NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

A selection of 80-odd of Alun Rees' poems from the last thirty or more years. There is an imposing traditional feel about these poems, often with a basic structure and rhyme or half-rhyme, in the evocation of timeless verities and images, as in WOMAN BY WINTERLIGHT:

	The snow upon the garden makes
	the empty rosebeds bloom with white,
	and now upon your lips there breaks
	a smile to see by winterlight.

	A smile so rare it tames the snow
	and makes the garden shake with light
	as on the frosty path you go
	and turn the morning summer-bright.

	The sun falls white upon her head
	as she sits in the garden, reading.
	The almond tree puts on its grace.
	The world goes on its way, unheeding.

	A man is justified in life
	if once he worships such a pair:
	the almond blossom, white and good,
	and sunlight in a woman's hair.

	She is the cry of the lark in the evening sky,
	and she is the flush of sun on the oak-tree's bough.
	Oh, she is the daytime ghost who tells me why
	her April hands make all springs seem like now.

	Our houses herd too close, and trees remind us
	of larger landscapes, valleys, mountains, forests,
	of open living, measureless. So we prune,
	and cut their scale of living down to ours.

	Harmonies, child, harmonies: learn how worm
	renews the earth,
	how egg will bloom into blossoming bird,
	how bird and fruit have come to terms,
	how worm and root and egg and fruit
	are arcs in a living circle.

	I will look for new values
	in the close of each season, knowing
        that in every death and disappearance
        there are the seeds of births and entrances.
        I will look bravely at the autumn moon.
        Yet I know
        that when I sleep my dreams will be filled
        with white feathers falling like snow.

		Her wrecked remains I mothered
	into a garden hole. I used my foot
	to seal that ruined ripeness in the earth.

	I am left stranded on the shore, stunned by the wonder
	of your transformation. You go from me, but still I am clutched.
	Through a haze, I see you far out on the water,
	my swan in the mist, ghost-gliding further from reach.

	My glorious girl, my brilliant boy,
	you are my dreams of myself. You colour
	each hour, each day with original pigments.

	Generations reverse. You lead, I follow

YESTERDAY'S TOMORROW is a book of traditional left-wing verse. Traditional both in the political sense and in the sense that it is mainly written in regular metre and hard rhyme. Alun Rees first emerged as a poet in the sixties with a whole new generation of radical Welsh poets. Rees is the kind of poet whose work can be understood at first hearing in a pub. These are poems to be read out loud, and I can imagine many of them being sung. Rees' work speaks with compassion and controlled rage. Much of it is satirical and I was strongly reminded at times of Adrian Mitchell and Alan Jackson, two other poets who became names to be reckoned with at around the same time.

Here is a sample from THE CABBAGES OF MAIDANEK:

	But did the blue-eyed Aryan troops
	know they were eating kosher soups?

	Or realise that they, perforce,
	grew steadily Jewish course by course?

	It was so efficient, so well designed:
	each death was stamped and sealed and signed.

	They are poor but they are honest,
	victims of the rich man's whim

	Morris Silver, from Lithuania,
	a small Jew with a cardboard suitcase,
	came to our house every week to display
	combs and ribbons, mirrors, buckles, tape,
	zips and laces, pins and pencils, anything
	he could buy for a little and sell for a little more.