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Steve Van-Hagen
reviews
Regeneration
by
Meirion Jordan
Meirion
Jordan, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for Regeneration’s preceding volume, Moonrise, is from an intellectually eclectic
background – he won the Newdigate Prize while studying for his first degree in
Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, before moving to UEA to complete a
Masters, and then a PhD, in Creative Writing. It is unsurprising, therefore,
that he has produced an eclectic, undeniably unusual and rewarding second
collection of poetry.
Regeneration
(2012) is immediately striking for its material appearance and organisation. As
one reviewer (Jacqui Kenton at New Welsh
Review – see http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=292) has already
observed, Regeneration is ‘tête-bêche,
with the White Book and Red Book at each end and upside down.’ These
two-collections-in-one which meet in the middle reference two medieval (fourteenth-century)
manuscripts, Llyfr Coch Hergest (The Red Book of Hergest) and Llyfr Gwynn Rhydderch (The White
Book of Rhydderch), important sources for the tales of the Mabinogion. As Jordan argues in
suggestive prefaces to both Books, the collection aims not at retelling the
tales of the fourteenth century, but at exploring how they establish a dialogue
with our own culture. The collection seeks, therefore, to address the ways in
which the (sometimes distant) past continues to erupt problematically and
polemically into our present. As Jordan argues in the preface to The Red Book,
he does not ‘seek to unravel the difficulties of [the eleven stories of the
Mabinogi’s] composition, transmission and literary context’ but rather contends
that:
Poetry is concerned most
fundamentally with meaning and interpretation, and that implies in turn that this
book is in some way turned towards those present in this imprecise, difficult
dialogue: you, reading, and myself, shepherding this writing to your senses as
best I can … These poems are an attempt to strike up a personal conversation
with those worlds, whose vitality remains tangible … just as the tales
themselves were an attempt to find conversation with other people and their
perplexing, marvellous lives. The Red and White Books themselves have come to
rest, in archives, well guarded and away from the mainstream of culture; these
poems are nonetheless a reminder that their presence is still felt, and that
like all other secondhand or discarded books they were once participatory
acts.’ (p.8)
The
prefaces are lengthy, and one wonders if they do not risk contradiction; by insisting
so expl
