Three Symphonies Tony Conran Agenda Editions, £10.00

Review first appeared in PLANET ; The Welsh Internationalist

Tony Conran has always been an ambitious writer both as a critic and as a poet, taking an original approach to both pursuits. As a young man, deciding to try his hand at rendering Welsh poems into English he embarked on a project of translating the whole range of Welsh verse from its earliest beginnings to the present. The formal structures and the element of praise in Welsh verse also had a profound effect on his work as a poet writing in English. Both of these are apparent in the conceptual grouping of his poems into symphonic forms and in the thematic focus of his work. This collection comprises the last three of his nine symphonic groupings and also reveals a number of other influences on the younger poet, in particular that of Robert Graves, someone whose ideas about the muse-inspired role of a poet, as expressed in his book The White Goddess, was clearly a major influence.

Large structural forms suggest an analogy with the twentieth century modernists. But, as Jeremy Hooker observes in his insightful introduction, Tony Conran is also a lyric poet whose lyrics combine into larger dramatic structures. Many composers draw on shorter musical fragments to shape their symphonic works as well as including ‘quotations’ from the works of other composers, as Conran also does, both directly and indirectly, from other writers. To what extent, then, is it meaningful to think of these sequences as symphonic? Each has its title and sub-description : 'The Magi' is described as a sequence, 'Fabrics' as a single movement of sonnets, and 'Everworlds' as a symphony in four movements, one of which is a Requiem. This final grouping feels most obviously symphonic. But 'The Magi’, which is the longest of the three, also has distinct thematic shifts and developments which can be regarded as movements, though not marked as such. It is also the most ambitious in tackling potentially intractable subjects such as the evolution of life on Earth and the growth of human consciousness. Its use of scientific language, for instance the biological terminology of haploid and diploid reproduction, interacts with a view of the emergence of life as 'The Goddess’: 'Gametes are the true / Archetypes' but themselves: 'have no history / Except hope'. Here metaphorical and scientific language merge in a challenging amalgam.

This, I think, is a key to the working method of these symphonic forms. Tony Conran rarely uses metaphor in the 'this as if that' sense simply to add local colour to an expression. What he attempts is, rather, the perception of an otherness brought into the world as a real presence. There is no 'as if ..' about it. In 'The Island’ : ’Time itself / Is metaphor’. Whatever artifices of language the poet might use there lies behind his expressions a dogged literalism insisting that 'Everworlds' break continually into our world, not just as imaginative constructions or even as rare mystical perceptions, but as constant presences illuminating our lives. So a miracle play is: ‘a metaphor transparent to transcendence', opening: 'Windows into godhead' . This is religious poetry seeking a form and, as he put it in an early critical essay, creating a ‘three-personed space’ . The Magi journey to find the: 'Mab Darogan', but tales are also told of the conception of: 'Cu Chulainn, Krishna, / Hercules, ... in the marriage sheets of time'. Gods emerge from developing consciousness until: 'the Holy One / Flames from the unburning bush'.

The sonnet sequence 'Fabrics' contains a much tighter series of subtly rhymed reflections that seem more to own the musical analogy of a set of variations, as in Bach's Goldbergs, than of a symphony, though in terms of the volume as a whole might be regarded as a scherzo between larger symphonic movements. The sequence is dedicated to a fashion designer and here life is clothed, developing implications of the earlier haploid-diploid references in seeing fashion as a sexual adornment. The focus is on the outward weave of the inner life emerging from the identities we adopt but also their temporality as we are: ‘unwound / And bobbined’ like Odysseus on Penelope’s loom.

The final symphony brings the Everworlds themes to a culmination as they penetrate the world of time, for which: 'Everworld creatures hunger’. Here the poet's own life is presented as a template for emerging creativity. The tribute to Robert Graves which constitutes the second movement regards him as: 'an elder brother' as: 'Rhiannon's birds sang / To the mooching I' from over an ‘everworld ocean’. The discovery of his own poetic voice is lucidly evoked as: 'Opening my eyes/ Slowly / To the silence.' The dimension of tragedy also emerges (the third movement's title is 'The Empire of Pain'). Everworlds can also erode: 'To Eschatologies - / The Last Things, / The enemies of ever.' Such is the world of Time.