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Moor Music
| £8.99 |
In this innovative new book of poetry Mike Jenkins continues his life-long obsession with the history and fate of Wales, embodied, in this instance by both the glories of the landscape and the depredations suffered by the old industrial valleys in their years of decline. In contrast, his career in teaching left him with a sense of optimism about young people, about the prospect of change and with an eagerness to embrace changing times. These poems, like his prize-winning short stories, are full of colourful characters, dialogue, and incident. His sensitive awareness of the natural world, or what is available of the natural world in an urban context, is also frequently poignant.
Author of seven previous poetry collections for Seren he has also published a novel The Fugitive Three, published by (Cinnamon Press 2008) and a collection of short fiction Child of Dust (Gomer). He has also published work for children, two novellas called Barbsmashive and the latest The Climbing Tree (both Pont) and a collection of poetry - Poems for Underage Thinkers (Pont) .
Listen to Mike Jenkins read his poem, ‘Einstein at the Comp’:
Comments
Review from Eyewear Blog
The title is a good one: this book is a blending of space and sound. The Re open form of the poems on the page seems to identify with the open moorland of South Wales where many poems take place. Jenkins also gives the sound of the words plenty of work, often with rhymes and rhythms which are less obvious than they might have been because the spread across the page draws the reader's attention; the subject of music occurs often, too (playing the cello, Fado singing, jazz) but also the sound of the world around, as on the moors. This poem, ‘Komitas’, about an Armenian composer, survivor of the massacres, is followed by ‘The Tears of Pablo Neruda’ and ‘Legacies of Pinochet’, and while it feels like a cliché to say political writing works better with home material, it’s true here.
Peter Daniels, Eye Wear Blog
Review from North
In Moor Music, his eighth collection, he's so open to all experiences. Nothing's immune to a Jenkins poem. He has a terrific range: animals, landscape, teenagers, a groper, the war in Northern Ireland, Pinochet, Neruda, the depredations of the Welsh mining valleys.
Music's the thread that runs through the book. There's 'a wind band of starlings' in the title poem, 'a xylophone of stones' ('Kreizenn Ar Son'), 'the voice of water' ('To Sing the Common') and swans with their 'inner song/of glide and flight.' Elsewhere are poems about his daughter dancing, his son on cello and the witty 'Insomniac Jazz' - the insomnia due to the Midnight Inspector (I'm guessing from Ofsted - Jenkins is a teacher).
Almost all the poems in this collection are 'open field poems' - i.e. poems in which the subject dictates the shape of the words on the page. In some poems, shape and subject seemed a perfect match (e.g. 'Gyre-Child', 'Every Palm a Map' and my favourite, 'Green-Car'). In other poems it was harder to feel confident that the rhythms weren't random. But this is an explorative and exhilarating collection.
Diana Hendry North No.47
Review from Planet
The poems appear to be scattered across the pages, adding a visual dimension to the evocation of the bleak, blown commons of the poet's post-industrial home in Merthyr. The 'music' of the title threads its staves through and between the poems, intensifying and diminishing as it travels. It is, however, a music that is dispersed by the openness of the moors. For Jenkins, this is often conflicted - it can change from the harmonious, nature-engendered 'music you cannot notate', to discordant darkness where it becomes an enemy ('A Manic Conductor') or a victim ('The Boy and the Grand').
Jenkins uses strong images to hotly condemn modern ills, such as fast food culture ('Chipoil Avenue') or widespread denial about climate change ('Living in Times to Come'). Jenkins's passion about these issues is undeniable.
The strength of Moor Music lies in Jenkins's ability to write personal poems without becoming over-sentimental. In the lyrical 'Oisîn's Last Poem', he imagines his daughter in the mythical land of Tir na nOg. The mixture of sophisticated imagery with more child-like constructs ('beyond the Skerrigs / like two dinosaur-backs') delivers the poem from mawkishness and brings a freshness to the familiar myth.
Sarah Coles, Planet 202
Review from Poetry Wales
Mike Jenkins' long-term project to write about the struggle of the ordinary has usually involved poems that stay in the left of the page. His new collection, Moor Music, presents less overt political dissent than dissonant form. In his very readable blog, Jenkins has described the form as 'phrases spread out and space vitally important and with one poem being one sentence'. The sentence drives its message through the poem's floating parts as in the second half of 'Einstein at the Comp':
the planets were bubbles blown
by a Year 10 girl
who almost swallowed her gum
everyone wanted time to stop
before the next lesson -
everyone wanted to travel in space
and stay young
the universe was a huge black
balloon
and, without saying,
some delinquent burst in -
believing he was the chosen one.
A comprehensive school teacher for thirty years, Jenkins has always foregrounded the prophetic teacher-narrator. His role is shown as onerous in the extended metaphor poem 'Even the Black Cow':
Even the cow gets tired
of the crows in its back
crows on its back
picking flicking flapping
alive with grubs and fleas
I wonder if the more ordinary, even sentimental poems about children such as 'Gyre-child' would have been better developed as prose - Jenkins is an award-winning short-story writer. And there are, in contexts that have left explanatory endings, such as the last three lines of 'Legacies of Pinochet':
these then
you legacies, General -
these your hell.
But I feel this is one of Jenkins' best collection: the prophet of doom reaches a point of transformation into celebration.
Clare Crowther, Poetry Wales Spring 2011