Review by Howard Norton of Jonty Driver's latest poetry: "The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek" and "£he Chinese Poems 1979 _ 2030"

 

I have just finished reading a brilliant anthology entitled, 100 Poems That Make Men Cry.  It should certainly have included The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek.  I loved the poem’s rich and graphic language: phrases like, ‘We drown in all the ambiguities of what we were and what we are’, and ‘bedraggled memories of my tainted past’. The illustration of the slave bell is deeply moving and adds greatly to the impact of the poem. 

 The Chinese Poems are so varied. They display all Jonty’s versatility, talent for conveying mood, and refusal to take the world at face value.  Some of them evoke Hardy for me (a writer who, like Jonty, moved from novels to poetry).  The key to the collection lies in the Preface where Jonty admits, ‘The Far East revived my sense of memory’.  His yearning for the sights and sounds and smells of his boyhood Africa constantly surfaces, sometimes overtly as in, ‘Shall I never again see the Lowverdt’ or ‘the bright-speared aloes’ (both from the poem Somewhere Else) but always lurking.  He is a displaced person whose term in China is a second exile, ‘I am no longer sure I know even where my home is’, and ‘I belong nowhere now’, he laments (both from the poem Quintet).  He feels doubly alienated as a political exile and as a poet, ‘A poet’s home is always somewhere else’.

Some of these poems are difficult.  We have to grapple with them because, ‘they might be a code’ (Letter to BB).  Jonty is always a subversive poet in the best sense challenging us to go beyond easy assumptions and superficial appearances.  How emphatically he rejects the assertion that, ‘Things mean precisely what they mean to show’. (Death and the Painted Lady)

The Water Margins is my favourite poem.  The old man seems, like Jonty, to have been banished.  As he relives his memories the regrets accumulate, ‘If only, if only’, but the poem ends serenely, ‘I feared those voices would be baleful, instead they are kind of peaceful, kind of accepting’.  His companion, perhaps a ‘post-modernist philosopher’ mocks his trust, ‘Do you really think you can hear what the reeds say?’.  But the wise old man rejects rationality. He trusts instead to a more primitive faith in the intuitions of nature and thereby finds peace.

Christmas in Hong Kong is a powerful diatribe against the callous materialism of Christmas.  The crowds, intent on buying luxurious presents, ‘lurch sideways to avoid someone bent and stinking asleep in the stairwell’.  The identification in the last verse of God who ‘fathered’ this Christmas with the disregarded tramp is a powerful juxtaposition.

The whole collection breathes humility.  Jonty loves China but only From Afar.  He does not pretend to understand that wonderfully rich culture - none of us does - and we need to be reminded of that as we follow Trump’s America and risk provoking a new Cold War.

Details of how to obtain these works, and Jonty's two other recent collections, are in the September issuee of the newsletter.