Deryn Rees-Jones and Paul Farley by Flora Anderson
As part of Literature Live, I went to see Paul Farley and Deryn Rees-Jones reading from their new collections The Dark Film and Burying the Wren respectively. It was run as a University of Manchester event in the John Thaw Studio on Oxford road, and was a real education in some thoughtful, wildly different, and emotionally charged writing.
47-year-old Paul Farley took to the stage first, later admitting he found such formal readings odd saying he had a sudden ‘attack of self-consciousness.’ I found this hard to believe as he reads with what seems like an experienced, yet soft, authority: his gentle Liverpool accent rounds off each word with well-seasoned character. On paper also he is a man of great experience. Farley has won countless awards, from a young age, winning the Forward Poetry prize in 1998 for his first collection The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You. His new collection The Dark Film is interested in the idea of ‘how we see’; explaining this as he puts on his glasses. Playing with ideas of perspective and scale, he asks us to be aware of the inevitable memories that float up in our minds. This is addressed in his poem about Quality Streets, lifting the wrappers up to your eyes as a child ‘becoming a camera’ and changing the colour and feel of the world around you.
Under a Pre-Cambrian Sky
the scale of blood and blood-shadow has made
An ancient fortress of the maisonettes
Farley talks about the inescapable draw to his childhood, something he almost doesn’t want to write about but it, time and time again, becomes his inspiration. Poems about his childhood in Liverpool he even describes as a ‘secretion’, as if they are a product of him over which he has no control. He does not trivialise or reduce these memories however; Farley seems to write on a series of levels at all times. His language is varied and unexpected, but he does not claim any alienating register, instead conjuring up images that you return to again and again catching new meaning from them each time. This was apparent in his opening poem, The Power
Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want
He demands us to create our own vision of his poem, which truly exemplifies his quest to discuss different perspectives. We are immediately made aware of it being our own vision, and one of many in the audience. The poem ends with the line ‘now look around your tiny room and tell me that you haven’t got the power’. Hearing Farley read this line himself brings real impact with it as he stares straight up at the audience, almost endowing us with his imagination. Of course he humbly brushes it to one side and makes a well-phrased discouraging remark before introducing his next piece.
Deryn Rees Jones presented her poetry with a far greater emotional stance, the sound of her voice had the tone of someone who was talking about something very close to her heart, and she approached all of her subject matter with real thoughtfulness and poise. An obsession with small things permeates her collection and we heard poetry about a series of Slugs, trilobytes and eggs. The imagery she used was extremley interesting, in slugs she writes:
In the gastropod inchings of their midnight séances,
the slow rehearsals of molluscular dance,
they’re themselves absolutely, beyond imitation.
Rees-Jones paints the slugs as magical beautiful creatures. Her further descriptions of trilobytes ‘small as bullet holes’, hark back to Farley’s childhood poetry, showing how small events and things can form a personality. Incidentally the two poets share a Liverpool past, despite Rees-Jones identifying more with her Welsh history. Her most startling poem is the Dogwoman sequence, inspired by artist Paula Rego, who Rees-Jones praises for ‘facing terror straight on’. We go down a path of squalor and degradation, dealing with the dichotomy of humility and humiliation which defines caring for someone who is sick. The death of Rees-Jones’ husband runs through various parts of her collection, nowhere more affecting than in The Songs of Elizabeth So, where she writes ‘Your name is one/ I will not speak’; identities converge and emptiness is allayed by a creative fulfilment, but is a moving depiction of loss and unfinished business.
The two poets took questions towards the end, highlighting the benefit of teaching and the importance of learning at every age from everyone. They both eschewed the idea of avoiding sentimentality from one questioner, instead saying that poetry inevitably does involve it, but through pertinent frameworks. Both poets here certainly did so, and with clear and moving individualism.