8 Poets from Cornwall
In a mesmeric tapestry of sound and language, eight
'poets of Cornwall' are profiled against an improvised musical background,
starting with Zeeba Ansari's grave and sumptuous evocation of the dynamics
of dawn over a 'beaten country', culminating
in Derrek Hines' magnificent rendering of Gilgamesh, the world's original hero, out of whose swagger and ebullience
came humanity's first great death lament. In between are many feats of
lyrical and vocal strength: Bill Mycock poignantly immortalises his late
father's workboots, transforming them into 'aeolian
harps’,
Victoria Field's elastic imagination lifts the lid on jazz and Russian
passion, in an astonishingly erotic tour de force; Paul Newman's
linguistic brilliance and emotive performance shed metaphysical light on
the Titanic ('history's
shrapnel'), in which the
disaster engages with the consciousness of subsequent generations; death by water also
features in Liz Rowett's
'Green, and Drowning', which
substitutes an aesthetic of abandon for oxygen, as the victim contemplates
her own finale, 'spanned like a white
bird on
the green currents of sky'; raking pavements for orphan
coins is recalled by Loic Rich in his hunger-driven odyssey Looking
for Money
on the
Ground', a
dazzling aggregate of dispossession; in a few weighty words, Pam Smith-Rawnsley
guides us from the particular (a young girl in Fifties England) to the
general (the agony of loss), concluding with a line which resonates
through the ages, 'no room for me in my father's mansion'.
Further
offerings include: Underworld, another
strand in the Gilgamesh saga,
brimming with memorable images, verbal felicities and complex ideas,
overflowing with sorrow; a stately homage to Michelangelo's David,
'a model of stilled kinetics', in
which the glow of arousal transfers from marble to restorer; Concept
Snake, a reptilian sleight
of mind, where the poet's voice itself seems to slither into the depths; a
tender tribute to the saints of Cornwall (Petition),
recreating the life-affirming religion of Piran, and his colleagues, 'Apport',
in which a periwinkle falls 'through
into this
world where nothing
is quite right or altogether
wrong either'; an inspiring ode to Cornwall's most rnajestic creature (Buzzard), written from the bird's point of view, exhorting us to
understand 'this parable of
c/ouds';
an open-armed welcome from the 'heroin-skinny
has-beens'
of the Holy City of Penzance;
a gripping portrait of a mentally brutalised woman (Rape) who,
having been ravaged and reformatted by an unscrupulous man, 'waits
for someone else to reinvent her'.
Although
they all possess their own originality, our poets have this in common:
they eschew the banal, the trivial, the merely personal, presenting us
with glimpses of the numinous.
MUSIC
Music by bass guitar, bass clarinet, Puerto Rican cuatro, thumb-piano, K-Station. Played by Tony Lamb (Chris Revill, keyboard on Titanic).
Produced by Tony Lamb
Price £5.99 (Freepost) Cheque or PO payable to Tony Lamb
Zeeba Ansari
Victoria Field
Derrek Hines
Loic Rich
Bill Mycock
Paul Newman
Liz Rowett
Pamela Smith-Rawnsley