Books are prominent in our living room, but music has always dominated. Cd’s piled on top of my ancient yet reliable sound system, cd shelves and cupboards, tapes in stacks like multiple games of Jenga ready to topple any moment. All them given to me by the Ace Tapeman Andrew Bartz (to whom my new book is dedicated), who gives them imaginative titles like ‘From Kisses to Concrete’ and ‘Sand in my Pocket’. He should hire himself out as an album namer.
The piano, played at present by my wife and young daughter, is an anchored boat ready to be played afloat. The half ‘cello in the corner just waiting for its bandages to be torn off, its spirit released. The music of my family plays a vital part in my latest book of poems ‘Moor Music’. There’s a poem about my son’s performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, another in memory of my older daughter’s band Gilespi, who brought out one excellent album ‘Methu Chware Gitar’ and also about my young daughter dancing like a spinning top to a live jazz band at a family wedding.
There are poems written under the influence of strongly hallucinatory music, like ‘A Once Strange Face’ written while listening to EST and ‘Insomniac Jazz’ under the darker tones of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet.
The music of the Waun (or moor) at the back of my house is prevalent: the staves of wires where a large flock of finches once gathered and the many reeds playing in the wind. A well-known photo by the late, great Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths proved to be the inspiration for ‘The Boy & The Grand’, which depicts a young boy setting about destroying a Grand piano. Even the absence of sound plays its part and when we visited a magical place in Brittany called ‘Kreizenn ar son’ (or ‘centre of sound’) in a large forest, it turned into a celebration of multifarious sounds, but silence also.
Even the sequence about the war in N. Ireland (‘War Stories’) had a curious origin in music. The title being a song title by a forgotten punk band from Belfast called The Starjets, who released one very good single contrasting comic-book fantasies of war with the real thing going on around them. I can still hear the chorus in my head – ‘War stories, Captain Hurricane/ War stories - this is it, this is it!’
This is the title poem and crystallizes the connection between the moor and the music, all around us in the sonatas of streams –
MOOR MUSIC
These are instruments you cannot construct
reeds in winter wind
sinewy nerve-lines
hollowed tree
bass body
owl bassoon
down down stream
leaf keys
blood crescendoing
the music you cannot notate
duet of ring doves
echo of the snow
a wind band of starlings
mimicking the other sections
and the sigh
always the sigh
of the oak’s lonely conducting.
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