Matthew Clegg & Chris Jones - The River, The Road - Longbarrow Press (2008)

I have taken for an example of the work of Longbarrow Press a small leaflet
entitled: The River, the Road. This is because, in itself it exemplifies how the
publications themselves are a kind of poetic transformation, as objects, due to
the finely crafted nature of them. The print itself is only A4 in size and yet I
had to check this as the origami performed on it throws one into doubt, as one
extracts it from its purpose-built envelope. Also it shows the quality of the
collaboration achieved, through the standard of the written work and
accompanying artwork. In this case photographic works by Brian Lewis complement
the written work, which includes two prose pieces from the poets Matthew Clegg
and Chris Jones, as well as the main feature: the poems Wicker and Edgelands.
The river and the road make appearances in both these poems, situated in
Sheffield, however they work as counterpoint: they are very different takes on
what could be landscapes, as
depicted, in the photographs and a not so much as create snapshots of different
places, as images taken from the viewpoint of different emotional
points-of-view.

The emblems in Clegg’s work are the drunk, the snagged tree limb, post-consumer
discards; through it all, nature, appears as a kind of survivor, emerging, and
appears almost phoenix-like from the dungheap created by man. It is, as if, only
man can make the ugly thing, only man can create garbage, nature has a
resilience and inherent elegance, which has to struggle at the periphery in
these Edgelands that man creates. Nature has recycled for four billion years, we
are a petrol-head in paradise on a terminal trip. There is not, it seems to me,
an epiphany towards, which this poem struggles, as many do in Journals nowadays.
The final tanka comes back to the image of the drunk, in microcosm - a wasp on a
can rim and the inevitability of the drunk-walk taking the wasp over the edge.
There is beauty here at least in the language and even observed in theses
neglected spaces, formed between the damp of the river and the paradox of the
ring road. Even in the
bathos of “Buddleias / shake their long, crocodile heads / over fridges, gashed
sofas, / 4 VDUs, screens smashed in. A sculptural quality is discovered in this
and the scene might almost be as exotic as Henri Rousseau's Tiger in a Tropical
Storm (Surprised!).

The sequence of Edgeland extracts (Numbers 36 to 40 of the 50 sequence in the
edition I own; now expanded to 56 in a later edition) moves through the senses:
(i) the sound of a song, (ii) the tactility of the destroyed VDUs, (iii) a
vision of angel-fish formed from the rust in the rver, (iv) possibly smell is
evoked in “The colour of ash soaked by the rain” and finally (v) to the wasp’s
literal taste of death in the beer-can.

Jones’s work is a haiku-tanka alternating sequence as opposed to the exclusively
tanka sequence of Clegg. Both follow, therefore, a traditional format, one
foreign to the terrain they witness. This is appropriate, not least because they
themselves are, but also because it is a place of alienation for all, as Clegg
describes in the essay (Pasts, Presents, Futures) the non-places…. Chris Jones
acts as introducer through his essay rooting the works geographically and
bringing back, for me, the line from The Dry Salvages - “The problem once
solved, the brown god is almost forgotten” of how man turns his back on
conquered nature, in the form, of the river and like turning away from God, for
Eliot, embodied the same foreboding of a potential flood. One of Jones’ lines
“the city in spate” takes a more secular, perhaps vibrant take on this biblical
touchstone.

Ironically, I have taken a whole page to express a surface scratch of The river,
the road; the voyage and the journey go ever on. Matthew Clegg’s essay alludes
to other works by Chris Jones (from: At the end of the road, a river -
Shoestring Press) but much of their other work is also available from Longbarrow
Press.

Other publications by longbarrow press

Paul J. Yoward