Richard Gwyn’s fourth collection, Stowaway, follows it’s anti-hero of the title as he roams around the Levantine region, but this is no straightforward travelogue. The voyages take place over many centuries – from the fall of Byzantium to present day refugee camps in Syria – and mix reality with myth and magic, enabling Gwyn to reflect on his own history, memory, conquest, loss, settlement and exile, where mazy journeys can become, as in ‘Map of Venice’, “simply a map of yourself, or of anyone you care to name”. Indeed, in that prose poem, the juxtaposition of long and short sentences – the long, deliberately convoluted ones split by comma after comma – becomes a formal mirror of the city itself in which an alley’s name-plate will bear “no relation to the name on your map”. Anyone who has been in Venice will know what he means, as will anyone who has ever begun a serious journey of self-exploration. There is “No respite from the labyrinth; / it pursues you / even when you think / you have evaded it” (‘Facing Rabbit Island’).

Gwyn writes complexity into a plain style. In the title sequence, spread through the book in six parts, the stowaway is discovered and set to work on the ship. He sprouts (and hides) wings and horns. He understands dolphin language but isn’t above being “fellated by a myopic poet”. He metamorphoses into a porpoise, gull and rat. He’s tied up, beaten, and urinated on, which give him a curious satisfaction. He sheds his soul. No wonder the ship’s crew “treated him with caution / and rumours began to circulate”. Gwyn fuses the real and surreal with great skill. Just as “every city collapses into Byzantium” (‘Memo to Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, First Venture Capitalist’), so time zones also collapse. A vagrant, the goddess Anitgone and a white dog crop up in poems separated by what could be years or many generations, and yet a residual memory somehow remains. In the final poem, ‘On Lesbos (November 2017)’, set in a refugee camp, he recognises “a Syrian woman he knew / centuries before, in Aleppo. She has barely changed, despite / the pall of fatigue around her eyes.” Gwyn’s narrator notes how history repeats. He is no angel, ruthlessly exploiting others and taking part in violence and killing. Even he begins to sense the futility of it all – the rise and fall of empires and the short-lived cycles of gain and loss – and vows in ‘Shabra and Shatila (September 1982)’ never to go to war again but, in the very next poem, he kills an old foe. In ‘After Smyrna’, a prose poem set following the Greco-Turkish War of the early 20th century, “The more Greek he is made to feel, the more he fights back, to become his other: Turk, Jew Arab, Kurd… and begins to understand that every narrative contains its opposite.” He is a shapeshifter, without allegiance, nationality or origin. Stowaway implicitly interrogates nationalism, mercenary individualism and historical precedent and still manages to be relentlessly entertaining.

In the poem, ‘Map of Venice’, Richard Gwyn evokes Italo Calvino’s notion that ‘the city reveals only a possible version of itself, one of many.’ Soon after, in the same poem, he draws on a second realisation, that ‘what is being described in all these false turnings, darkened doorways, dead ends… is simply a map of yourself, or of anyone you care to name,’ which feels somewhat akin to another of Calvino’s observations: ‘Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.’ 

At the heart of Gwyn’s latest collection, Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure, are simultaneous, intertwining explorations of place and self. The locations are fuzzy realms scattered across the eastern Mediterranean, painted here in a vibrant and transcendent style that acknowledges the porousness of history and the capricious nature of place. The self seems an amalgamation of the poet, an anonymous narrator and a fictional anti-Ulysses character pieced together from various far-flung fragments – a stowaway on an epic journey of discovery. 

Before starting the book I had been worried that a work addressing travel and identity, likely to incorporate elements of autobiography – Gwyn spent a decade travelling the region – might stray into overly romantic, self-searching territory. Such fears were quickly alleviated. While it is concerned with how distance and dislocation can force us to confront important existential issues, creating space for new knowledge, there’s nothing trite about it; such themes are shaken up with a thrilling sense of mischief. Rather, it’s a sophisticated, self-mocking disruption of what we think we know – about ourselves, the past and the world around us. 

This defamiliarisation is brought into focus, for instance, in ‘Old Greeks’, where Gwyn’s rogue protagonist, ‘a radical figure’, is ‘waiting for a vessel that will bring him to the edge of something, where the familiar starts to lose its shape.’ His various expeditions, which breach time and span centuries, see him bear witness to the fall of Byzantium, the Greek diaspora, the Greco-Turkish War and the deportation of the Jews from Salonika during World War Two; more recently, there are the conflicts in Lebanon, the Balkans, Iraq and Syria, and the rise of Islamic State. 

With the eastern Mediterranean steeped, as it is, in traditions of myth and magic, and the narrative a twist on classical literature, these events are seen through a lens masterfully skewed by invention. Recalling the Great Fire of Smyrna, in 1922, for example, the poet describes the stowaway slipping through the chaos, ‘past old men and women, past children, past bodies screaming but inert against the human tide,’ and almost slithering into the water, swimming, with supernatural agility, to safety. At another point, our intoxicating guide soothes his budding horns with olive oil.

Conflict – and the misery it gives rise to – is a constant: ‘I want to be friends with everyone, and yet know I must have enemies too, if only to maintain my friendships. What kind of crazy thinking is that?’ There’s a pivotal moment in the collection (not long after a string of short prose pieces about bodies shattered by illness, which perhaps represent the most potent collision of fiction and autobiography) when, in Beirut, the stowaway sees the horrific remains of victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. With ‘all notion of co-habitation blown away’, the scene becomes a premonition of the millennial Levant – that of Daesh. 

It’s at this point that the demonic traveller vows to never again take up arms, in any war, and by the time we’ve hit the final poem, ‘On Lesbos (November 2017)’, he’s almost human, given even to empathy. He sees refugee families strewn across a beach, exhausted by their own perilous time on the sea, fleeing the most desperate warzones. He recognises a Syrian woman from centuries ago, ‘the pall of fatigue around her eyes’ the only sign of the pain she’s now resigned to; it’s stunning work, leaving the reader utterly dismayed at the persistence of suffering, secure only in the knowledge that something, at some point, must change. 

As well as political catastrophe, we encounter natural disaster, an acknowledgement of perhaps the greatest threat of our times. In another short prose piece, the poet describes experiencing the Kalamata earthquake of 1986 from a distant village. A week later, he arrives in the town and walks among NATO tents filled with evacuees, sucking in the ‘black, exasperated air’. He stops and talks to a bartender, who, with his hand trembling, explains: ‘You cannot imagine an earthquake. You have to live it.’ It’s a powerful bridging of the big and the small, something Gwyn does extremely well throughout. 

Given the geography of the poems, I found myself thinking regularly, whilst reading, of Mathias Enard’s work, set largely around the Mediterranean basin. Over the course of nine books, four of which have so far been translated into English, Enard has written on sectarian violence in the Balkans, a trip by Michelangelo to Constantinople, jihadism and the relationship between Europe and the Middle East, among other things. It’s a sprawling project rich with ambition, historical insight and formal experimentation.

These are descriptions fit, too, for Stowaway, which is of course physically slight in comparison, but impressively layered, nonetheless, and packed with puzzles and riddles to pore over and revisit. It’s a collection to slip into your coat pocket and carry with you, out on the move.

This review is shared with permission of New Welsh Review. Read the full article on the NWR website.

This is a book imbued with the character and spirit of travel on the itinerant sea but of an earthy and hazardous kind, slumming it, penniless, ‘the essential aspect/was never paying for a ticket.’ (p9) as the opening poem ‘Reckless Travel’ says. This could have been an autobiographic, experiential tale, though it departs from plain facticity to spin a number of fictive episodes, while the author blurb points out that Gwyn ‘spent a decade travelling on and around the Mediterranean’ which process he has already recounted in a well received memoir ‘The Vagabond’s Breakfast’ (12). Gwyn studied anthropology at the LSE and later took a doctorate in linguistics at Cardiff, where he continues to teach Creative Writing. Gwyn has written three novels, among which his first, The Colour of a Dog Running Away(05), was rated book of the year by The Bookseller, this followed by Deep Hanging Out (07), set in Crete. He has also translated from the Spanish and travelled in Latin America (2011-15), from which came the anthology The Other Tiger (also Seren).

This book of poetry is, as it were, mapped out by a long interspersal poem in 6 parts, ‘Stowaway’, a number of well constructed and expressed prose poems likewise scattered throughout and a selection of locales that are named, from Byzantium (‘He dreamed of Byzantium’ p11) to Susa to Venice, Lesbos, Lebanon and Crete. The poetry of course reads more briskly and evocatively than the careful, vivid and well honed prose. 

The six parts of ‘Stowaway’ no doubt form the kernel or spine of the book. ‘Stowaway I’ sets out how the travelling got started with its evasive rationale. The narrator, with his boat taken from him, ‘stowed away, for love of the sea’ and ‘had no idea where the ship was bound’, though he had dreamt of Byzantium, yet whereof ‘neither excuse nor explanation came to mind.’ (p11) He is found stowing, and the ship’s captain, rather than ejecting him, put him to work, where it is found that ‘he has an aptitude for maritime tasks’ (II p17), a ‘natural’ who can scale the rigging like a monkey. He then finds that he traipses the Levant, ‘from port to port’ (III p21) for a year or so, but ‘begins accumulating/ sorrows’ ‘that accrue from living among men’. 

By ‘Stowaway IV’ he had turned to ‘taunting other members of the crew’ (p25) and is tossed over the side of the ship. In a rather florid or mystical episode the narrator survives drowning through embodying the spirit of a porpoise, then a gull and a rat, shamanistically, and returns himself to the ship where ‘From that point on/ they treated him with caution,/ and rumours began to circulate.’ (p25) At ‘V’ however he jumps ship at Kastelli. In a rather lurid, bruising and surrealistic episode he seems to resist identification with the budding horns and tail of the devil before coming into contact with some dubious twins at a hotel who tie up and abuse him wherein he responds masochistically that ‘He knew/ deliberate self-abasement was/ one of the routes to mystic truth’ (p35). 

The sixth ‘Stowaway’ poem finds him wandering through the pine forests of the Aegean. This again unravels in rather compulsive but surrealist notes. He finds work in melon fields. He then ‘forgets’ his sense of purpose and direction. He insistently climbs a rocky slope intent on throwing himself off its top but ‘a great tiredness overcame him’ (p42) 

         he slept for many days,
   waking weightless,
   without a care, but without a soul.
   He made his way towards the city,
   any city, looking for trouble. (end p42)

This then seems to recapitulate the indifference or unawareness of the direction of the initial stowing as well as the troublesomeness that found him latterly being thrown overboard. Curiously too Gwyn shifts between third person (‘Stowaway’) and first person (frequently, elsewhere) narration.

Gwyn sets out the presentation of his long poem with two short prefatory pieces on ‘Reckless Travel’ and the somewhat proverbial ‘Some Journeys’ (of two quatrains) of which it is said that a journey is either of a ‘fixed trajectory’ or that which ‘you did not complete,/ and which has still not ended.’ (p10) 

There is a dreamlike or somewhat surrealist or allegorical quality to some of the intersecting poems and prose poems,- ‘The days are beginning to fold into one another, a slow-motion wing-beat on repeat.’ he provides in an early poem. (p14) The first person is introduced in a prose poem called ‘The Names’ (p13):

   I meet them in transit, in cheerless bars or dosshouses,
   On canal walkways, in overgrown cemeteries. 

These cemeteries seem to contribute a darker or more shadowy aspect to the narrative. The last poem to use the ‘I’ of address is ‘The Names: Remix’ (p53) which is a tale of violence and betrayal in whose conclusion

   I found my way to the Kapani market
   and vanished there, without a trace. 
      (p54)

This is somewhat preparatory to the final poem ‘On Lesbos’ where the protagonist unexpectedly remembers, but she knows neither how nor why, a woman’s name, Amena.

Elsewhere Gwyn writes of ‘elusive memory that told me I had something to uncover there, to retrieve’ (p18) and equally that 

                                              he has always
   confused the journey with the writing of it,
   whether the two things have finally become one. 
   (p12)

that is whether he is ‘remembering,/ the act of writing with the object of that need/ to tell and tell?’ (p12)

All of which is to suggest that Gwyn has marshalled the threads of his narrative rather well, with these at least three main strands. The 6 part ‘Stowaway’ is a tale in itself. The remaining poems, some three dozen, have a kind of storied trajectory but not an unequivocal one. After that first poem, ‘Reckless Travel’ this is essentially the thematic material of the book, travel that is more or less reckless. In ‘Stowaway’ itself the protagonist must use his wits to survive and recovers only to find himself motivated to set off to sea again among the city ports, ‘where no harbour signals home.’ (p56), the final phrase of the book. 

So that we are infused with this travelogue spirit of journeying, dark, reckless and unpredictable, sometimes sparing and providential, ‘intimacy granted/ by the frail co-ordinates of war’ (p56). As Cavafy’s epigraph to the book sardonically states ‘Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, [this city]/ you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.’ Gwyn’s writing for the most part is very crisp and clear, of persuasive facility in both poetry and prose. The book naturally has a lot of the flavour of travelling at sea, light and rough, and how our protagonist might have fallen into it. No home harbour he concludes but equally ‘You’ll always end up’ ashore ‘in this city’ as Cavafy puts it (‘The City’), lending the tale a kind of closure and grounding through cyclicity. One might say though that the flavour of the book rests more, on balance, with the travel than the writing.