like this, many offerings from this interesting poet are truly beautiful. reviewer: Eric Ratcliffe.
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