Stephen Watts: The Blue Bag (Aark Arts, London & New Delhi, 2004, £9.99. 100 pages. approx 8 1/2 x 6 inches). Enquiries and orders to Christopher Gutkind, 103b Fortess Road, London NW5 2HR. (cg19@soas.ac.uk). Send a cheque, payable to Christopher Gutkind, of 10 pounds per book, and he will cover the mail costs if within the UK.

This selection spans a creative period of twenty years from 1977– 1997. The subject matter, focussed around character, landscape and the past, elicits an array of stylistic responses which demonstrate a versatile and sensitive touch. Though intellect, down-to-earth register and an acute perception shape the bulk of the work, Watts is nevertheless capable of surprise with a poetry overflowing with an exuberant passion for language.

A large number of poems in The Blue Bag concern lone outsiders. These can be arranged into two groups: the misread, ignored city dweller and the literary figure (this time all men), who for whatever reason has suffered and been marginalised in his lifetime. The first group, a gallery of characters who are shunned by society – the brain damaged, alcoholic, unemployed, of easy virtue and others – are befriended by the poet who shares with them his time and, perhaps more importantly, his language:

Those are the best words, but the hardest to bear.
     To me he says:
"Always – always – stop me – always – come across."
And what is the point of centuries of conversation if
     no-one's ever there to hear
                                   (Song For Mickie The Brickie)

and for another 'ordinary maddened man':

I met him on the Mile End Waste – that great
     mad market of the
world – and knew by the absence of his yellow
bike and the grey fleck in the pain of his eye
     that he needed to talk
                                   (Mark Wickham in Whitechapel)

These encounters are an attempt to transcend mere contact and to bring about an assuagement and common belonging through language, to counteract and 'to abort the sickness from the soul of the city':

He still knocks for milk and money and for a talk
     between friends. So we share hot tea,
two most landlocked of men left out on the ocean,
     trawling away at the urban plankton that
          drift around our skulls
                                   (A Song For David Silver)

And in a poem about the death of his mother as much as the departure of the 'body'and the 'spirit', it's the vanishing of speech which is mourned:

I strain to call back your voice and talk from my
lungs, but somewhere I know colliding waters
     have dissolved the mother tongue.
                                   (My Mother, My Tongue)

The straightforward language of these poems appropriately reflects its subject matter, and the stanza arrangement, to look like songs, differs from the almost blank verse of much of the rest of the selection. Adopting anything other than a colloquial, conversational style would seem patronising and position the poet at a distance, superior to the characters with whom he interacts. What we are presented with is a meeting of equals trying to make sense of the world, trying to get by – 'trawling away at the urban plankton'. Watts brings to his work what Brecht termed 'crude thinking' (plumpes Denken) which was the the belief that thought should be simplified, distilled to its essentials and rendered intelligible before it could be made use of.

This style, plus the sharp perception and eye for detail, is applied to the cityscape, the context which these characters inhabit. Although his method relies predominantly on the visual, the richness and variety of detail contains the ghosts of smell, texture and street sound. Descriptions are further enriched by the addition of history and memory:

would know this street is a seamless cloth, this
     city, these people,
and would not suffocate ever from formlessness
     or abrupted memory,
would know rich history is the present before us,
laid out like a cloth – a cloth for wearing –
     with bits of mirror and coloured stuff,
                                   (Brick Lane)

Other city poems deal with the presence of natural phenomena: 'Fragment' about renewal through change and 'November Tree, Tower Hamlets' in which beauty of a solitary tree offers, this time, possibilities of human renewal and healing.

The poems concerning the literary outsiders are different, because the balance between subject and poet has changed. Interconnection here is between outsiders, like intellects and interpreters of the world – 'trawling' now takes place in a broader sea. The conversational style, not abandoned entirely, drops away and the language becomes denser, more overtly 'poetic'. In 'Camoes's Voyage To Goa', for example,  the rolling rhythm of the sea, emotional chant stitch together the fragments of memory and experience and the themes of love and separation. These poems are gentle elegies for the literary man whose lives were lived under the shadow of trauma or tragedy: the 'eccentric' Benjamin, Holderlin, Brenner and others. Their situations are presented with the understanding and tenderness of a fellow traveller.

Watts' nature poems stand in contrast again to the rest of his work. In them language eludes the rational, logical – he is describing a force – images merge and separate like objects in a busy landscape and scenes shift with elemental change. Three early poems, 'Lord In Dream', 'Fragment' and the Thomasesque 'From The Islands', give a clue as to this side of Watt's writing, but until 'Praise Poem For North Uist' and 'Moor With Fire And Snow' and parts of some later poems the impact has not been fully developed:

I know how song arrives, that it comes with
     breath, that it is
a fire out of the waste, that the mouth is dry
and pain is laughter and I look for no excuse
     in my divided words
                             (Praise Poem For North Uist)

He goes on to describe this response to nature in a later poem as:

This is language that is forming in my throat
revolt of burst energies from the skies of my
                    silence,
                              (Moorland With Fire And Snow)

Amid the poem's almost ecstatic 'fire' human struggle and history are not ignored, just downsized against the intensity of land and seascape:

And Uist has appeared to me like a boat, stern of
     Griminish from the prow of Eaval,
and if it could drive us from pampered government
and if it could bring them to job filled shores –
     but when would that be likely.
                              (Praise Poem For North Uist)

Throughout the collection Watts' versatility and technique enable him emotionally and intellectually to explore a range of subject matter. His colloquial language should not mask a deeply felt commitment and social concern – language the symptom of decline is also its cure and as such must be able to address everybody. Nature could be envisaged, in his terms, as speaking through him but for others, the outsider and the dispossessed, the voice is his alone.

copyright © John Couth, 2005. All quotations are copyright © Stephen Watts.