Welsh writer Nigel Jarrett is a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize and the Templar Prize, both for short fiction. He’s published nine books, two of them poetry collections. His latest book of poetry, Gwyriad, is published by the Welsh independent, Cockatrice. Nation.Cymru said its poems rewarded close reading by their ‘ingenuity and range of cultural allusions’, while Acumen magazine remarked on the collection’s ‘perceptive meditations on many of the key moments of human existence, expressed with humour and insight’. Cath Barton met Jarrett to discuss the collection and his approach to the creative process.

Cath Barton: Nigel, you explain in the notes at the end of this collection that your title Gwyriad, Welsh for diversion, is used in a metaphorical sense ‘to indicate paths not taken, or, if taken, then leading to confusion or catastrophe’. So, at least on the strength of these poems, you do not have the optimism of Robert Frost in his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. Am I right?

Nigel Jarrett: Sort of. Maybe I don’t share Robert Frost’s kind of optimism. I say somewhere that the collection deals with various kinds of instability. On the grounds that writers can’t make much of situations that are even-keeled and free of conflict and uncertainty, I suppose any optimism, if it exists, must be undeclared. But I discovered late in life that both my father and paternal grandfather suffered from depression, so maybe my worldview is sometimes dark – bleak, even, on a wet Saturday afternoon. The American poet William Carlos Williams said it was interesting to discover how many times death occurred or was mentioned  in a writer’s work. My tally is pretty high. It’s not really surprising, but nor is it macabre: death is part of life, including your own eventually. I think Williams included writers of otherwise jolly disposition, of which I am one, so long as the clouds are not gathering.

CB: We’ll come back to death. But first I wanted to ask you about the central section of Gwyriad, a sequence about the incarceration of people in what we used to call lunatic asylums. Scandalously, many of those locked up in these institutions for decades were not anything like what would now be referred to as mentally unwell. Your poem ‘Diagnosis’ starkly lists some of the ‘diagnoses’ applied to inmates, including nymphomania and melancholia, the latter it seems to me particularly poignant, given the living conditions of many working class people in the nineteenth century. You state in your notes that in some ways these institutions provided a place of safety. But at what cost?

NJ: The older I get the more I sympathise with the Victorians, who’ve had to put up with a disproportionate amount of bad publicity. I live in a former lunatic asylum – that’s what they called it – built in 1851 and converted to flats at the start of this millennium. About 200 yards away is a patch of ground in which 3,000 patients who died there were buried anonymously and in pits between its inauguration and 1948, when I guess they ran out of burial space on site.

Psychiatry and its categories of mental illness came relatively late, and the poem you mention lists all the manifestations of affliction for which little medical nomenclature seemed to exist, except the catch-all Melancholia and Hysteria. Don’t forget that ‘asylum’ meant ‘sanctuary’, as it does so pertinently today.

In a society ill-equipped to deal with the deranged, providing the best care possible was the least the authorities could do. But I don’t deny that such places institutionalised their patients, or that there was bad practice and an undeniable amount of ignorance about exactly what to do. Society didn’t or couldn’t help: I often wonder how many of those 3,000 were abandoned by their families or believed by them to  be in a place where they could best be looked after.

CB: You convey powerfully and succinctly what that institutionalisation brought about in your short poem ‘Patient Record: The Photograph’:

 

She leans against a vase, bringing

us to our senses with her loss

of sense

 

Am I correct in thinking this is about Alice Kate, a patient in Bristol Lunatic Asylum, 1894, portrayed on the cover of your book?

NJ: Yes – poor Alice Kate, a servant, admitted to the Bristol Asylum in 1894, with – I think – Melancholia, but soon discharged ‘after treatment’. I wonder what that entailed, if anything. I wonder what her Melancholia entailed.

From the writer’s viewpoint, of course, mental illness is the sort of complexity that’s out there waiting to be explored. I did it in my fictional memoir Notes From the Superhorse Stable, which appeared a couple of years ago. I guess a writer’s subject might be described as ‘the lives of others’. If they’re not interested in other people, writers will never be convincing. You can always tell.

CB: The unity of your central section contrasts with a wide range of poems in the rest of the collection. They explore much about the lives of others and, as you say, death or its approach eases into many of them – for instance in ‘Orchard’,

 

not so much innocence lost

as the awful tendency,

signalled by rot and leaf fall,

of everything to run down.

 

Does melancholy (in the modern, non-pathological sense) inspire better poetry than happiness, do you feel? I’ve certainly thought that of some other poets, notably Wendy Cope, whose verse was much more striking when she was unhappy.

NJ: Oh, undoubtedly; though I wouldn’t call it melancholy, even when it’s not employed in the clinical sense of a paralysing condition. I guess the exception is religious poetry or poetry informed by religious belief: it offers a kind of guaranteed optimism. The work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, who was only downcast when he, as an example of flawed humanity, confessed his shortcomings to himself. Most things for him were uplifted by ‘the grandeur of God’, except when men destroyed them, as they did when they felled his Binsey Poplars (‘My aspens dear…’). R. S. Thomas confessed to lugubrious despondency; I’ve never seen a photo of him smiling.

Non-religious confessional poetry can overflow with the consequences of melancholy, which sometimes ends in suicide, that antidote to debilitating misery. I tend to prefer the ‘melancholy’ poetry inspired by sweet sadness, its philosophically regretful sister – Housman’s ‘Blue Remembered Hills’, for instance, and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 29’, admittedly not one of his most profound (‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state…’). To appreciate that, one has to come to terms with life; the unstable never do, because they cannot.

CB: Ah yes, I do like sweet sadness, and I also enjoy the flecks of humour your splash into your work, one such ‘Marion Morehouse’, about the wives of poets and their contribution to their husbands’ work. Do you feel that it’s important to leaven your work with humour?

NJ: Not particularly. It sounds too contrived and self-conscious. When it happens it just makes for variety of tone. I like humour when it’s ‘light verse’.  Not the least of light verse’s attractions is its detail, its comic inventories. So much poetry lacks it: life’s river falling into a mysterious hush as it approaches the eternal sea doesn’t have much detail and teeters on the brink of banality (with apologies to W. H. Davies and the other Georgians). I think it was Tennyson who said poets ‘were not counting the stripes on the tulip’. By the way, the contribution of spouses to their partners’ writing is a serious matter, though male poets would probably have asked their wives to make the lists and count a tulip’s stripes. More’s the pity. More’s the pity that it wasn’t the other way round, I mean.

CB: Indeed! You’ll notice that I’m particularly drawn to your shorter poems; that’s personal taste, or arguably laziness! Do you feel that poems, like stories, dictate their own length?

NJ: Years as a newspaper journalist have made me avoid self-referential writing where I’m able – the confessional sort I’ve mentioned above. It’s probably my loss. There’s nothing wrong with writing about yourself, about your personal feelings and anxieties, but I mostly look outwards; I’m a reporter still chasing a story. Goodness knows there’s enough going on in the world to merit a poet’s attention. So there’s a narrative quality to my poetry, and narratives tend not to be short or pithy. I’ve always believed that a poem is as long as it should be; no more and no less. Poems always know when they’ve hit the buffers.

CB: A related question I have is is whether the reader should have to work to understand the complexity of a poem? Put another way – that the best poems will only give up all the layers of their meaning on repeated readings?

NJ: Well, by definition, wanting to understand complexity is going to involve work. I don’t write with readers in mind. That always sounds pompous but the relationship between writer and reader is simple: a writer writes and a reader reads what’s been written and, the writer hopes, will want to deal with any problem of understanding.

If writers wrote for readers, especially in a way that they believe readers will grasp without too much effort, contemporary literature would be totally different. It’s not so much that poetry of all ages is often difficult to grasp for today’s readers – that also – but that few poems are just surface depictions. Robert Frost again: ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is not just American homespun: it’s surely an intimation of mortality. It is to me. If you don’t get that, the poem can mean very little. Poems may be easy to apprehend but less easy to comprehend. Anyway, I never read a poem fewer than three times; if it sounds simple and unambiguous it’s probably telling me something I need to uncover.

CB: Do you ever go back and re-read any of your own poems some time after completing them and find yourself surprised?

NJ: If I have to read them in public I re-read them in order to make it look as though I know them by heart, which I don’t. But at least it means that I’m not always staring at the page when performing. This process does lead to surprises, the best one being the realisation that what one wrote, say, five years before wasn’t half bad. I’m amazed at the number of writers who tell me they suffer from Imposter Syndrome: the feeling that they’re not as good as they might think, or are performing some sort of cultural sleight of hand. I often endure IS pangs. It used to be known as  ‘lacking self-esteem’. Writing does sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a hill when others are running towards glittering prizes on the flat and without impediment.

CB: I’m curious about the inclusion of your musings (I use that term in a descriptive sense) on your family history, and the paths not taken by you and your siblings. What led you to include such a passage in this collection?

NJ: I got the idea from two contemporary poets, Robert Lowell and Craig Raine, who wrote recollections about their families in the middle of poetry books. There may be others; I only bagged GCSE English, so my knowledge is piecemeal. At a basic level, it just offers relief from all the poetry, especially if that poetry is challenging; but it’s also a means of establishing one’s theme in a personal way. I’ve already mentioned my father and paternal grandfather.

There was a story, possibly apocryphal, which told how my paternal grandmother often ran to the bottom of the garden whenever any of her children suffered accidents and injury in the house, because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Her route down that garden path was a different path taken, born of unease. I don’t want to believe the story because it makes her look irresponsible. I’m sure she wasn’t.  As a reader of poetry, I always wonder if a poet’s sensibilities have their origin in the way they were brought up. Hence the central, biographical essay.

CB: Which leads me to the question – when, for you, does an idea / thought / preoccupation inspire a poem or poems rather than a story?

NJ: When? At any time, even the middle of the night.

CB: No, no, I mean in what circumstances?

NJ: I see. When an idea, thought, or preoccupation presents itself as an image. It’s the difference between an instant, almost complete in itself, and a possibility, the belief that the idea or preoccupation has a complex background needing to be explored as exegesis. The first involves, at a simplistic level, the description of a picture; the latter requires a lengthy fictional unravelling. Imagery is an essential element of poetry and it’s just that, almost visual, seeing something in a way that enhances and intensifies. Dylan Thomas’s ‘hawk on fire’ is a description of what a bird of prey looks like when hovering before the kill: a flickering flame. This view does not contradict my interest in narrative poetry: my poetic narratives are just more complicated pictures, large canvases, if you like, rather than miniatures.

CB: Interesting, though another time we could have a conversation about imagery in stories. Meanwhile, is there another poetry collection in the offing?

NJ: Not yet. My poems appear irregularly like bubbles rising to the top of a tank. That’s a bad analogy for being incomplete: the rising and irregularity are the important aspects, not the bubble itself, which, when examined, will prove to have contained nothing but trapped air. A poetry pamphlet of mine consisting of poems with a French connection is with a publisher at this moment. So, digits crossed. (Writers who tell you they’ve never been rejected by publishers are lying.) The Welsh poet Grahame Davies says his poems used to gather in the skies like planes constantly coming in to land, but that now the runway was sprouting grass. I know what he means.

CB: Well, fingers crossed for the French connection. Thanks for a fascinating conversation, Nigel.

Gwyriad is published by Cockatrice Books.

Cath Barton is a frequent contributor to The Lonely Crowd. She is the winner of the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize for her novella The Plankton Collector. Her most recent publication is Mr Bosch and His Owls.