London Grip Poetry Review – John Weston

 

Poetry review – AT A TANGENT: Neil Elder admires a well put together New and Selected from John Weston

 

At A Tangent 
John Weston
Shoestring Press
ISBN 978-1-915553-57-7
£12.50

John Weston raises an interesting thought about the genesis of concerns explored by writers in his early poem ‘My Father’:

What coded sequence
Has pushed my pen to
Themes or images later
Found prefigured in his own?

This poem helps establish the tone and style of the collection and is a particularly strong element among some finely crafted and evocative work. How touching that we have Weston’s father emerging from “his never – / to be published verse” at the start of a book that draws together some of Weston’s poetry from the last twenty years. Indeed, the pathos is acute in the discovery of poems by the father figure that are summed up by the speaker thus

Broken health, broken
love – these poems I value 
more now: lineaments
of a disappointed life,
but an honest monument.

Any poet may reflect, having read ‘My Father’, on what “lineaments” they are leaving for their own family to find in poems that go unpublished. But they can perhaps take comfort too, in the idea that the written word is lasting; and here the words “eclipsing absence” go along with “He emerges from / the page” and a solid connection between son and father is established, a connection that transcends death.

Showing the range of tone in the collection, is ‘Getting the Bird’, a poem that will hit home with any published poet. In this amusing piece the poet re-stocks with second hand copies of one of their own books that is now out of print, only to find, when they arrive,

The history of some 
Is shown by my inscription on the fly.
So I can tell which friends remain a chum
And where it’s best to let such matters lie.

Possibly today’s readers will feel “chum” is rather archaic and rather too convenient for the sake of rhyme, but I think Weston just about gets away with it, since the piece is, after-all, knowing in its conceit.

Family features heavily in the collection, and I did wonder with a couple of the pieces, ‘Fifty Years On’ for example, if the poems were fine as gifts for those involved, but rather too personal for wider readership. I suppose that is a challenge for any poet lucky enough to have worked published – to decide what works and what does not work for those not directly concerned in the action of a poem. A piece that clearly does succeed beyond the poet’s immediate circle, is ‘Sighting’. There is potential for mawkishness in a piece that features a grandchild being carried in a loving fashion beneath the stars, but Weston eschews this with deft touches of self-deprecating humour that indicate the poet is well aware of the pitfalls.

I took my grandson out to the huge sky
At the mature age of five weeks …
His focus, let us admit, was at best blurred

The result is actually a rather charming poem that arrives at the conclusion that despite the sight of Mars, “the greatest wonder of all was close at hand.”

‘Sonnet’ is also a delightful poem that successfully treads a fine line. With the preface “For my wife after 50 years” we could have been overdosing on the saccharine, but Weston manages to produce a love poem whilst acknowledging “A love-song is the hardest thing to engender / beyond the midway point.” There is some sleight of hand that means the lines that come at the midway point of this poem,

So I shall not repeat my boyhood odes
And fresh poetics are not mine to lead

are followed by an epiphany that reminds the speaker that “our love renews each year like April showers.” This particular poem is a good example of Weston’s craft and he employs rhyme and metre to excellent effect, whereby the cohesion achieved absolutely marries to the subject matter. There are various forms of poem used in the collection: a concrete poem in the shape of a hot air balloon (yes, a hot air balloon, quite some feat); and villanelles and sestinas are also among the range.

Of course, as we all know, family life is not all hearts and flowers. In a pamphlet called ‘Mindful’ published in 2023 by Shoestring Press, John Weston tackled a highly personal and sensitive matter that resulted “after misfortune had hit”. The poems, included here, try to make sense of how a successful young man (Weston’s son) finds himself in custody on remand for an episode triggered by a psychotic disorder and  also to understand the subsequent, tortuous, journey to recovery. The poems are among the strongest in this collection, but despite my general misgivings about poems that require supporting notes, I wonder if here the short essay giving the background to these particular poems, published in the original pamphlet, should have been included; the episode they concern really deserves full consideration which comes from reading the details.

The book also includes new poems, subsequent to those from ‘Mindful’ and so it is good to see that Weston has been able to move on and write about other, joyful aspects of life. In ‘Fixed Points’, Weston celebrates moments of chance thrown by nature, such as the moment

a stoat snatches coot’s 
egg, an antler sheds, a hawk
picks a willow-tit
from thin air,

Weston calls these “such moments / as poems were made for,” a wonderful observation that actually applies to many of these poems. The large and the small aspects of life are fixed in ways that chime with the reader and may give “a refracted / glimpse of your own other self.” We are invited in the same poem to, “open the bindings and let / the poems take light” an invitation one would be wise to accept, particularly if one is interested in how a poet’s angle on life shifts through the years. Weston may be looking at life from a tangent, but he always sees clearly.

Neil Elder has won the Cinnamon Press debut collection prize with The Space Between Us,as well as their pamphlet prize with Codes of Conduct which was also shortlisted for a Saboteur Award.  His latest work is Like This, available from 4 Word Press.
He occasionally writes at https://neilelderpoetry.wordpress.com/