Phil Maillard: Sweet Dust and Growling Lambs –Three Books by Phil Maillard
Published 15 September 2008
Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700837
"Allen Fisher in London, and John Freeman in Cardiff,
published my first 2 books in the mid-1970's. Peter Hodgkiss did 3 more.
Since 1980, apart from a couple of chapbooks and a paperback of short fiction,
I've published in magazines and anthologies. Very little of the writing in
this Shearsman selection, therefore, has appeared in book form before.
As a blow-in to Wales, I feel part of a Triad of Migrant Bards – the
other two being Chris Torrance and Graham Hartill – whose influences and
agenda inevitably differ from much contemporary Welsh writing.
Looking at this collection, Sweet Dust And Growling Lambs,
I think I can perceive a few recurrent themes. The first relates to mythology,
in a broad, story-telling kind of fashion. Of recent years, 'myths' have been
regarded as universal, because archetypal, repositories of human experience.
From there, it's a short step to the idea of 'fusion', of combining elements
from different cultures in a single work. This is most familiar in music. In
my poem The 'Confession' Of Gerald, for example, the Celtic story
of Elidorus and his meeting with the fairy folk is developed by way of a Buddhist
teaching story.
In contrast to the globalisation of myth is the idea of 'the
local', of 'place', a concept dear to the writers of my generation. The second
section in this Shearsman collection, Go Tell It On Broadway, is taken
from a kaleidoscopic work in progress on the landscape, pre-history, history
and people of my own current 'place', Cardiff. In terms of influences, the template
here is still William Carlos Williams' Paterson.
Finally, language itself is a subject, also not untypically
for a writer of my age and persuasion. In poems such as Dysphasia, for
instance, I've tried to look at the human centrality of language, for better
and worse, by way of the effects and consequences of impairment: delineation
by absence, like a print block in negative.
If the above sounds a bit like toeing the party line, I hope
there's enough 'other stuff' in the book that will simply speak for itself."
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