(33 pages, stapled, card cover).
ISBN 1 897968 37 X £5 US$10; US$11 air
In his introduction the author wrote:
London has absorbed my birthplace and I spent almost all my working life in London. My speech was formed by London speech and my thoughts by London thought. Although I now live as far from London as it is possible to go without leaving England, its hold on my imagination is undiminished.
No one can truly describe London; no one could have imagined it. My imaginings are echos of thoughts evoked by impressions over many years of that incomparable metropolis.
I see these poems as inhabiting London and, like its human inhabitants, they are of varied age and disparate form. Perhaps some of them will speak to you.
Some poems from the book
Life's Riches
Summer's deep penetrating heat
Has emptied every square and street
From Stepney Green to Bow.
Behind the stone and brick facades
A secret people play charades,
Pretending life is rich.
While far above them through the sky
A silver aircraft flying high,
Screams "Life is for the rich".
Summoned by Betjeman
Morning train from Tring to Euston,
Underground to Stepney Green,
Climbing stairs to sunlit pavements
So unlike the Chilterns green.
Journey from the tree clad hillsides
To the city clothed in stone,
From the little lanes long winding
To the broad straight streets wind-blown.
Through the blue vault, slowly drifting,
Come white clouds from western shires.
Sunlight glints on broken bottles,
Sharper than the woodland briars.
I love hillsides green and graceful,
Where wild flowers skirt the roads;
Yet I write of darkest London,
Where humanity implodes.
Creosote
Another coat
of creosote
seasons the fence;
hot sun draws scents,
pungent as tar
that graveled lanes
with shingle grains
when as a child
I wandered wild
through summer streets;
glass marbles flashed
and clicked and clashed
in gutters dry
where friends and I
chanced treasured bloods;
ants shiny black
from pavement crack,
my interest woke
in emmet folk
who tunnel deep:
- so long ago,
yet memories flow
like water clear
from mountain mere
in sunlit streams.
Of
this collection, Bernard M Jackson wrote in Quantum Leap (Issue 49,
2010)
I
speed to the city
along
black tarmac roads
caught
in a racing stream
of
pilgrims city‑bound.
(City
Bound)
There
can be but a few writers in the
small press world to whom the name John Light is not familiar. For well
over 20
years, he has single‑handedly compiled the now eponymous LIGHT'S
LIST,
an inventory of all known poetry
magazines, country by country, world‑wide. He has also
proved
himself to be a poet of great distinction. Now living in Berwick, he
ever
retains a deeply rooted love and affinity for London, where he was
born; and
this fascinating collection revisits the great metropolis and probes
and
describes a London seldom observed by casual visitor, tourist and
sight‑seer:
a
collection of minutiae
conflation
of discrepancies,
of
imperceptible details,
size,
shape, height, colour of buildings
differences
of dress, movement,
features
of the inhabitants,
of
back street sounds and shop smells.
(East
End to South Bank)
In
his poem London Dawn
John
deploys an economy of words to portray verbally the effect of breaking
dawn
across the city. Here is the veritable touch of the artist:
Below
pewter clouds
yellow
horizon
births
an orange sun
that
limns leaden cloud
with
a scarlet base.
(London
Dawn)
There
is considerable movement in his
poetry, too, as in several of his poems he describes journeys by car
and the
Underground - journeys vividly impressed upon his mind, and invariably
recreated in dreamlike atmosphere. People, too, become ghostlike and
restricted
to those characteristic light and shadow portrayals to which, within
the
context of John's various poems, they duly belong:
On
the Underground
no
one speaks to anyone else:
in
the dark depths of the metropolis
life
is serious;
people
read or think lonely thoughts,
thoughts
not to be shared with other
faces.
(London
Travellers)
Those
of us who have had regular contact with London will find many familiar
place‑names
drawn upon within these absorbing pages. I particularly liked and
appreciated
J.L.'s lovely poem, Globe Town wherein there is superb depiction of an early morning market
being stirred
into action - and here again we
have fine instance of
the poet/artist's keen eye for detail.
But not all of this writer's admirable portrayals strike a positive
note
for the
alluring charm of the innercity. In his poem, Above Ground
we
find a scene of abject desolation graphically
described :
The
District Line crawls from London's clay
to
a desolation of despair;
lagoons
of poisoned water lie dark
between
spoiled heaps of slag and clinker
and
black pipes carry hidden liquids
above
multicoloured channels
to
man‑made forests of stainless steel
and
corrosive clouds cast dead shadows
where
once marsh birds spread their wings.
(Above
Ground)
There
are so many exquisite' poems in
this collection that really, I could continue quoting each in turn.
However,
don't just take the word of a passing review writer - Why not see for
yourselves ? If you love to read well‑written poetry, in the modern
vein,
imbued with clarity of perception and incisive imagery, then this is
the book
for you
Bernard
M
Jackson
For a rather different viewpoint see Steve Sneyd writing in Data Dump 142:
Chimerical City: Poems of London, by John Light is a 50+ poems collection, illustrated by the author, including an elegantly sinister cover, which sets out to capture, at levels of mood and mystery, JL’s birthplace and location of his working life before retirement to border town Berwick. Rather as with US poet Joseph Payne Brennan’s pictures of rural New England, or indeed P K Dick’s few non-SF novels with the air that the aliens have just stepped out for a tea break, there is little overtly genre here, yet an eye-corner feel of strangeness / the Other / the city as living entity with its own non-human agenda persists (another mood anthology from prosefic might be Leiber’s ‘Our Lady of Darkness’ for megalopolis as over critical mass life form-in-waiting): “iced fire” (“Artist’s Vision”), the “distant towers” rule “beyond the dereliction of half-hearted businesses” (“Maze of the City”), while “humanity implodes” (“Summoned by Betjeman”), helplessly fossilises - “statues of anglers” (“Urban Waterway”) or is manipulated into helpless captivity to pain-pleasure (“Monstrous Machine”) and above all what rules is the urban entity itself, “pixelled breast …/ curving sun-brown (--) sky-darkened needle (--) drawing the city to the stars”, its builders and denizens alike long outgrown, become interchangeable - “so many to choose from / so many to be” (“Mystery of the City”), disposables who will forever fail of admittance to the Meta-city, the “tall truncated pyramid (--) unsealed by any sort of door” (“Towards the Unentered Building”), ready and doubtless willing and able to exist past / beyond / without human presence, become in the last the pyramid monument of an Egypt-dead or Hodgson’s ‘Night Land’-dead civilisation in futurity.
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(Page amended 05 Sept 2017)
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