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29th September, 2023

Friday Poem – ‘Lyrical Invention’ by Nerys Williams

Photograph of a town sign pointing in multiple directions. The grey town is blurred out in the background

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Lyrical Invention’ by Nerys Williams which was recently Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. The poem is published in her latest collection Republic.

51. Lyrical Invention Coming from this “little shit place”, as a rugby coach told us in 2018, we learn adaptive strategies. We are mountain people, under the radar, speaking a language that offers protection from direct penetration. Home is broken down, parables of post-industrial, an adventure campground for another country. Of course, relish the description by A.A. Gill we are “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.” Or, maybe dear reader, if you are into the burn Jeremy Clarkson appeals: “It’s entirely unfair that some people are born fat or ugly or dyslexic or disabled or ginger or small or Welsh. Life, I’m afraid, is tragic.” My friends this tragic life, as we sit in our demesne in soft rainfall. Ron Liddle’s “miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill-tribes” comes into mind. Journalists who want our words silenced as “an appalling and moribund monkey language.” There is a danger in responding too quickly, giving ugly words a permanence, credibility. Monolingualism is no crime, the curation of other languages is a tricky art, but monoculturalism, the impossibility of fielding doubt into your rhetoric? Doubt makes me wonder if there is a salt mill grinding in the sea. Or, that those mountains are fashioned by a giant god, breathing into life birds, trees and stones. Being didactic creates its own loss, disabling, poor creature with open mouth signing into the world. Leviathans straddling the shapes of their own grammar, splish-splosh. Instead, recall how Benjamin Britten’s This Little Babe translates into your language. Echolalia, how to find narrative accuracy not in the repetition of words, but in timing to music. Caught on quarter inch tape, a reel packaged and sent. “Oh, yes the choral” you nod “that old stereotype”. No, what I reference is the force of me, you, us a power of breath to fall and rise without issuing demands. Being here, colouring a lyric’s final iteration high notes fading against a cupola, the roof of a tin shed, the gambrel of a village hall, all the mercury bubbles unleashed.

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Related Books

Republic

Nerys Williams

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