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The review ends:
'Guilar’s reimagining of the story of Culhwch and Olwen blows away the cobwebs and allows us to read this classic work of medieval Welsh literature and foundation stone of the Arthurian cycle with fresh eyes. It’s a triumph.'
The full review is here.
https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2026/04/27/celtic-matters/
My thanks to Billy Mills for taking the time to review the book.
How Culhwch Won Olwen, a translation of the oldest Arthurian Tale
The translation will be published by Shearsman in 2026. You can find information and samples on their website by clicking on the link below which will open a new window.
You can find also notes on the translation on this blog by using the tags to navigate to them
1217 tells the story of a siege and two battles; one on land, one on sea, that ‘saved England’. As a story it has a great plot and a fascinating cast of characters. But while Hanley writes with the skill of a novelist, her story is true and grounded in a careful use of the available sources.
Background.
By 1215 King John and his barons were at an impasse. He had been forced to concede what later became known as Magna Carta, but he had placed England in the hands of the Pope. In a radical about face, the Pope moved from excommunicating John and putting England under Interdict, to declaring the Charter null and void and threatening to excommunicate anyone who rebelled against the rightful King. In response some of the barons invited Louis, the son of the French King, Phillip Augustus, to become the King of England.
The first French contingent landed in December 1215. Louis set sail with a small invasion fleet in 1216, landed unopposed in May, and was proclaimed King of England on the second of June 1216. Proclaimed, but not crowned. Hanley suggests this was a crucial error while accepting that as an excommunicate he couldn’t take part in a church service.
John died in October 1216. Hanley sees this as the best thing he could have done to help his cause. To anyone placing bets it looked like the Angevins were finished. Large parts of the country were in rebel hands and John’s son, Henry, only nine years old, and surrounded by a shrinking group of royalists. However, while John had often seemed to go out of his way to alienate everyone, Henry was surrounded by a small group of exceptionally capable men. Their acknowledged leader was William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest Knight’. His loyalty to the royal family was both famous and so unshakeable that it could be described as pathological.
1217
Hanley tells the story of how those loyal to Henry staged an improbable military comeback to insure that an Angevin King would stay on the English throne. It is far more entertaining and interesting story than most fictional ones set in the Middle Ages.
How much was at stake in 1217 is hard to see in retrospect. For the 90 percent of the population living below the nobility, would it have mattered if a French (Capetian) or a French (Angevin) king were ruling them?
However, Hanley presents the events as crucial in the development of a sense of Englishness. She frames the sea battle off Sandwich as an English fleet defending England against a French invasion. The defeat of the French fleet is compared to the later, more well-known destruction of the Spanish Armada, with Hanley arguing the latter was of lesser consequence. Hanley also suggests that throughout the war there is a definite shift towards a sense of ‘England vs France’.
At the time, however, nationality might not have played a decisive role, nor is there any sense of ideology at work. Self interest motivated both sides. Henry was the King’s son. The royalists risked everything and stood by him.
Not all the rebels stood by Louis. As the war went on there was significant wavering in their ranks. This may have had little to do with nationalism or ideals of justice either. Men who had hated John had no reason to hate his infant son. If successful Louis would be obliged to reward his French followers, but at whose expense?
Hanley has a healthy scepticism about some of the leading players. Without denying the Marshall’s role in the war, she acknowledges his failure to protect the citizens of Lincoln and notes his acquisitiveness. The Marshall’s flattering biography is one of the chief sources for the period: she avoids both uncritical acceptance and uncritical dismissal.
Likewise, while acknowledging Hubert de Burgh’s essential role in the defence of Dover, her description of his actions at the battle of Sandwich, often claimed as his great victory, doesn’t make his participation a deciding factor in the battle.
IF 1217 has a great plot, it also has an outstanding cast. At the centre, though missing from the action for obvious reasons, is Henry III, a nine-year-old boy overwhelmed by his coronation, whose father was disliked by almost everybody. William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest knight’, who at 70 was given the task of regent and the job of saving the Angevin line, enthusiastically charging into battle at Lincoln having forgotten to put his helmet on. Eustace the Monk, renegade pirate who had turned his coat so many times no one knew which was inside or out anymore, leading Louis’ fleet. Wilkin of the Weald, a commoner who led a ‘guerilla’ war against the French; Blanche of Castille, Louis’ wife who could be described as formidable without any exaggeration.
Hanley’s contribution to the story is to bring others into the limelight. Phillip D’Albini, who may have been as responsible for victory at the battle of Sandwich as De Burgh. Nichola de la Haye, who in her sixties held Lincoln for the Royalists, held her nerve throughout the siege, and was rewarded by being removed from her post so William Longespee, who had swapped sides during the war, could be rewarded. Hanley describes the regency’s treatment of Nicola as ‘one of the most astonishing acts of ingratitude imaginable’ but adds in a footnote that it was Nicola who ‘had the last laugh’.
If one of the advantages of a book like this is it gives 254 pages to events that are covered in one paragraph of David Carpenter’s biography of Henry the Third, some characters still seem inscrutable.
Louis is a shadow in the narrative. His father had refused the military and financial support that would have given him a formidable invasion force. His campaign stalled first in front of Dover Castle, and then came to a halt when, after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, the reinforcements sent by his wife, Blanche, were destroyed off Sandwich. He wasn’t present at either of the two decisive battles. Hanley’s narrative suggests one of the contributing factors to the French defeats was that no one seems to have been in overall command at crucial times.
Floating through this, as invisible as usual, is Isabella of Angouleme. John’s marriage to her in 1200 had been politically disastrous. In 1207 she had given birth to John’s first legitimate child, Henry, and had then given birth to three more children. The Anonymous of Bethune suggests she played a role in the peace negotiations after the Battle of Sandwich, which Hanley doesn’t mention. She was offered no part in the regency. This seems strange but so was her response. She returned to France at the end of 1217, leaving her son a crowned King, but a child surrounded by advisors.
Because of the limitations of the evidence, there are always questions that will never be answered, but the book also shows history as a series of accidents. Dover did not fall to Louis because it was a strong fortification held by a commander who held his nerve and Louis didn’t have the manpower he needed. But the battle of Lincoln was lost by the French when an inexperienced commander miscounted the oncoming royalists and instead of going out to meet them, where superior French numbers might have won the day, decided to stay inside the city walls. There’s also the secret entrance no one seems to have noticed which would be considered an unacceptable flaw in a fictional account. If the wind had been in the right direction when the French relief fleet originally sailed, then the English would have struggled to meet it, and the reinforcements might have landed. If …
1217 surprised me. I don’t like writers who use the first-person plural. Although it used to be common in factual writing it has become corrupted by politicians using it as an invidious positioning technique. But Hanley returns it to its courteous usage. Her style is that of a well-informed, capable guide, and while the tour goes round the usual places, she paces it carefully and stops to provide useful background information. She is very clear in her discussion of the sources.
Books about the Middle Ages that focus on battles tend to misrepresent the period. There’s so much more to Edward III’s reign than Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers and deeds of daring do, but in this case the siege/s of Dover castle, the battle of Lincoln, and the sea battle off Sandwich are crucial events in a pivotal year. There are times history swings on a hinge and at the end of 1216 a King of France on the throne of England was a distinct possibility. 1217 as a date would then have had had the same prominence in collective memory as 1066. Hanley’s excellent book, ironically, explains why this isn’t so.
Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire (Lothian, 2025, 121 pages)
This review originally appeared in The Brazen Head in July 2025.
Set in rural Australia The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems.
The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be.
Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse’. They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives
At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]
The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.
Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book
The Foal in the Wire opens:
As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark
I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.
he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay.
‘Foal’
Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose.
As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii]
It is very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.
In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.
However, as Coburn’s poem in the Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse.
No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]
The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either.
Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]
Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable :
Sam sneaking out at night:
making sure to stay on the clover
lining the sides of the path
to avoid the potholes and depressions
left in the ground by horses.
(‘Furtive’)
tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal.
Julia has bought another bottle of formula
and I have a bundle of hay
I gathered
from inside the shed.
dad won’t notice.
whenever hay is lifted
stalks fall from the bale
and gather on the floor.
‘Waiting’
Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised.
It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end.
The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:
I want to write down everything
about my brother and Julia and the foal
I am no longer ashamed of who I am
and where I come from.
I can hold on and be anyone.
Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends:
Maybe this
scarred and haunted body
is enough--
the wounded animal
is capable of survival.
If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving’.
There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]
But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was.
In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school; first love; first sexual experience; a drunk abusive father; some form of reconciliation.
What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:
like holding a body
and cradling a ghost
at the same time.
Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first- but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their own shelter for abused horses.
Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.
Notes:
[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these five examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel.
[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.
[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries.
[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent.
[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.
[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job.
[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.
Jenny Lewis, From Base materials, Carcanet, 2024
Well written poems provide the pleasure that only well-written can provide. From a re-imagining of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, via short illustrated poems reminiscent of Edward Lear, to the outrage and indignation that seethes through her poem for Sarah Everhard, the pleasure of reading Jenny Lewis’s From Base Materials lies in the excellence of its writing and the variety of its content.
Lewis’ previous book include an acclaimed version of the Epic of Gilgamesh and her translation of Adnan Al-Sayegh’s Let Me Tell you What I Saw. The latter is a book anyone interested in modern poetry, especially long form poetry, should read. The former is the most readable version of Gilgamesh you’re likely to find.
While tightly themed collections of poems all on the same subject allow reviewers to sound profound and provide publishers, if they still publicise books, with snappy publicity shorts, the reading experience can be dreary. There was a time when books had titles like ‘New poems’ and ‘36 poems’. Poets are people who live in the real world, and the real world is various and as humans their reactions to it range widely so why shouldn’t their poems?
From Base Materials moves from the private-domestic, from personal poems in which the writer describes dealing with a mastectomy and the loss of friends, the reality of ‘love in old age’, the wit of ‘Tales from Mesopotamia’ where Gilgamesh’s barber and a street dancer are grumbling, to short translations, humour, moments of reflection and outrage.
‘Hearsay’ is a sequence of three short poems (38 lines in total) about Guinivere, Arthur and Lancelot and illustrates many of the strengths of the collection,
If poems are a way of thinking through and in language, then this sequence should offer both the pleasure of itself as a well-made verbal artefact, and comment on the story of Arthur and Guinevere.
The sequence might be asking: Who is Guinevere? In answer, it suggests there are only versions: she seems unsure of, or unhappy with, her identity, while both Lancelot, and Arthur are sure they know who she is, though their versions differ.
In the first poem, ‘Guinevere’, a restless woman, shifts amongst possible identities, waiting for the miracle of recognition.
The poem begins with subversion: ‘like eve she names the birds/while waiting for miracles’. In the Christian tradition, Eve does not name anything, nor did she wait for miracles. An Eve who did these things would be rebelling against her traditionally assigned role.
However, the line refers to another poem in the collection, ‘As Adam lay sleeping’. Two pages earlier it ends:
where she, hearing clearly for the first time
the tumultuous singing of the birds,
could set about the task of naming them.
Between ‘As Adam Lay Sleeping’ [with its possible acoustic nod to the repeated line in Kipling’s ‘Four Angels’] and ‘Hearsay’ is ‘Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee…’ dedicated to ‘Eve, born 6 January 2020’, which ends with the poet describing her wishes for the newborn. The title, as the poem acknowledges, is a line from Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’.
The sequence ‘Hearsay’ is itself part of a sequence, gaining meaning from other poems in the book, and gaining power by drawing on the poetic tradition.
The birds Guinevere names: ‘owls, peacocks, ptarmigans, doves- ‘ provide a shifting set of possible roles which can only ‘brush against her thoughts’. The list, suggesting restlessness or uncertainty, is followed by suggestions of unhappiness.
While waiting for miracles, she is ‘polishing the round table, wanting praise.’
A literal reader might object that queens don’t polish tables. But there is a tradition of stories in which queens and princesses are punished by being forced into menial labour or into roles that are at odds with their status. In these stories the essential identity of the woman is either not recognised or not given its due. Here the queen is ‘wanting praise’. Wanting in both senses, lacking and desiring. The phrase suggests her dissatisfaction with her role, with actions that are not in keeping with her sense of her own identity, and explains why she is waiting for miracles.
She does ‘polish’ the Round Table. She brings grace to the gathering and gentles an association of expert killers. She feminises the knights. But that turns her into an adornment, something less than an individual. The fact she wants praise suggests something too about her husband’s attitude. Polishing the table in this sense is a useful activity, but the fact she keeps doing it over and over again suggests no one appreciates her efforts.
In the bath she is ‘angelic, pure, mother of pearl with light bursting from her’. Still not human. As her lover removes his armour piece by piece, ‘the naked hand that held cold steel finds/the warmth of her bird filled body’ while Arthur looks away and sees snipe and plover fall into the net.
Arthur ‘looks away’. Is he looking away as the lovers meet, or is he just watching something else. One of the questions in Malory’s version of this story is at what point does Arthur know his wife is having an affair? The second poem of the sequence, ‘Windhover’, describes the moment he realises the rumours are true.
Like many in the collection it’s a technically impressive poem, and like so many of the poems it draws on literary tradition. While windhover is a dialect name for a kestrel, it’s also the title of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins most famous sonnets. Not only has Lewis used Hopkins title and rhyme scheme, her lines end with the same words as Hopkins’, with one exception, where sillion has been replaced with stallion. The swing and swerve of the world Arthur is looking at is mirrored in the rhythm of the first eight lines.
Such technical excellence is impressive, but on its own it suggests the workshop exercise that proves little but linguistic virtuosity. The question that often goes begging is ‘to what purpose’? Here it suggests Arthur’s complicated relationship with his wife. The sense of awe that pervades Hopkins poem carries over to Arthur’s thoughts about her. But whereas Hopkin’s poem celebrates the glory of creation made specific in a single bird, who masters the elements around it. Arthur is locked into the rhyme scheme of his own misery and his vague awareness of clouds and nameless birds can’t save him from the thought of his wife and friend. Hopkins’ poem also ends;
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
There’s no sense of this transformation into beauty here.
He is out riding. The same clouds Guinivere saw from her bath in the previous poem, ‘like scarves stretched by the wind’ he only sees as ‘a sky full of clouds’. The poem captures the moment when he knew ‘what his heart had been hiding’….that what ‘they said about her must be true’.
Lancelot, riding on a white stallion, [Arthur’s mind slipping on the crude connotations of riding so close to white but saved by stallion instead of mare] has taken away his dear ‘his lady her raven locks her white body and her lips that burn vermillion’. Unlike Hopkins who labours to capture the singularity of a specific bird, if Arthur sees Guinevere at all he only sees surface. Lancelot has not taken away a friend, or a lover, just a ‘dear’ [with its double meaning of object of affection and something expensive] collection of cliched body parts which do not individualise her but reduce her to type. The woman with lips redder than blood, hair darker than the raven’s wing, skin whiter than the snow is today a figure familiar in fairy tales but goes back to medieval times. Such women are also often tragic figures or participants in a tragedy.
The last poem is ‘Falconer’.
He only saw her whiteness, I
saw her as brindled, wild
like a spirit you call in
across the darkening fields,
I watch her stoop, then come
to me with flying jesses
her ferocious eyes unhooded
unerringly mine.
While the pronouns in the first line are unattributed, it’s logical to think ‘he’ is Arthur, who mentions his wife’s ‘white body’. The /I/, presumably Lancelot, sees a different version of the woman. [If this were a stand-alone poem the /I/ becomes far more ambiguous and could be both Lancelot and the poet.]
The first line is a criticism of Arthur’s inability to recognise his wife. For Lancelot, she is ‘wild’ ‘a spirit’ her eyes are ‘ferocious’. She is not soft, or prey but predator. Rather than white, he describes her as ‘brindled’, which might be an odd word to describe a woman, since the dictionary associates it with cats and fur, but it is a word Hopkins used in another famous sonnet, ‘Pied Beauty’ which begins:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
That poem celebrates:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled…
Lancelot recognises a version of Guinivere that is perhaps more nuanced than Arthur’s doomed fairytale princess. In her meeting with him her eyes are ‘unhooded’…both the falcon whose hood is removed to let it hunt, and the woman who no longer has to pretend. Does he see her as ‘counter, original, spare, strange’? Has she achieved the kind of life the poet wishes for Eve at the end of ‘Therefore all season shall be sweet to thee…? Lancelot and Arthur both seem to have found themselves, like Adam in Kipling’s ‘Four Angels’;
Till out of black disaster
He arose to be a master
Of Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
But never reached his heart's desire!
The words in ‘Falconer’ undermine any temptation to accept the final poem as a description of Guinevere’s ‘true nature’. He’s not thinking of her as an individual woman but as a hunting bird. By the end of the sequence, she’s still not free, still defined by her relationship with a man. If she’s the falcon and he’s the falconer, however wild the bird, she has been tamed; she can be ‘called in’. He can proclaim she is ‘unerringly mine’. She isn’t even one of the birds she named. Someone else has named her.
Does she love Lancelot because he sees her as she is? Or does he simply offer her a miracle of limited recognition, an improvement on her husband’s inability to notice her? If so it seems a limited improvement. Beyond this, there is a suggestion that their relationship is dangerous to both of them. The contrast is between a spirit that is wild, and one that can be ‘called in’. Restrained, limited. Brought back to its owner. While the phrase ‘she stoops’, beyond its technical meaning in falconry, and the sense of the bird falling towards the thing it will kill, has an inevitable resonance with the phrase ‘She stoops to conquer’ [a phrase which has floated free of its origins to mean something more threatening], suggesting Lancelot’s self-confidence might be misplaced.
Reading ‘Hearsay’ like this is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. But hopefully it suggests some of the qualities of the verse in From Base Materials and the pleasure of reading it.
From base Materials is an impressive collection. You should read it.
The trilogy, A Presentment of Englishry, A Man of Heart, The Fabled Third.
(David McCooey, Australian poet and critic, on The Fabled Third and its predecessors. (Email correspondence, published here with his kind permission.)
‘I love the sense of mood in all of your work. I love, too, your skill with, and attention to, the sonic condition of poetry (not something often talked about these days). Like this:
A dappled grey horse, huge,
its rider dressed for the hunt,
in fawn-coloured clothes,
horn slung around his neck,
watching him from the trees.
A bent note in the rustle of the forest.
What superb vowel music. And then there is, of course, your historical imagination. I love moments like the footnote on ‘gebedda’. Your skill with narrative and image is often, to use a hackneyed term, cinematic. (I’m thinking especially of when you start and end a scene.) And lastly, though not finally, as a work of intertextuality, I am in awe of the knowledge and adaptation skills evident in your trilogy.
Congratulations on the trilogy; it’s an extraordinary achievement.’
( David’s most recent collection The Book of Falling, is published by Upswell Poetry. He is also Professor of literature and writing at Deakin University.)
The English poet and critic Jeremy Hooker on The Fabled Third. (Email correspondence reproduced here with his kind permission.)
The Fabled Third' is a rare, magnificent achievement both alone and in relation to the sequence. The only problem I have with reading it is that I can't always tell who is speaking - which makes me wish for more information at the front or back of the book. Yet the absence of this may also be seen as a virtue. For you, the invisible author, are completely inside the narrative and the actions and characters. The stories are driven, and the many short, verbless sentences compel them forward. This, though, is only one technique, in a work in which style, matter and pre-modern attitudes create a world. You are, as I have said, invisible, only present in occasional footnotes and quotations that reveal the depth of scholarship on which the work is based. But you are of course the poet, the master of language, responsible for the clean drive of the prose narrative and the more poetic or aphoristic passages, such as 'small birds alighting on a tree/after a storm has rinsed the air bright.', or 'Nostalgia is a perverse mistress./ Memory's destructive sister, ...' Evocations of atmospheric landscapes (eg., p. 122) and of rich clothing and weapons (e.g., pp. 146 - 148) enhance the narrative. Many passages are memorable. For example: 'What do you think life means, storyteller?' and the preceding and following lines, and 'We are not rivers, trees, or rocks./We are the animal that narrates,/ ... free to reimagine.'
My congratulations. I do not know of any other poetic work as substantial, ambitious or memorable as this written in our time.
The Fabled Third is available from Shearsman books in the UK, most online book sellers and from the shop on this website (www.liamguilar.com) where you can also find samples and further information.
clear, plough, sow and reap in one day
The Anoethau in Culhwch and Olwen[i]
This is the second problem sequence I’m working through. (See previous post for the first.)
In Culhwch ac Olwen, the Giant Ysbaddaden gives Culhwch forty impossible tasks which are referred to by editors and within the text as Anoethau[ii]
After Ysbaddaden stipulates the first task, Culhwch replies:
Hawd yw gennyf gaffel hynny, yd tybyckych na bo hawd.
It is easy for me to get that, though you may think it is not easy.[iii]
Ysbaddaden responds:
Kyt Kkffych hynny, yssit ny cheffych.
Though you may get that, there is something you will not get.
Each subsequent task is wrapped by these lines. So both phrases are repeated approximately forty times, which is repetition driven to excess. Would it be too much to ask of a modern reader?
If anyone knows of a poem that repeats the same 2 lines forty times or more, I’d like to read it.
I was tempted to cut the list of tasks down to only those which are actually performed in the story.
However.
Perhaps anachronistically, we can see the strange dialogue that develops in dramatic terms. It is a clash between two characters who have irreconcilable objectives. As a result of this exchange, one of them must die. Culhwch knows he will never marry anyone except Olwen. He’s been told several times that most men who come on the quest to marry her have been killed.
During their brief meeting, Olwen had given him some advice. Ask for my hand in marriage. Whatever he asks in return, promise you’ll get it. But if he has cause to doubt you, me you won’t get and you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.
Both Culhwch and Ysbaddaden know the latter will die when his daughter gets married. He is understandably inhospitable to any suitor. For unstated reasons, he is compelled to enter into a contract with the suitor and offer him the opportunity to complete an impossible task. If the suitor flinches or fails, the giant can kill him.
So there is obvious conflict. It’s a ‘high stakes’ confrontation.
The dialogue begins with Ysbaddaden stating an obvious impossibility. He wants a field cleared, ploughed, sown and the resultant crop reaped all in one day. Instead of protesting, Culhwch, says: It is easy for me to get that, though you may think it is not easy.
Perhaps wondering if the boy has understood, the giant then explains why it is impossible: you need this man to prepare the field, he won’t do it of his own free will, and you can’t make him. Culhwch repeats his phrase. You also need this man to fix the plough and he won’t come and you can’t make him. And Culhwch, like a naked man in a hailstorm, refusing to flinch, repeats: It is easy for me….
And so on. Things needed for the wedding feast; things needed to shave his beard; dogs, people, horses and things needed to hunt the Twrch Trwyth.
Ysbadadden keeps going, waiting for the boy to crack, and Culhwch stands his ground and repeats the same response. He’s hiding behind it because, of course, he can’t do any of these things.
As the boy refuses to crack, Ysbaddaden must see his own death coming towards him like a slow train on a very straight track over a very flat landscape
He plays his final card. It’s obvious the boy can’t do any of these things on his own.:
You need Arthur and his men to hunt the great boar. And he won’t come, because he’s my man. (The phrase he uses is ‘he’s in my hand’).
But Culhwch still refuses to flinch, still repeats his mantra. The giant, running out of ideas, reaches for absurdity, a desperate explosion of nonsense. He’s been pounding away, and now he must realise that he’s been punching the side of a mountain.
Though you get all that, there’s something you won’t get.
The Twrch Trwyth will never be hunted unless you obtain
Defective, Perfected and Completed,
sons of Broken Sword, grandsons of Perfect Sword
Three shining whites their shields
Three stabbing piercers their spears
Three keen carvers their swords
Their three dogs: Silver, Salmon and Smoky
Their three horses: Sharp, Speedy and Steed
Their three wives: Late Bearer, Ill Bearer and Full bearer
Their three crones: Alas, Scream and Shriek
Their three serving girls: Bad, Worse and Worst of all.
These three men will sound their horns,
And all the others will cry out,
so no one will care if the sky falls in.
I can get that easily enough, although you seem to think I can’t.
Ysbaddaden makes one final attempt, saying what they both know:
Sleeplessness without rest you will get in seeking these things,
and you won’t get them, and you won’t get my daughter.
But Culhwch, who has already shown he’s not the most tactful or polite of young men, now sticks the boot in:
Horses and hounds I will get.
And Arthur,
my Lord and Kinsman,
will get everything for me.
And I will have your daughter,
and you shall lose your life.
I’m becoming very pro-giant.
I think the dialogue has a structural coherence and a dramatic context, but whether that underlying drama is strong enough to carry a reader through the repetition remains to be seen.
[i] (When I started working through the Tasks I read this essay, which seems to suggest a similar approach. Dehghani, Fiona. “The Anoetheu Dialogue in Culhwch Ac Olwen.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 26/27, 2006, pp. 291–305. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40732062.)
[ii] GPC offers: wonderful thing, wonder, jewel, treasure; something difficult to obtain or achieve, feat, exploit; wondrous, wonderful, strange, unusual, ?difficult.
[iii] This is Sioned Davies’ translation. Other translations are my work in progress.
Of course you can your majesty, but tell us why you want to take home a dead girl in a coffin?
Does genre work by setting up a tacit bargain with the reader: Some questions are inappropriate? If for general example, you're reading the Grimm's version of Snow White you should not stop and ask what the prince is going to do with the dead girl in the glass coffin when he gets them home. Nor should you try and imagine his arrival at the palace and his parents' reaction. Doing either will kill the story.
Someone who objects to the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty because ‘it’s non consensual’ is making the same mistake.
In Culhwch and Olwen there's the 'Tale of the Oldest Animals' which I've just finished drafting. You have to accept animals can talk and people will understand them. But....the story itself:
Arthur and his men need to find Mabon mab Modron. To do this, they have been told that first they have to find his cousin, Eiddoel mab Eri. They find Eiddoel easily enough, he's being kept prisoner in a place called Gliui by someone with the same name.
Gliui is identified by the editors as Gloucester. Fair enough. Later, after a trek from one 'Oldest animal' to an 'Even older animal' our heroes discover Mabon is being held prisoner in Kaer Loyw, which the editors also identify as Gloucester.
So they free Eiddoel from the same place they free Mabon, though they go round the Wrekin to achieve this. I admit I’ve ever noticed this before when reading the story in translation.
Inappropriate, unanswerable questions here?
How can they both be prisoners in the same place? Who is keeping Mabon prisoner? Presumably it’s not Gliui because he's offered Arthur his help and support when he released Eiddoel? Was he lying? Is Arthur at fault for not asking if Gliui knows where Mabon is? Why do they assume that 'No one knows where Mabon is' means, 'Don't ask anyone except an animal'? Why does no-one else on the river hear Mabon lamenting? Why have they been told they needed Eiddoel to find Mabon when he is sent on the search but contributes nothing to it?
Why is the episode so satisfying and enjoyable until you start asking these questions? And this is true of so much of Culhwch ac Olwen and medieval literature in general.
Are we back with a specific version of Culler's 'Literary Competence'. The idea that you have to learn to read a literary text as a literary text on its own terms? And with this story, that means trying to learn what those terms are?
Olwen’s father Ysbadadden, who needs forks to keep his eyelids up.
These3 poems were first published in The Brazen Head
https://brazen-head.org/2024/08/19/three-translations-from-culhwch-ac-owen/
Translating Culhwch ac Olwen.
(I.m Michael Alexander)
In popular films the sexy treasure hunter/archaeologist
(they conflate the two, much to my trowel wielding friends’ dismay)
who’s fluent in every lost forgotten ancient language,
confronting the inscription on the recently uncovered wall,
or gazing at the long lost rediscovered legendary text,
looks, then translates, without a pause, the symbols
into fluent, idiomatic, contemporary American.
The reality goes more like this:
Kilyd son of Kledon Wledic
Wanted a wife as noble as himself.
Here is the woman he wanted.
Goleudyt daughter of Anlawd Wledic.
So far so good.
After they stayed together What? Gwest Ah, see note.
They spent the night together. Is that too direct?
The verb’s related to the one for copulation.
They came together. After they were married
….bland. After they had slept together,
no, the story teller could have used kysgu gan.
The cruder options? No. Not here. What follows?
The country went to pray they ?might have? offspring
And they got a child/boy through the prayers of the country.
And from the hour she captured, caught?
The next word’s definitely ‘pregnant’. Another note.
‘Became pregnant’ though literally ‘caught pregnancy’.
As though it were an illness, perhaps better than ‘fell pregnant’
which evokes abrupt decline, or woman, falling?
Then she went wild/feral. Another note.
‘She went mad’. Mad or wild is somewhere you go to
in this case beyond the civilised boundaries.
She’s gone mad and won’t come near a building.
Wouldn’t enter a building?
And from the time that she was pregnant,
She went wild and wouldn’t enter any building.
And when her time came, she came to her good sense.
You go mad but come to your senses. The payoff’s here,
the sudden twist estranging your own language.
You go out of your mind as though it were a car,
and you could leave it in the car park to return to
when finished being mad and needed it again. Anyway,
what’s next? Pigs!? What? We’re up to line 7, only
one thousand two hundred and thirty eight to go.
May I marry your daughter?
(The giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr knows he will die when Olwen, his beautiful daughter, marries. Understandably, he doesn’t welcome her suitors. But Culhwch has been told that if he doesn’t marry Olwen, he will never marry anyone. He and his six companions set out to ask the giant for her hand in marriage.What isn’t stated but becomes obvious is that the giant can’t be killed until his daughter is married. )
They killed the nine gatekeepers,
and not a man cried out.
They killed their nine huge mastiffs;
not one so much as squealed.
And so they came into the hall.
‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr! Greetings
in the name of God and man!’
‘You, where are you going?’
‘We seek your daughter, Olwen,
for Culhwch son of Kilyd.’
‘Where are those rascal servants?
Where are those ruffians of mine?
Raise up the forks under my eyelids
so I can see my future son in law.’
This they did. ‘Come back tomorrow
I’ll have an answer for you then.’
He had three stone spears beside him,
each tipped with poison.
As they turned to go he seized one
and flung it after them.
Bedwyr caught it and hurled it back,
piercing the giant through his knee cap.
‘Cursed savage son in law!
It will be worse for me when I go downhill.
Like the sting of a gadfly,
the poisoned iron has hurt me.
Cursed be the smith who made it
and the anvil on which it was forged.‘
They stayed that night at Custennin’s house.
And on the second day, they set out to the hall,
in majesty, with fine combs in their hair.
‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,
give us your daughter.
In return for her dowry and marriage fee
to you and her two kinswomen.
And if we don’t get her from you;
you’ll get your death from us.’
‘Her four great-grandmothers
and her four great-grandfathers
are still alive. I must consult them.’
‘You do that. We’ll go eat.’
He took the second spear
and hurled it after them.
Menw mab Teirgwaedd
caught it and threw it back.
It pierced the centre of his chest
and sprung out the small of his back.
‘Cursed savage son in law.
The pain of this hard iron
is like the sting of a horse-leech.
Cursed be the forge wherein it was heated.
Now, when I go uphill,
there will be a tightness in my chest,
stomach aches and frequent nausea.’
They went to their food.
On the third day they came to the court.
‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,
stop throwing spears at us.
Do not wish hurt and harm
and death upon yourself.’
‘My eyelids have fallen over my eyeballs-
Where are my servants, raise up the forks
so I may look on my future son in law.’
They arose, and as they rose,
he took the third spear
and hurled it at them. This time,
Culhwch caught it and threw it back,
and as he wished, it pierced the eyeball
went through and out the back of his neck.
‘Cursed savage son in law.
As long as I live the sight in one eye
will be worse than the other.
Whenever I walk in the wind it will water.
I’ll have headaches and giddiness
at the start of each moon.
Cursed be the forge that heated it.
Worse than the bite of a mad dog
is the sting of its poisoned iron.’
Next day they came to the court.
‘Don’t attack us anymore.
You’ll bring hurt and harm
and martyrdom to yourself.
Give us your daughter.’
‘Which one of you was told to seek her?’
‘Me, Culhwch, son of Kilyd.’
‘Come here so I can see you.’
A chair was placed under him,
so they could be face to face.
‘Is it you who seeks my daughter?’
‘I do.’ ‘Give me your word
that you’ll be just?’ ‘I give it.’
‘When you give me what I name,
then you will have my daughter.’
‘Name what you want.’
--------------
(Ysbaddaden gives Culhwch forty impossible tasks. This next poem tells how one of them is achieved. Gwythyr is one of Culhwch’s companions.)
The Lame Ant
As Gwythyr mab Greidawl
was crossing a mountain,
he heard lamentations:
a most bitter wailing.
Dreadful this noise.
He rushed towards it
drawing his sword,
cutting the anthill
off at the ground
saving the ants from
the blistering flames.
‘God’s blessing and ours upon you,’
they said to him.
‘And that which no man can recover
we will recover for thee.’
These were the ants
who collected the flax,
all the nine hestors
Ysbaddaden demanded.
But one seed was missing.
Until just before sunset.
it was finally brought in
by the last, limping ant.
Kei and Bedwyr hitch a ride on the Salmon during the search for Mabon man Modron.
Translating the Court List in Culhwch ac Olwen.
(Quotations from the story are from Will Parker’s annotated translation: http://www.culhwch.info/index.html)
When I began translating Culhwch and Olwen into verse, I knew that my three biggest challenges would be the Court List, the List of Tasks, and the Great Boar Hunt. My problem is to find a way to overcome the challenges they will present to my ‘Model Reader’ who doesn’t read Medieval or Modern Welsh.
My initial idea was to shorten the tasks to only those which occur in the story, cut the list altogether and keep the hunt to a minimum.
I’m changing my mind about all three.
The Court List:
Reasons to cut it.
The temptation to cut the list is strong. It’s essentially a list of names, with attributes attached to some of them. It runs for four pages or two hundred lines of continuous prose in the Bromwich and Evans edition I’m using. The editors count ‘about 260’ names. It begins like this:
he invoked his boon [in the name of] Cai and Bedwyr and Greidol Gallddofyd and Gwythyr son of Greidol and Graid son of Eri and Cynddylig Gyfarwydd and Tathal Twyll Golau and Maelwys son of Baeddan and Cnychwr son of Nes and Cubert son of Daere and Ffercos map Poch and Lluber Beuthach and Corfill Berfach.
If you can’t read Welsh, the obvious problem is pronunciation. 260+/- names that look as though someone spilt alphabet spaghetti on the page. But not only might the pronunciation of Sucgyn mab Sucnedut trip you up, unless you know it means Suck son of Sucker, the humour of the list is lost.
Bromwich and Evans , discussing the list, suggest. ’But if the whole series of names between lines 175-373 is excised, the tale runs on with greater clarity and smoothness: line 174 being followed immediately by line 374.’ They are right, of course:
"[The boon] I name is for you to get me Olwen, daughter of Yspaddaden Bencawr, and I invoke it [in the name of] your warriors."
[Delete 200 lines of text]
‘Arthur said "O Chieftain, I have never heard about the maiden of whom you speak, nor her parents. I will send out messengers to search for her gladly."
Reasons to Include the List:
Plot isn’t everything. Deciding on what is relevant to a story is not a straight forward process regardless of what your editor claims. Relevant to your reading or mine or to a possible reading neither of us have made? James Joyce and Umberto Eco would have loved it. So what might it do?
The court list demonstrates the extent of Arthur’s power. It contain men from France, Ireland, Brittany and the Uplands of Hell, as well as bishops, kings and the sons of kings. It contains historical figures, euhemerised characters from earlier myth, and figures from other story cycles.
Arthur’s court might be impressive, but we know it falls and the list forcibly reminds us of this by referring to the battle of Camlan. We meet one of the nine men who planned the battle, and the three men who escaped and Arthur isn’t one of them. Even the mention of Gwyhenever and her sister alludes to the fact that, according to the Triad, Camlan was the result of her sister hitting the queen. There is also the man who will kill Kei, who Arthur will kill in revenge.
The absurd qualities of some of the heroes are exaggerated exaggerations: the kind I‘d heard growing up: he could eat you out of house and home; he drinks so much his legs must be hollow; he can talk the hind legs off a donkey. So they don’t feel as alien as they might and I enjoy them. But the fact that so many of these names have special skills or qualities, even when the skills and qualities are absurd, emphasises the fact that Culhwch has nothing going for him other than his fine horse, his shiny weapons, and his bad manners. He is out of his depth even before Ysbaddaden stipulates 40 Impossible Tasks.
The list also reinforces the fact that neither Culhwch nor reader, nor the original audience, are in familiar territory anymore. Once Culhwch has been greeted by the porter we’ve entered a very strange version of the world. There will be giants and witches and talking animals, as well as people who God transformed into animals for their sins. Kei and Bedwyr will hitch a ride on the the shoulders of a talking salmon. By the time you get to the end of the court list, the relative sanity of the opening of the story with its folk tale style familiarity is easily forgotten. The list acts as a portal that normalises the rest of the story. Once we've passed through it, nothing that follows seems strange.
You can also feel the story teller working the audience. As he launches into the list, the audience would tense. How long will this go on for? But they will never know what comes next, if it’s serious or ludicrous, and the variation carries them through the surging rhythms of the list. It’s an essential part of the performance that is this story.
The ‘silly names’ in the list also remind of us of two things. Firstly, there was a time when names did mean something. In this context, making up names has a currency. Secondly, real people had names that to us sound strange. To take a random example from a book on Medieval Hunting by John Cummings: Jehan Corneprise’ (John blow the death), Jehan Ievre (John Hallo-the-hare) and Huelguillot le Mastiner (Guillot the mastiff man.) (The translations are Cumming’s)
A similar list of names in Apollonius of Tyre’s poem on the Argonauts is a dull catalogue. The list in Culhwch is varied, entertaining and if not laugh out loud funny often amusingly demented
Given it does so much according to my reading, it seems worth the risk that is might alienate my non Welsh speaking Model Reader. The Court List stays. Whether in slightly abbreviated form or in full remains to be seen.
Culhwch arrives at Arthur’s court, though this scene should be taking place inside the hall….
I’m ‘translating’ the medieval Welsh prose of Culhwch and Olwen into a modern English verse sequence. First attempts are now published on David Cooke’s The High Window.
You can read them by clicking on this link:
Seven Extracts from Culhwch ac Olwen
Second group is published at The Brazen Head:
https://brazen-head.org/2024/08/19/three-translations-from-culhwch-ac-owen/
This Is Not a Grail Romance: Understanding Historia Peredur uab Efrawc. Natalia l. Petrovskaia . University of Wales Press, 2023.
'If the material before us fails to conform to our present-day European concepts of logic and unity, perhaps instead of rejecting the text should reject the logic and find a new one'. (Llyod-Morgan. Qtd page. 15).
Beyond its value to students of the Welsh story, this book demonstrates the value of approaching a medieval text, not with the assumption that it is a flawed attempt at a modern narrative, but as an attempt, not so much to read it on its own terms, but to discover what these terms might be.
Background.
The default approach to medieval texts is to see them as clumsy approximations of modern literature. To be sure there are 'works of genius' but 'Chaucer would be so much better without the digressions'.
There are two strands to this approach which start at the same point but head in different directions. In one the 'literary flaws' of the text are enumerated. The lack of coherence, of character development, the digressions, the absence of a proper narrative arc, are all pointed out. The Writer is like a child who is trying to do something that is beyond him or her. Nice try, but...
The second approach, specific to this topic, is the one which sees the Welsh prose stories collected as 'The Mabinogion' as incoherent. The writer didn't understand or wasn’t in control of the material, the stories are the ruined, garbled remains, of lost precursors. There is a critical tradition in which the scholar, having identified the incoherence, attempts to recreate the original, coherent, story. Given such stories no longer exist, the reconstruction usually says more about the scholar than the story.
Both approaches are underwritten by the idea that literature is an organic entity subject to Darwinian evolution, and after the high point of Greek and Latin literature, the awkward fumbling of the medieval Makar are the clumsy beginning of a progression which improves over time to whatever you currently think of as excellent.
This is both highly patronising to the creators of our texts: if only they'd have been to a modern writing workshop they might have done better, and insulting to their audience who were obviously willing to put up with any kind of rubbish because evenings were long and Netflix hadn't been invented.
But it shuts down a proper consideration of medieval storytelling. It's not possible to learn from something that’s already been dismissed as inadequate.
End of background
So here's to Natalia Petrovskaia, and her willingness to treat Peredur on its own terms. Her analysis of the structure seems to prove that this is not just a random accumulation of events but a carefully built story working to its own rules.
Her argument is based on the recognition that there are two surviving versions of this story. The Short Version, which owes little to the French, and the Longer Version or Short Version +Continuation. The latter is what modern readers encounter in a translation of ‘The Mabinogion’ and it is incoherent, inconsistent and repetitive.
By focussing on the shorter version, which is the oldest surviving version, she rejects the idea that Peredur is a badly written single narrative. She argues that the short version is three distinct stories, self-contained, which are linked by being about the same hero. The key is that the individual episodes ‘can be taken not merely as episodes in a grander narrative, but as complete semi-independent narratives forming distinct units that can be removed, replaced and re ordered. Most importantly, there are no internal contradictions or inconsistencies within each of these units.
‘Any inconsistences that can be found (eg. the seemingly ever changing object of Peredur’s affections) are to be found between these episodes, not within them.’
She refines her argument to see the story’s organisation as a fractal structure, specifically a Sierpinski gasket. This fractal model offers a mnemonic structure for the story teller: Three episodes, each composed of three sub episodes, each involving three consecutive scenes of encounters.
What such an analysis cannot reveal is what was agreed between Story teller and Audience as acceptable variations. Two instead or three but never four? Part of her argument reminds me of Carol Braun Pasternack's arguments about the 'Movement' nature of Old English Poetry, and while that leap is mine, not Petrovskaia's, it adds weight to her argument.
The coherence of her model would seem to prove her point as does the experience of rereading the story after reading her book.
Secondly, her argument that this is not a Grail Romance seems incontrovertible. Perdedur is not shown a Grail or does he seek one. (Hands up those who, like me, first read it as a Grail story because they had been told it was, and wondered what they'd missed.)
Thirdly this is not a Romance in the generic Medieval meaning of that term.
We read in ways we've been taught. Our reading practices shape not only our responses to texts, but create the texts themselves. Modern reading practices get in the way of our engagement with medieval stories. Rather than treat each text on its own terms, the critic and reader try to fit the text into learnt patterns based on teaching and prior reading. When a text doesn’t fit the pattern, it, rather than the pattern, is found wanting. Christopher Cannon made this point brilliantly in the context of post-conquest English literature in 'The Grounds of English Literature'. But it's a point that needs repeating.
There are other arguments in the book. Whether the landscape of some of the episodes can be linked to specific places and the story contextualised geographically is a moot point. Certainly a Welsh /Border landscape supports the argument about the Welshness of the story. However while Identifying a specific castle by a convent where the Nuns are in poverty is difficult, the fact that the attempt is possible reinforces the idea that the original audience would have felt these landscapes familiar and plausible in ways a modern audience can’t.
The Welshness of the story has been argued over. Petrovskia makes a sound argument that what she calls the 'Short Version' originated in Wales, and not as an attempt to copy a French original.
Her conclusion:
This is not a Grail Romance nor is it a Romance. Peredur is not a single narrative but carefully built episodes.
What she designates as Episodes 1 to 3 not only show no trace of stylistic incompetence, but demonstrate structural virtuosity; are anchored in Welsh historical, literary, legal and cultural contexts, and originated in Wales.
Short, clearly written, carefully argued, beyond its value to present and future students of Peredur Vab Efrawc, it is a demonstration of the benefits of approaching a story with the assumption that the text is the way it is because someone who knew what they were doing made it that way for people who enjoyed and appreciated the end product.
This small but astonishing book is John Matthias’ lament for his wife, Diana. It illustrates the truth of Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that if a writer gets the balance between trauma and technique right, the end result is great art.
At the heart of the book is a 13 page prose narrative. Diana was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and then became the victim of increasingly frequent hallucinations. She died due to complications from Covid. There are poems on either side of the prose. The three that precede it were written for or about her before she became ill. The piece that comes after it, Diana’s Things, is a sequence of 8 short prose paragraphs. There is also an afterward by Igor Webb which feels like a fussy stranger at a funeral, telling the mourners how to react.
The story is traumatic enough to have stopped many people from writing, but Matthias is one of the most interesting American poets I’ve read, and a technique developed over a life time holds the subject, stops it from overwhelming the writer, and shapes it into art.
The relationship destroyed by illness and an implacable medical system caught up in the Covid pandemic, is revealed in the three initial poems. ‘Of Artemis Aging (For Diana on her 65th Birthday)’ plays on her name, the Roman version of the Greek Artemis, the hunter goddess. It has its moments of gentle humour:
‘Actaeon turned/Into a stag. I’ve seen Diana at her bath but never was/devoured by my hounds, only by my longing.’
The Goddess does not get old, and cannot change. If she could change:
She might be like the woman called by her roman name,
Reading in a book beside the fire in my own house.
She has come down all these years with me, and she
Is getting old. She turns the pages slowly, then looks up.
Her wise ironic glance is straight as a shaft of gold
The comparison between sterile, unchanging goddess and aging familiar namesake is handled in a way that the goddess comes off second best but the subject of the poem is celebrated and yet made particular. This skilful use of myth is carried over into the next poem.
Good Dream takes the story of Baucus and Philemon from book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid’s story, as Matthias points out, is one of the few gentle ones in his book. The elderly couple, having offered the God’s hospitality when no one else did, are offered a wish. Their wish is to have their house turned into a temple; that they be its priests, and that above all they will not outlive each other. As they are dying they are changed into two trees, facing each other. What more do you need to know about the writer and his wife’s fifty years of marriage? The poem and the dream end:
The three remaining walls of my house collapsed
And I was standing in a marble temple, and I
Was not I. Beside me, Serpent Aesculapius arose
In flaming cloak. Diana spoke: I am a linden tree
And what I was replied: I have become an oak.
But as the prose recounts, the poet does outlive his wife. He isn’t allowed to visit her when she is dying because of Covid. At the beginning of her hallucinations she has seen a ‘flowery man’ in the hall. At that stage she knew he was not there. His last contact with her is over the phone. He is reading her the poem he wrote for her 65th birthday: ‘I couldn’t continue. “You’re doing great dad,” my daughter said, “but she wants to know about the flowery man.” So I told her everything I knew.’
The emotion that generates the story is left outside, and the facts are assembled and related and allowed to speak for themselves. Although the poet’s own experience is harrowing enough: taken to hospital, kept separate from his wife, put into the psychiatric ward and only allowed out when a friend organises a legal intervention, the focus remains on Diana, not on himself. The result is much more moving than any wailing could be.
What follows the prose is Some of Her Things, a meditation on a life through seven objects. In his dream he is standing in a river, with an impossibly large suitcase which contains all her possessions. He knows she is dead but she is present on the other bank of the river. She tells him ‘Do like Henry James’. He has no idea what that means. ‘ Do like Henry James,’ she repeats, ‘but save me seven things’.
It turns out that Henry James was asked to dispose of Constance Woodson’s things. He drowned her clothes in a Venice lagoon. Or tried to:
‘A ball gown billowed up and wouldn’t sink. It seemed that Constance Fenimore Woodson swam beside them’.
As Henry James discovered, drowning the past is not that easy. The danger is being drowned in it. In the seven sections that follow each thing is linked to a memory, or memories. It builds the kind of picture we all have of someone we know well, associated with items that have personal significance. Only once, in the last piece in the sequence, does the poet come close to a direct description of his own feelings.
‘I suppose I stand midstream only in a dream but I am broken to the point I cannot tell.’
It’s one of poetry’s harsher realities that no matter how traumatic or ecstatic the experience or emotions that generate the writing, once they are written down and handed over to a stranger they risk becoming cliches. As human beings we might sympathise with the writer, but as experienced readers of poetry we may well be bored and wonder why someone wanted to tell us this. At the other extreme, a death becomes an occasion for poetry and the sincerity of the poet can be questionable. Even a great poet like Tennyson’s sincerity was and is questioned for the writing of In Memoriam.
What Matthias has achieved here is to produce a sincere lament for his wife but in such a way that the lament is interesting as a made thing. My discussion of doesn’t do it justice. Total strangers will share and feel his loss, but the book is also an exemplary lesson in how to turn trauma into art without in any way betraying the experience or the subject.
The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber 2015
‘The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.’ Blurb.
Discussions of literary allusions usually disappear into theories of intertextuality, rather than discussions of the effects specific examples have on the reading of a particular text. The Buried Giant is an example of conscious intertextuality, where elements of the story are deliberately waving in the direction of any number of famous texts.
A Saxon warrior brandishes his trophy: ‘…what they were looking at was not a head at all, but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human like creature.’(p76). In case the reader misses the reference, a character explains: ’Our hero killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black water.’ (p.76)
A Saxon hero, two monsters, one with its arm ripped off sinking into the black water. Minor variations, but too close to Beowulf to be anything else. Later, the same hero will go into combat with a dragon. But if Beowulf is being alluded to, knowing the poem adds nothing to an understanding of The Buried Giant, and The Buried Giant doesn’t offer any kind of insight into Beowulf.
There is a knight called Sir Gawain, a recently dead king called Arthur, a magic wielder called Merlin, there are wild women to be met on a blasted plain, a dragon to be killed….but what are all these allusions doing? Instead of adding significance, the ceaseless, enthusiastic pilling up of literary references empties the words of meaning.
All the aging Sir Gawain has in common with the hero of Arthurian romance is the name. A cross between Don Quixote and one of the Knights Alice meets in Through The Looking Glass, who just might also have spent time in Browning's Child Roland. He is every literary Knight and no one in particular.
Arthur was a gift to medieval storytellers because he provided them with a ready built story world. And the basic outline of the story, established by Geoffrey of Monmouth, gave the world a beginning and end. But since Arthur became a character in modern films and fiction, the Arthurian story world is no longer coherent. Gesturing towards it gains the writer nothing. There are so many characters called Arthur, in so many divergent versions of ‘his’ story. The recent film ‘King Arthur: legend of the sword’ could have been called King Bob and his magic stick. Prior knowledge of King Arthur is of no help in understanding either that film or The Buried Giant.
The allusions do create an air of familiarity. A post ‘Arthurian’ world of villages and knights, Britons and Saxons, evil lords and inevitably crazy sado-masochistic monks. But nothing in the story alludes to anything specifically Arthurian except the names. The king could just as well be Good King Billy Joe Bob. Sir Gawain could be Barny, Billy Joe Bob’s nephew. Change the names, leave the story set in a fantasy world set in pseudo medieval times, and lose nothing. It would still be a fine story. It just wouldn’t feel quite so superficially self-consciously ‘literary’.
The Beowulf character Saxon tells his apprentice that the stone monastery was once built by Saxons as a defensible hill fort, which includes an ingenious stone tower to trap the attackers. If this is immediately post Roman Britain, then the Saxons didn’t build in stone until very much later.
The Saxons and Britons could be Twiggles and Boggles. The story world would then create and define the Twiggles and Boggles. Instead nothing in the story distinguishes them, they are labelled Saxons and Britons, but they have very little, if anything, to do with any meaning those words have outside the story in either history or literature.
The Arthurian/Beowulf background is short hand wall paper, a cheap set dressing, not to be taken too seriously, not to be examined too closely. It gives the book a ‘literary air’, in which the writer shows off his reading and a certain type of reader gets to feel literary because they recognise the texts. But the names and the words have been emptied of meaning. They point everywhere. They are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing.
Wales can boast one of the finest literary traditions in the world and in the poetic tradition of Wales, Taliesin is a vital figure. There are, intriguingly, two ‘Taliesins’.
The first is an historical character. A Briton who (?Probably?) was a court bard in ‘The Old North’, during the sixth century AD. He composed praise poems for ‘kings’ like Urien Rheged and was well-rewarded for his songs.
There is a second Taliesin, who is a character in a legendary tale. He benefits from a concoction in a magic cauldron and having been pursued by its irate owner, through several animal transformations, is finally eaten as a grain and born again to become the greatest of poets.
In the long Welsh tradition, it seems that ‘being Taliesin’ became a persona that later bards could adopt. The poems were memorised, recited and passed on. The poems associated with this practice tend to be 'visionary' and for a modern reader often baffling. Poems like 'Armes Prydein' or 'Cad Goddeu' remain obscure even after they have been 'explained'.
Scholars have tried to separate the ‘Historic’ from the ‘Legendary poems’ in an attempt to see what the historical poet may have composed. Not everyone agrees on the selection but they do agree the Historic ones are few. They do however contain gems like 'Marwnat Owein'; the great lament for Owein Rheged which is not only a great lament, but a master class in metrical finesse.
There’s not much that can be said about the Historical Figure, though the book gives a good introduction both to him and his context. Morus-Baird’s focus is the story or stories that survive about the legendary Taliesin. In an eloquently written exploration of the myth, he reads the symbolism of the stories to establish links to other stories, and to older and wider themes in a broadly ‘Celtic’ history.
He knows that interpretation, especially interpretation of myth, legend and folklore is an art, not a science, but he is too well-informed and too sane to drift off into the twinkly-eyed excesses of others.
Reading discussions of medieval literature and folk lore, it often feels like being a passenger on a tour bus in a foreign country. Too often the tour bus arrives at a junction and the obvious progression is to go right. You can see the Hill of Tara which is where you thought you were going. The bus goes left.
This happens far too often, and the reader becomes mired in the kind of arguments that C.S.Lewis mocked as: ‘Apollo was a Sun God. He rode in a chariot. Cuchulainn rides in a chariot. Therefore Cuchulainn was a sun god.” At which point you get off the bus, hike back to the intersection and wait for someone going in the right direction.
This never happened for me with Morus-Baird’s book. The tour guide is eloquent, entertaining, and obviously very well-informed. When the argument arrives at the intersection, he may go left, but you will be glad he did, because he will take you to places you hadn’t considered and while objections will occur to any reader, he always stays within the grounds of possibility and is very explicit about when he is speculating or stretching a point.
The writing navigates a territory whose boundaries are mapped by the meticulous linguistic arguments of cautious scholar and the wishful thinking of the ill-informed. As such it’s very valuable not least because it's readable. He cares about his subject. Part of his argument is that the Taliesin tradition is built into the Welsh Language, and therefore its diffusion and perpetuation are essential parts of a thriving Welsh culture.
This might sound like niche marketing, but the ‘Taliesin tradition’ has a lot to offer anyone; especially those interested in folklore, or interested in one of Medieval Europe’s great poets.
Hopefully before the next Robert Graves blunders around in that tradition, he or she will have read this book.
(My only criticism of this book is its lack of an index.)
Three reasons why you should read David McCooey’s poetry.
David McCooey, The Book of Falling. Perth, Western Australia, Upswell Publishing, 2023. 109 pages. $24.99 (AUS)
The Book of Falling is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programs can’t write.
1) He’s very good at what he does.
His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:
It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence
never a boast or a see-here,
Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:
The unseen night creatures -scaled and feathered
for their occult ceremonies-rasp and call outside
in the dark beyond the half dark that
surrounds this marbled, half lit house
(Questions of Travel)
This deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in The Book of Falling and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th Birthday; Marilyn Munroe divines the future and amongst other things, ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’
These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs.
The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.
2) Variety.
On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read and unusual in single author collections where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is.
Rain Poem.
And as if someone uttered the trigger word
rain begins without ceremony.
But it’s not ‘driving rain’;
it’s just sitting outside
engine idling over the neighbourhood.
The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.
It doesn’t give a damn
And then, like a poem ending
you look out the window
and the rain has stopped.
The birds have returned and the wind
has begun its invisible cover-up job.
Many of the poems present the everyday and familiar but altering the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world. Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.
When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: ‘Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity’.
What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world . And above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required. Or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.
If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example:
Australia
Dropping my son at school.
It is ‘Art Day’;
students are to dress up
as their favourite artist.
I see a kid dressed in white.
He has sunscreen on his nose,
And carries a cricket bat.
Both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. The traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports mad country; a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art’; or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.
3) His books are enjoyable to read. This may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review.
David McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable. You should read them.
This is Michael Daniels’ first collection, the traditional slim pamphlet with the added benefit that the publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated subtle art work to enhance the text.
A note informs the reader that Ravenser Odd first appeared as a sand or gravel bank at the mouth of the Humber in the early 13th century. A settlement was established there. It enjoyed a bad reputation, until it was finally erased in a great storm in the 14th.
It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it might be true, and while the enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as devine retribution, today as the note states, it’s easier to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns.
The poems are all written in Terza Rima. Anyone who voluntarily writes in this form has to be admired for making their own life difficult, but the success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.
The sequence begins:
What is it to be held in mind
by someone else, to dwell as ghost
or presence there? The drowned recline
in chambered mud, yet still we host
them in our heads, subdued and dim.
It isn’t us who need them most.
Economically, Daniels moves from here to sketch in the development and final destruction of the place. Two passing ravens provide a bird’s eye view of the new land. Then there’s a feudal Lord; ‘…life was his to make the worse,/he was their breath, their bread, their meat’, the restless power of the sea, the gradual erosion of the land, until the dead are ‘liberated’ from their graves and washed ashore. The two ravens see the final calamity:
The people’s final prayer rose up,
petitioning their lonely god.
The ravens read their trembled lips
to scavenge scraps of uttered word,
then spat them back as raucous noise,
disemvolweling all they heard.
This is a small impressive collection. The poet’s own website contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.
https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk
Update: March 2023. There’s a longer version of this review at :
https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/28/verses-for-a-vanished-town/
This review originally appeared in the Brazen head Here
Reagan M. Sova. Wildcat dreams in the Death Light. First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages.
‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.
It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.
Set in the first decades of the 20th century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, falls in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the festival of light for his dead relatives.
A lot happens.
At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:
i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them
While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW.
Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names; The Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, The IWW; recognisable conditions; whites only hospitals, and historical events like the Frist World War, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.
The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitive hucksters and frauds. An American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and where the good guys find friendship and love and win despite the odds stacked against them.
The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings to the party.
The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battle Field Where the Moon Says I love you. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.
By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm of legend.
When Alf, the circus master, asks the 13 year old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:
i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain
This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.
As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.
In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for two hundred and fifty pages.
Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating a distinctive story world.
In Ghost passages and A Country Without Names (Both Shearsman 2022) two fine poets approach history from different directions. My review of their books is up on the Long Poem Magazine website. Click the link to read it and it will open the review in a new window.