Red Poetry
Yesterday’s Tomorrow
By Alun Rees
Published by Y Lolfa, 2005 (in conjunction with Red Poets) £4.95
Reviewed by
Kate Jones
A SOCIALIST poet should be more than a poet who
happens to be a socialist. If poetry is art expressed through words, a
socialist poet must write poetry that expresses his or her socialist
ideals, attacks capitalism from a socialist perspective, puts forward a
socialist alternative. But, first and foremost, it must be poetry. Alun
Rees from Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales aims to be a socialist poet –
not just a socialist, not just a poet.
Does he succeed? There is a strong thread of radical
and socialist writing running through Welsh literature in both our
languages – in poetry, the most well-known being Harri Webb in English
and by TE Nicholas (Niclas Glais) in Welsh. Alun Rees has been writing
poetry since the 1960s and is active in the Red Poets, a group
associated with socialist and radical movements in the South Wales
valleys.
South Wales, birthplace of the industrial
revolution, has a tradition of working-class struggle going back to the
Chartists and beyond. But when our coalmines and steelworks were
destroyed almost at a stroke by Margaret Thatcher, whole communities
were abandoned to hopelessness and poverty. This is the world that Rees
addresses in this collection - poems very varied in subject and style,
moving from bitter parody to agitational humour, to a powerful
celebration of the Welsh working class and its history. The poems are
accessible rather than academic, and address real contemporary issues.
If I have a criticism of Rees, it is that he relies
too much on parody and pastiche to get the message across, including the
title poem of this work. Many of his more serious poems are more
powerful and therefore more effective, for example, Outcasts:
"Across a landscape bleak and spare
the tattered shadow-figures march
to congregate in ragged groups
beneath a crumbling railway arch,
where one, more fortunate than most,
may raise a bottle in his hand
and put it to his lips and drink
a toast to life in Shadowland".
He returns again and again to the theme of the
outcast, the socially excluded - whether today’s homeless, or the Jews
in 1930s Germany. He describes them living in a shadow land, another
country, excluded because society, humanity, we ourselves, make them
different:
"Through dampness and decay observe
the stunted Shadowchildren crawl…
We will not let them share our world
because they cannot pay their dues".
And in The Dispossessed:
"They do not move
in true straight lines;
they exist
at right angles to living…
You see them de-evolving
day by day,
undeveloping, regressing, slipping
downscale towards the point
where we can feel at ease
regarding them as a lower species".
Jews in Nazi Germany or asylum seekers today?
Rees reminds us of working-class struggle worthy of
celebration but too often forgotten. He turns to the holocaust, to war,
to satire and to anti-Tory and anti-New Labour agitation. His is a Welsh
voice but also a working-class voice, speaking of universal concerns.
Here he speaks of seeming helplessness in the face of the system:
"From the four corners of a littered world
we see junk lives, lives junked amid indifference".
In Valley Boy we hear the voice of the abandoned
working-class communities of South Wales:
"You think my life is worthless. Well, it is.
You think my head is empty. Well, it’s not.
You’ll find there’s rage and hate in there,
enough to fill the gaps between
the stars that hang like hope beyond my reach".
Rees is not afraid to use rhyme and rhythm, and to
powerful effect. Here is protest in the form of a crow:
"A grim spare shadow of a bird
so grim, so spare it seemed no bird…
it seemed to say
that there was hunger in the dark
so fierce, so wild it would not take
a whole world’s alms to go away".
Rees is not in the Dylan Thomas league, by a long
way (and Thomas was a socialist too) but the publication of this
collection of 38 poems, spanning more than 20 years, is certainly very
welcome.
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