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COLLECTED POEMS     THE PAIN CLINIC     THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT     KEAT'S HOUSE     

 BRENDA WILLIAMS: THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT

This pamphlet by Brenda Williams — described on the jacket as Britain's leading Protest Poet — consists entirely of fourteen-liners, forty-one in total. Most, but not all, adopt the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearian sonnet along with ten syllables per line, although Williams makes no attempt at metre and there is often no discernible volta. She uses the form in different ways, as stand-alone poems and also as sonnet sequences or stanzas in longer poems. The best of them combine insight with simplicity and real lyricism. This is one of my favourites:

                      FOR JOHN HORDER

                     I watch the day distance itself over

                     Hampstead Heath and from an open window

                     Of a psychiatric ward I wonder

                     With the lost steadfast leaves falling below

                     Why am I here? Were the nights as a child

                     With my mother and our endless journey

                     Through the streets of Leeds, through desperate wild

                     Rain just to end in vain in a room here?

                     While November trees hold the listless leaves

                     Held within the first fold of memory,

                     How the end of a single leaf retrieves

                     The meaning I have lost, how childhood's key

                     Is broken fast within its lock. Leaves late

                     In their own stillness falter as I wait.

Note the skilful use of internal rhyme and assonance.

The longer poems or sequences — ON THE DEATH OF DOROTHY TEBB, FORDWYCH HOUSE and PAIN CLINIC — are perhaps less successful, spreading themselves more thinly and (for me at any rate) over-endowed with introspective angst; although the closing stanza in PAIN CLINIC is a fine poem in its own right:

                     Poetry used to be something quiet,

                     Somewhere I could lose myself for a while,

                     A space on earth left empty and to let

                     To words alone, a place where the dial

                     Hand can stop and the world can wait outside

                     And go on looking casual. I dream

                     Only of sleep and the rhythms are wide

                     Open and full of intent and they seem

                     To want to break themselves on another

                     Shore as I hurtle into overdrive

                     Losing the chance for rest for a further

                     Night and wondering how I will survive.

                     New words for old, yet summoning instead

                     Somewhere for the spirit to lay its head.

Williams is no stranger to the dark night of the soul, and G M Hopkins would empathise with many of the poems here.

reviewer: David Anthony.

BRENDA WILLIAMS: DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

I have read and enjoyed poems by Brenda Williams in the past, and thus was pleased to be able to review a full pamphlet of her work. She's a lyrical, complex poet, who's very good at sonnets and the singing line. Influences on her work seem to stretch far, from beat poetry to Blake.

I think that, at times, the poems contained in this volume suffer from images that are a little too abstract, and that these occasionally undercut the poem as a whole yet, having said this, her work is worth perseverance. In this volume, I liked the shorter poems better than the long poems, as I felt that these had a much more fluid sound to them, and avoided being over decorated, but I did think that the skeins of autobiography running through both short and long works were fascinating. In the long poems, the twin influences of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg are much in evidence. Also, the poet is very good at providing bleak and memorable snapshots of landscape, that remain lodged in the mind of the reader.

The title long poem, DEATH AND THE MAIDEN contains some great elegiac images, of music, landscapes, time, and urban life. Eliot's influence seems much in influence here, as do the influences of those poets mentioned above. The first sections of the poem work very well. The central parts of the poem, I sometimes felt, could have done with a little pruning, particularly the use of the small i, that seemed to be in danger of being over repeated. I also felt that the lack of punctuation became a little over done, but this is purely a personal preference on my part. Having articulated such reservations, I liked the ambitious nature of the poem (whilst not being over keen on its title). At best, the images of music recalled Dryden's great poem for Saint Cecilia's Day, and the images of rain, marcasite, granite, and light were memorable in the extreme. The poem's last words lily lily were like the last notes of a symphony after an orchestra has reached the crescendo of the piece.

This volume is definitely worth the hard work necessary on the reader's part, and, with reservations, the final work provides the volume with an impressive title poem. This is a work that is definitely worth reading, and, at £3.00 from the Sixties Press, more than reasonable in price.

reviewer: Deborah Tyler-Bennett.

THE LANTERN REVIEW

Death and the Maiden  Brenda Williams

Sixties Press, 89 Connaught  Road, Sutton, Surrey SM1 3PJ England £3.00 

Brenda Williams breaks rules by being conservative in form (mostly the Shakespearean sonnet) but anarchic in content -very astute. At first off-putting because of the thickness and size of the verse – like slices of Christmas cake - her poetry soon takes hold. We are used to smaller, thinner stanzas these days, with the white page sometimes being 50% of the statement. If there is such a thing as ‘full rhetoric’ as opposed to the empty variety, it is in Brenda Williams’ collection. She has important things to say - not only for herself, but on behalf of others not as gifted:

Was it for this my mother lived her brief

Hour following in the footsteps of her

Life, existing alone with a belief....

..... something she could not talk about

While she raised us with what was left to give

Beneath her images a robust and articulate mind is at work.

In your Mr Flintoff holds out little hope, she tilts at the University

........ and poetry today flourishes at St Hugh's.

Rachel, you can keep your place for I've heard that female dons

suffer from mysogyny much as men but worse

everyone was there permeable green glass a floral

garden at the waxworks museum I was unable

to distinguish between the live and the dead ...   

Not for Brenda Williams the little snippets, page-staggerers ; she is at the I Hallelujah Chorus end of the poetry scale, massed choir and orchestra going full belt. that is what gives her collection a nineteenth century- flavour - this confident assertion. Then she tackles the moderns in ‘For the big boys at the gates of Magdalen’

‘Ginsberg have you tried to carry that red and gold volume

around midway with a chair up bus steps I've cursed you

In ‘The Pain Clinic’, a sequence of sonnets, in the midst of personal problems, she shows herself reconciling pain with action :

How can I go on simply measuring

Out a syllable count and aligning

Rhyme and rhythm on the span of my hand...

.......And yet just writing about my mother

In some way makes me feel nearer to her.

This brings in ‘Death and the Maiden’, a ten-page prose poem, weaving three generations of women-Irish peasant grandmother, emigrant nurse mother and poet daughter,

those autumn leaves of red and gold I youst to know

and your mind the colour of the fractured marcasite

The grandmother is pictured :

primitive incongruous and catholic black her

kid gloves they sent her back at the end of summer

As more religious phrases/prayers/carols interweave,

I sing of a maiden

Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring

her lifetime for a moment held his love

Daddy brought you flowers that day so proud he was...

it ends as it began, in an out-of-scason cafe:

no loophole for the soul through that mortised horizon

But Brenda Williams finds a positive final line, ‘Will be. Wait for. Want to.’ Rather the cheerful ending of T.S. Eliot.

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