What do we mean when we talk about poetry? What do we do with the tools at our disposal: assonance, alliteration, metaphor, the iambic pentameter, free verse.
Like a dictionary, a poem is a gathering of words. But a dictionary appears to answer, not in an abstract way, the requirements of the reader.The poem however, and much depends on the poet, exacts requirements.
For example, poets are encouraged to be honest. I’d prefer accuracy. You have a thought or an image or a feeling, and you see accuracy in your hijacking of that moment.
It can’t always work because, as you will discover in Hear the Colour, poems must exceed their definitions. If a poem lacks the volcanic impulse to come to the surface, it is probably not worth writing.
In Gotcha, the marooned hermit crab Joe spots on a beach is, within a handful of short lines, compared to Sugar Ray Robinson and transformed into a moving mountain of a shell. It didn’t start out like this.
It is a small poem with an epic theme. It is an invocation to the reader, and is instantly a picture woven by simple words.
Elsewhere, there are many examples of Joe’s recognised aural pleasures, the Welsh fiddling with words, the poet in the playground of his soul, the arrangement of syllables within the tight marginal frame of a blank page.
From Matterhorn
No other profile
Of a peak so tattoos
The meniscus of the mind
The meniscus of the mind: I first came across the word meniscus as a cartilage on the surface of water, where a trout might take a fly. To me it conveyed the image of an inescapable pod of water, once the fish moved in.
In other words, a fishing term. Joe, of course, living by the river Sow, is a proficient angler, blessed by the murmuration of nature in Eden Vale, a pulse beneath his work. He long ago learned to look, to listen and to learn.
From Yellow
Nature’s quantitive
Easing keeps
The dazzle tint
In front of petals pink
And purple, red and blue
And gets the vote
Of insects too
Back in the day, Horace wrote Un pictura, poesis: As the picture, so the poem. Poets, like painters, operate in both shadow and light, and present abstractions.
But poems, unlike paintings, depend on the spoken word to inhabit more than one world. Uttered by the mouth, as Joe will demonstrate shortly, there is music. We have his lines, seen by the eye, set down by the hand, but formed by the breath.
I can imagine hearing Joe speaking aloud the last verse of Changing of the Light in his study, the better to nail the rhythm.
ust you wait until the night when moon
Is mooding blue again and stars cast
Shadows like violet violations
Of all the lore we’ve come to understand.
Moon is mooding, stars cast shadows, violent violations. The alliteration works perfectly because the picture painting of the words is exact. Mood is mooding blue – yep – we can all imagine that.
