Poetry

A Mid Winter Garland, by Niel Wright. Published by Pegasus Press and reviewed by Denis List.

Flowers picked in winter are hardy, but their beauty is consumed in their survival. Such is the message of Niel Wright's latest collection of poems, entitled "A Mid-winter Garland, some minor poems by Niel Wright." They are very formal poems, most of them very carefully constructed of rhymes, metre (mostly quantitative) and verses. They fall into three main groups: epigrams, roundels and poems on classical subjects.

Most of the epigrams are rather weak, often built around the rhyme:

Big Me
The stature of big me's
Lost upon these pygmies.

The roundels are more interesting. In these, the first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh, and the second is repeated as the eighth. But Niel Wright introduces different meanings for the repeated lines by changing the words that are stressed; for example:

The Interest
His interest in words
Made epic-making Attis
A fool: yet afterwards
His interest in words
An idle world rewards
With epoch-making status.
His interest in words
Made epic-making Attis.

These poems, and the above is a fair example, sound remarkably awkward when read aloud (or you could say powerful). Niel Wright is not a nature poet. He writes of men and ideas. Description and vivid imagery are absent. Instead, he often uses repetition.

The most obvious and remarkable thing about A Midwinter Garland is that the poetry is preoccupied with what you might call thought at the expense of emotion. The nature of the poetry forces the reader to stay at a distance (so few people will be interested). This is to most poetry what vitamin pills are to food. But there are exceptions, such as:

The Visionary
What can it mean:
Blood on the moon,
Death on the sun?
These I have seen.
I saw a sign:
Death on the sun.
Blood on the moon.
What can it mean.

This, though slight, is far more penetrating (of the reader, not of itself) and at first seems to have more in common with Blake or Lorca than with Niel Wright. But the same sound-qualities are there: the consonantal rhyme; the repetition; the words perhaps are shorter. The Visionary is some-how more involving than the others I've quoted. Most of the difference is that here a feeling of alarm has been added, and readers notice the fright.

So if you like ideas but not imagery, force-fulness more than elegance, man more than nature, and rationality more than emotionality, you will probably like Niel Wright's poetry.—Denis List.