IMAGE & IMAGE by Jonty Driver: a sample: Sonnet 11 (See review by Alan McKinna below) Click on Image to enlarge

IMAGE & IMAGE by Jonty Driver, reviewed by Alan McKinna

One of the advantages of longevity is the opportunity for review and in this slim pamphlet Jonty Driver has taken a telescope to the early quarter of his life mostly in South Africa. Whilst inspecting old photographs in an album, sometimes with a magnifying glass, his ever ready poet’s pen captioned them with a dozen sonnets.

He opens with twin images of himself: now and then. 

        “He’s not so sure these days he likes to see
          Just what he was - a bit too much of himself 
         To bear, before he learned the ways to mask  
         Himself, his fears, his past: .......”

The dozen sonnets are deliberately unrhymed but the photographs tip some memories back much more sharply than others. He is seated as The King centre stage in The Prep School Play (with a cast of fifty!) decrying the Head who wrote it because ‘nothing said in verse couldn’t better be done in prose’, a very early delight in verse for this young boy. The sonnet concludes remarking his ‘little brother, the one who’s dead’.*

There are passages devoted to his undergraduate life, from a triumphant rugby XV, the “C Reserve” up to a Group University Student Conference in 1964 shortly before his detention in solitary confinement suspected of involvement in the African Resistance Movement. Because the whole is about his relationships with the stars of the photos, the family is well represented: a year old Jonty in a romper suit on Grandad’s lap followed by his wife, Ann with two children and expecting her third. 

     “The older children gather at her knees
       Demanding love and time; and still she tells
       The stories that she knows they need to hear
       And gathers them as if they were themselves

       Stories to be told. ........”

              

The twelfth image is of THE OTHER GRANDFATHER : his father’s father, Harry born in 1881 and killed in France in 1917. Its sonnet and the memories described throughout this intriguing ‘pamphlet’ make me wonder if an alternative title might have been IMAGES & HOMAGE

The greatest English sonnet master gives us thought:

               “Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;

                 Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;

                 Both grace and faults are are lov’d of more and less:

                Thou makest faults graces that to thee resort.”

W.S. Sonnet 96

Alan McKinna

 Published in Rye, at £2 it’s a snip and thoroughly recommended

*MY BROTHER & I (2013) by C.J. Driver.

 

Andrew Bamji: another poem, and some information on the author

In the Gallery

I have an admission.  I really love Titian, and Renoir, and even Van Gogh,

But I’ve not got real urges for splodges and splurges so Rothko’s stuff turns me right off.

I’d love a Canova – be rolling in clover if I could own Rodin’s “The Kiss”,

But Lucien Freud makes me very annoyed. I’d always give his muck a miss.

So off to the gallery (maybe with Valerie) to find something I can afford;

A Grimshaw, perhaps, or some nice Cary maps with which I would never get bored.

I would even consider, were I highest bidder, a Victorian landscape or two;

What would also be awesome – a Montague Dawson, with clipper on ocean so blue.

I am sad a bouquet by Renoir or Monet would require I dispose of my house

And a Rembrandt or two would leave me quite blue and as poor as a little church mouse.

So I wander each room in a deepening gloom hoping finally I will uncover

A masterpiece lost (and at very low cost) which has not yet been found by another…

But it’s all modern stuff! And  there’s more than enough of Damien, Francis and Tracey

(and anyway most of the work they produce is rather unpleasantly racy).

And the last on the wall isn’t painting at all! An Offili, all tickle and slap;

At the end of the day I can honestly say it’s a terrible load of old crap.

AB

Andrew is a retired consultant rheumatologist  who lives with his wife, (Liz, also a retired doctor), in Rye. He has written a lot in his retirement, including a polemic about the shortcomings he observed while working for many years in the NHS, (Mad Medicine), a thriller (Anything but a Quiet Life), a history of the pioneering work by Harold Gillies,in plastic surgery on soldiers wounded in WW I,  (Faces from the Front) (Andrew gave a talk on this subject to the Second Wednesday Club.), and The Doctor's Doggerel, a collection of "Wry Verse".