This collection grew on me – or grew in me – which further supports my conviction that reading poetry is not at all like reading prose. A poem, or a book of poems, doesn’t begin at the beginning. It starts where the stone strikes the pond. Its energy ripples outward, and if it’s any good, its resonances increase in power once the book is closed. It goes without saying that to take in a new collection, several careful readings are essential. Only then does further random dipping begin to call together the remembered images and ideas from the whole book.

Only as a reviewer must one begin at the beginning, which does not do this collection a favour. For me, the ripples begin with ‘Portrait of the Poet as a Young Dog’. By comparison the poems that open the book seem too well-made, well-mannered. With this sequence that looks back to his youth, the poet’s voice is set free. A living poetic language flows, easy and slangy and never mind the bits of Latin and other scholarly touches. They sound native to the poet’s true voice, sprung from wherever poetry comes from, out of the life of the awkward Welsh boy he was, metamorphosed into the young student in love with poetry. After this sequence, the occasional poems which punctuate the later part of the collection are vitalized and real, among them elegies that remember mourning his father’s death, and other deaths, which ring true, urged into being by poetry itself. But it is with the twenty eight Glyn Dwr sonnets that the big stone hits the pond and reverberations take on real power. Here at the real heart of the book is an ambitious sequence, political, fierce, making a brave connection between a mythic hero/terrorist at the turn of the fifteenth century - when Britain’s first colonial war was still burning - and one we fear now. This is from ‘Owain’s Poetics’:

The art is to leave your calling card and
melt away. To keep them wondering what
it is you’re up to, haunting the page at
the edge of sense, as if you understand
their dreams.

With ‘haunting the page’ the role of language itself is implicated, word/terrorist haunting the space where the myth flickers and disappears. These poems give us a language to consider current troubles.

That autumn morning, out of the wide blue
future, when they razed the town of Rhuthun
to ground zero, how many of them knew
what was afoot?

And now it is Haifa, Lebanon, Baghdad, Mumbai.

These poems raise questions about heroes and terrorists, myth and history, Some may be outraged that England’s suppression of Welsh insurgence six hundred years ago should be compared with current events or given the name, colonialism. Some may be taken aback by the idea that Owain Glyn Dwr, a favourite Welsh hero - and a British favourite, according to a recent newspaper survey - should be called a terrorist. But poetry should be turbulent. The whereabouts of Owain Glyn Dwr and Osama Bin Laden are secret to this day. Glyn Dwr died in battle somewhere in border country, ‘until the day dawned he found/ (no one knows where), that little wicket/ gate to Annwfn, where he was crowned.’  Annwfn is not Paradise. It is the netherworld of myth.

This collection refers again and again to poetry and poets. Tributes to Edward Thomas and Dylan Thomas frame the ten poem sequence, ‘Homage to Patagonia’, which tells of the nineteenth century migration to South America of those who founded the Welsh community there. The eleven sonnets of ‘Arkwork’, which lament and chronicle the loss of the Stranraer to Larne ferry in 1953, are each faced by a fine pencil drawing by Julian Bell, which contributes to the salty ghostliness of the poems about the 133 passengers and crew drowned on that short voyage.

Why is the collection entitled Slower? From a signpost on a road somewhere in rural Ireland.

Andrew McNeillie, Slower, Carcanet Press, 2006. £9.95. 1-85754-82-8

© Gillian Clarke, 2006

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.