Though topics covered in their latest collections are as disparate as the interrogation of science, the myth of Actaeon, and the physical and emotional conundrums of a person known only as ‘the reasoner’ (these short, slightly glib assessments doing little justice to the breadth and depth of what is considered in each – buy them and see for yourself!) there was a neat kind of symmetry linking the poets whose most recent endeavours we were celebrating. Jon Glover, Managing Editor of Stand Magazine, and Jeffrey Wainwright, who helped shape it as a publication in its early years, have the roots of their association in the School of English at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, and represent key contributors to the renowned ‘Leeds school' of poetry.
To make it a clean sweep for Leeds, we were told on the night that Evan Jones has recently been appointed visiting Fellow in Creative Writing in the same department which taught Wainwright and to which Glover still belongs as an Honorary Fellow.
Evan Jones, reading from his debut Carcanet collection (though his second all-told), had a vocal lightness of touch with his poetry, giving the magnitude of myth taken as its subject a personality informed by his own experience as a traveller, and the vulnerability of the individual standing in the face of tradition; from the young man, hoping school will be cancelled tomorrow, messing around placing artists defined by their nationality in different countries, to the great poet Cavafy, standing poignantly alone ‘on the Strand near Albert Dock’ in ‘Cavafy in Liverpool.’ The confident way in which the written collection seeks to create trans-national re-imaginings of myth, history and art was communicated in the confident delivery of poetry clearly rooted in the oral tradition.
Though we are told that the collection’s title arises out of a childhood school experiment, where one discovers that when you hit a marble it flattens momentarily before miraculously resuming its original shape, we are admonished not to try the experiment ourselves. The injunction, borne out of fear for the safety of the walls and floors of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, nevertheless echoes the problematic nature of taking science or sight at face value; an idea intended to trouble the reader throughout Glass Is Elastic. Without our own interrogations, how are we to know whether what is scientifically certain is really true? This cerebral questioning is given humanity by the interjections of colloquialisms – ‘whatever’, ‘I guess’ – expressions of doubt or defeat so much more effective when spoken.
Though Carcanet’s Alice Mullen, introducing him, confidently asserted that he ‘had all the answers’, the questioning became more intense during Jeffrey Wainwright’s reading from The Reasoner, whose narcissistic, confidently-spoken yet ultimately troubled central voice questions both the visible truth of appearance and the moral truth of life (whilst walking his dog) over ninety-five poems.
Starting with a reading from the middle of the collection (a comic nod to the pointlessness of a beginning and an end amongst the eternal questions which his narrator asks), Wainwright proceeded to move from the personal vanity of a visit to the ‘visagiste’ to the powerful, troubling poems asking for, then dismissing Truth as a place which ‘we cannot visit, still less lodge in’ which conclude his collection. On reflection, rainy Manchester is the kind of melancholy environment appropriate to attending to such probing questions, and the many audience members who took advantage of the launch night discount on the poets’ books will have had the perfect backdrop to their continued consideration. As both an undergraduate and postgraduate of the same School of English which ties these three poets together, I was pleased to be in the midst of both the past and future of a department which has produced and is supporting such important poetry.
Harriet Richards, Carcanet Intern September 2012