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.