The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems

by Paul Henry

This substantial selection is the culmination of more than two decades' worth of beautifully crafted poems. From a poet who was born into a family of musicians, music pervades many of these pieces, as do a large cast of aunts, neighbors, and friends—many of whom appear in Dylan Thomas-like character sketches. Characters are not pinned down, but are allowed to flourish as archetypes, evoking their history and context with a rare empathy and a lyrical lightness of touch. Also included in this collection are several poems written for the Welsh national rugby team as they prepared for the 2007 rugby world cup. The individual human voice, the ragged vagaries of the heart and soul, and the joys and sorrows of family life allow this collection to be personal without being confessional, preferring tender observation to sensationalism or didacticism.

Genres: Poetry

180 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

Reviews

[Sheenagh Pugh]

This is a selection from Henry's published work since his collection Time Pieces in 1991, plus about 25 new poems written since the publication of Ingrid's Husband in 2007. I'd heard most of these new poems at various readings, and been so impressed by them that I turned to the end of the book first to read them. But don't do this at home unless you already know Henry's work well, because some of these new poems, including the sublime "Penllain", derive part of their powerful, brooding nostalgia from reprising characters who first appeared in earlier work, notably The Milk Thief (Seren 1998). Henry, a musician and songwriter as well as a poet, has always been one for using the techniques of reprise and refrain; there are poems from Ingrid's Husband, like "The Snow Dome" and the section of "Gestures" beginning "I want you close before I go" that are effectively, though unobtrusively, rondeaux, and the whole of "Penllain" is a sort of verbal fugue, with motifs, images and people from the past endlessly shifting and recurring, coming around again as things do. Nightingale Ann, Prydwen Jane, Brown Helen all resurface from The Milk Thief in the new poems; so does Catrin Sands, in a poem heavy with recall, whose recurring, subtly changing lines again have some resemblance to the rondeau:

Catrin Sands, are you still there?
I dreamt about you last night.
You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you
who were pale and thin last night.
And your eyes were brown instead of blue
Catrin Sands, if you're still there.

I suppose the themes that have been constant in Henry's work have been, firstly, the relationships of people to each other and to the places they live in, and secondly, intricately bound up with the first, the passage of time. As far back as "Daylight Robbery", from Captive Audience (Seren 1996), a 7-year-old boy's first "grown-up" haircut becomes the occasion for a meditation both on parenthood and on time passing, changing people and their relationships:

All the way back to the car
a stranger picks himself out
in a glass-veiled identity parade.

Turning a corner
his hand slips from mine
like a final, forgotten strand
snipped from its lock.

Through his next three collections, this sense of time altering relationships and perceptions became stronger and more brooding, and it also became bound up with place in that – to over-simplify somewhat – Newport, where the poet then lived, came to figure the present, while his childhood home Aberystwyth was emblematic not only of the past but of all the alternative turns time might have taken. Several noted poets hail and have hailed from the unenticing urban landscape of Newport, but I can't think of any who have brought it alive as vividly as Henry does in his "Newport East" group and the long poem "Between Two Bridges", in which he walks through the town by night with his younger self:

I notice the river. barely a slough of itself in the cracked mud–
as if the moon had taken a long straw to the years and sucked.

He pulls away. The wind puts its lips to an arcade.
A seagull on a barber's pole waits to open its blades.

Yet at the same time, Aberystwyth and the past, or a present that never materialised, were becoming an ever more powerful presence. "College Library" merits quoting in full, because it exemplifies not only this elegiac, what-if strand in Henry but his exactness with words and images, a quality of almost clinical observation that paradoxically makes a terrific emotional impact:

The book no one else took out
since stamped on 9.10.80
when the Jack Russell froze on its zebra
four stripes ahead of its zimmer
and a wave held back its confession
and a tongue hovered an inch from its cone
and the lifeboat got anchored to its wake
and a finger in the Bay View's window
accused the horizon… is still there.

He splits it, gently, its shell
back to the light. They take a breath
as swimmers surfacing might.
Their fingertips drift, collide
on lines once whispered by heart.
He snaps it shut again, for good.
The esplanade clock chimes twenty-five….

Small lines appear at her eyes, which he loves.
His hair comes away in her hand when they kiss.
Someone says Sh – a pair of heels on wood
near where the sun falls open at their feet.

Despite the underlying melancholy, there is a humour about that Jack Russell, and it would be wrong to overlook Henry's facility in that direction; even the final poem, an elegy for his friend the artist Tony Goble, is shot through with humour, as befits that eccentric gent.

When I think of some of the almost unsayable, and certainly unmemorable, prose in lines that passes for free verse, and of some highly praised, competition-winning poems that resemble determinedly quirky exercises rather than an attempt to articulate anything important enough to need saying, I am at a loss to understand why this poet, who not only concerns himself with themes that would resonate with most readers but has the verbal and musical skill to make them resonate, is not more widely known and admired. When, recently, I had to name 15 authors who were important to me, he came just below Louise Gluck and Edwin Morgan, which still feels about right.