poetry

Les Barker “Déja Vu”

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Les Barker

The Journal of Music | 2021

Les Barker writes strange poems and comes originally from Manchester, but he’s now Welsh. He was an accountant before he became a professional idiot. He’s written 85 books, which sell in large numbers at his gigs because people don’t quite believe what they’ve just heard. His poems have spawned a number of folk heroes: Jason and the Arguments, Cosmo the Fairly Accurate Knife Thrower, Captain Indecisive, and Spot of the Antarctic, to name but two.

Les began his career as assistant to Mrs Ackroyd, a small hairy mongrel who lay around in folk clubs, bit people and became famous. Mrs Ackroyd was the only dog ever to own her own record label. Since her sad demise, Les is mainly a solo performer, though he has taken to working with humans from time to time. The Mrs Ackroyd Band gradually evolved from an ever-changing who’s who of the folk scene into a tightly knit, well-rehearsed group. The band are now playing as a trio, without Mr Barker, and will be far more tightly knit and well-rehearsed. Mr Barker’s Welsh songs are occasionally performed by a trio of Welsh musicians who have had the good sense to keep him out of the band.

Les has several solo albums to his credit: ‘Dogologues’, ‘An Infinite Number of Occasional Tables’, ‘A Cardi and Bloke’, ‘Up the Creek Without a Poodle’, ‘Arovertherapy’, ‘The War on Terrier’ and ‘Daydream Retriever’. He has travelled the length, breadth and height of Great Britain, as well as Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and – both solo and with the band – the United States and Canada. More recently, he has won prizes for his Welsh poetry, including 5 small chairs, a big one and a stool, and has now completed a DVD of his Welsh poetry with photos and musical accompaniment.

“…he may be the best writer of parodies and wordplays that the English-speaking world has ever heard.” – Tom Nelligan, Dirty Linen

“There are subtleties which you didn’t notice the first time round, and there are clever puns and turns of phrase so good you look forward to hearing them again.” – Caroline Walker, Folk Roots

Faith

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I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

from Where Many Rivers Meet
© 1990 David Whyte

“When Peace Broke Out In The Garden” – a Poem by Rónán Ó Snodaigh

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Filmed and musically scored by Myles O’Reilly, the flora and fauna of Rónán Ó Snodaigh’s poem, When Peace Broke Out In The Garden, become the central characters in an epic tale of war and transformation.

By Alex Gallacher

The flora and fauna of Rónán Ó Snodaigh‘s poem, When Peace Broke Out In The Garden, become the central characters in an epic tale of war, negotiation, peace talks and transformation. The changing seasons mark the turning tides of fortune and defeat, prayers and hope for new beginnings. Will peace return?

The reading was filmed by Myles O’Reilly and is set in the scenic Sheep’s Head Peninsula (West Cork, Ireland); Myles also provides the ambient score. It’s great to see them collaborating here again. In last year’s interview for their album The Beautiful Road, Thomas Blake observes: Ó Snodaigh clearly has a poet’s eye as well as a keen ear for melody…O’Reilly…is a purveyor of mood, of subtle tonal shifts and enveloping soundworlds.

There’s a wonderful magic to the collaborations of these two, something Myles touched on in his guest article last year:

In that quaint cabin, isolated from the world’s noise, music flowed as if the dam was broken. All of our thought power for each lap of the moon could be dedicated to our craft. Time melted into the ether, and we lost ourselves in selfish sonic reverie. No interruptions, no distractions. Just us and our instruments. Melodies and rhythms that excited our ears. Not forgetting momentary pauses to be creative in the kitchen. To replenish and recharge. Stepping out regularly to gaze at the waters of Lough Key and the woodlands surrounding us, another plate of our favourite fuel in hands: bacon, eggs, black pudding, and bread, to which the last track on the album now serves as an ode.

Source: When Peace Broke Out In The Garden [A Poem by Rónán Ó Snodaigh] – KLOF Mag

Pablo Neruda’s ‘The Dead Woman’ (La Muerta)

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The Dead Woman

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.

I shall live on.

For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.

Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.

When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.

No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive,
because above all things
you wanted me indomitable,
and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.

Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D Walsh, from The Captain’s Verses (New Directions, 1972).

 

By Anthony Wilson

Some things you know before you know them, apprehending them in your bones. The gut doesn’t even come into it. You might be eighteen and studying for exams. Or recently married and out for a date night to watch Truly Madly Deeply. Which a friend has insisted is hilarious but turns out to be about grief and death. And a rat infestation.

Encountering Pablo Neruda’s ‘The Dead Woman’ was just such an experience for me.

The experience of watching Nina (Juliet Stevenson) switching from desolation to ebullience in the famous ‘snot scene’ with her therapist was not really like watching acting at all. For years I would replay it on a thinning VHS tape, marvelling each time at Minghella’s ability to conjure the same from practically everyone in the cast, right down to George the rat catcher, reminiscing from nowhere about his dead wife, beautifully played by the late David Ryall.

Nevertheless, I was resolute in my belief that the film belonged to Stevenson. From the aforementioned snot, to the scene in which Nina’s sister asks to borrow her deceased partner Jamie’s cello for her son, to the scene in which she hops along the Embankment splurging her life story to new boyfriend Mark, I felt certain that the role of Jamie, played by Alan Rickman, had been merely to allow Stevenson to flourish.

And then he died. And like a million others I dusted off my DVD and began to reassess a few things.

There is his own brilliant switch, in his longest speech of the film, watching Nina collecting the washing by her back door, from wry to wistful and back via wonderment, laying the blame for the world’s lack of love at the feet of the government: ‘I hate the bastards’. The way he moves from intimacy to irritation just by raising one eyebrow, when Nina names a cloud, complete with beard, after his mother. The slightly exasperated tone in which he drawls ‘I knew you shaved your legs’ after surprising Nina in the bath.

But in this clip, available on YouTube, he is at his tender best, reciting Neruda’s poem in a ‘terrible’ Spanish accent that is at once comic and intimate. Which is what Minghella himself said was the film’s main subject, not ghosts and not death: ‘That feeling you have when you’ve talked all night, you’re eating cornflakes for lunch and you haven’t even kissed yet.’

For the film to work we need to believe in Nina’s grief.  In the scene above, just as importantly, we need to believe in Jamie’s compassion, his capacity to love her enough to let her go. His smile as Nina embraces him mirrors that at the film’s close, as Nina leaves the flat to meet her new lover, his ghost-friends closing round him to offer him hand slaps of salute. I find it reassuring that Minghella entrusted the film’s most intimate moment, which is about intimacy, to a poem.

Source: Lifesaving Poems: Pablo Neruda’s ‘The Dead Woman’ (La Muerta) – Anthony Wilson