Steven Lovatt reviews Wild Cherry by Nigel Jenkins (Parthian Books, 2023)
They’ve passed away now, but throughout the nineteen-nineties, whenever I brought a Kathleen Ferrier LP to the counter, the elderly charity shop volunteers would sigh and their eyes would moistly twinkle. Twenty years from now, my generation may react in the same way to the remembrance of Pavarotti, say. It already happens in Swansea if you mention Nigel Jenkins (1949–2014), who, like Ferrier and Pavarotti, is an artist understood as having belonged to the people in a way that is now very rare, though less so in Wales than in England. And Jenkins, moreover, was a poet.
He was Welsh, raised on a farm in Gower. His early poems, collected in Acts of Union (1990) announced his lifelong affection for animals, people, objects – the stuff of the world in general and the great mystery of life. His farm poems are earthed in the intimate specifics of “guide-arm, wing and wheel”, of the farmyard odour of diesel-zested manure, of a cow in the throes of birth:
[…] that single hoof, pale as lard,
poked out beneath her tail
The images are precise and affecting; the metrics are dynamic and authoritative; there’s a transitive energy to the verbs that yokes all the images Jenkins collects as a participant-observer on the farm and sets them dancing. While the situations and viewpoints vary, a common thread records a sensitive mind recoiling from violence. Creative tension is generated from the contradictions between this affectability and Jenkins’ fascination with the driving, semi-automated rhythms of farm-work and prosody:
A string at each knee as a bar against
vermin, the men piked the rick
sheaf by sheaf to the thrasher’s mouth.
Though this communal harvesting might sound like an account from much earlier in the twentieth century, Gower retained old traditions of agriculture, habit and speech until the advent of mass tourism in the 1960s; Jenkins’ closely observed reconstructions of his childhood may well be of interest to the social historian.
His farm poems are earthed in the intimate specifics of “guide-arm, wing and wheel”, of the farmyard odour of diesel-zested manure, of a cow in the throes of birth
Welsh as he was, English was Jenkins’ first language and the language of his poems. When Acts of Union was published, the older term ‘Anglo-Welsh writing’ was already disappearing from use, to be replaced by the ponderous but more culturally acceptable ‘Welsh writing in English’. The question of whether authentically Welsh writing can be in English was being persuasively argued in the affirmative by the poetry and cultural criticism of Tony Conran, an unignorable influence on Jenkins. There was less agreement on the crucial, consequent question of whether English-language Welsh poetry had a responsibility to articulate and defend Welsh cultural difference. Dannie Abse asserted that “missionary public poetry [is] of no greater significance than any other kind”; in the other corner, Harri Webb came out swinging: “Sing for Wales or shut your trap / All the rest’s a load of crap.”
Jenkins was temperamentally closer to Webb, but he explicitly rebutted the crudeness of this couplet; his own passionate patriotism is of the embattled sort, left-wing and universalist, that understands respect for other cultures as arising without contradiction from love of one’s own. As he puts it in ‘A Length of Rusted Chain’ (a poem addressed to Conran):
About the Yangtse dams’ uprooted millions
we deserve no say
who do not hear, for the jet-skis’ narcotic whine,
our own lost – of Efyrnwy, Clywedog, Cantre’r Gwaelod …
Felly, Cofiwch Dryweryn!
and cofiwch too the carcase-worrier’s sweet inertia
Most of the Welsh words here name reservoirs imposed on Wales to profit the English, the parallel with people displaced by the damming of the Yangtse made explicit. But the poem asserts links across time as well as space: Cantre’r Gwaelod is the mythical lost territory flooded off the Welsh coast, a reference – open to being read as either ironic or stirring – to a supposed Celtic ‘Golden Age’, while ‘carcase-worriers’ is a direct nod to R. S. Thomas’ infamous ‘Welsh Landscape’. Like R.S., Jenkins was scathing of the Welsh who neglect their history. In his political poems he is a Jeremiah, though more in the castigating mode than the lamenting one, and tonally distinct from both the nastiness of Caradoc Evans and the Romantic, elegiac air that clings to R. S. even at his most baleful. Briefly, Jenkins was an angry idealist, and at heart an optimist, despite the great unravelling of ecologies and civilisations of which he was a prescient early chronicler. Being so committed and large-hearted himself, he could not tolerate the lack of these qualities in his compatriots.
The farm poems from Acts of Union, then, though not anachronistic in their social depiction, in a different sense seem separated, even superseded, within Wild Cherry’s generous overview of Jenkins’ career; for as he matured and came to a greater awareness of Welsh history and culture, Jenkins increasingly wrote poetry that was political, less engaged with objects than with embodied ideals. He was usually very good at this, too, avoiding the common pitfalls (windiness, hectoring, the diminution of prosodic energy associated with the poetic tub-thumper) that beset a move away from material things and towards politics. In large part, this is because the targets of his ire were chosen with the same discrimination as were his earlier images of farm-work. As well as reflecting his commitment to Wales and to the cause of social justice and outraged innocence wherever he found it, Jenkins’ polemical poetry also seems to have been an outlet for aspects of his personality that might otherwise have remained frustrated by quieter subjects and more orderly verse forms. At its best his engagée poetry is funny, crude and barnstorming, kept together more by the forward propulsion of its polemic than by any formal or tonal inhibition. This is part of a deliberate effort towards accessibility and social influence, and from an English point of view it’s again worth noting, with astonishment and perhaps envy, that the traditional expectation of Welsh poets that they can colour national opinion, though it has perhaps never seemed so questionable as in 2024, is not ridiculous now and was less so when Jenkins was writing.
At its best his engagée poetry is funny, crude and barnstorming, kept together more by the forward propulsion of its polemic than by any formal or tonal inhibition
Despite the great superficial differences between his early and later poems, the corpus of Jenkins’ work is unified by his promiscuous curiosity and restless ambition, his desire to articulate the whole of human experience and, above all, by what seems to me a genuinely religious thirst for synthesis and connection that elevates all of his most interesting poems beyond the (merely) political. All of these qualities come together in the long poem ‘Handbook’, one of Jenkins’ best, which uses the image, activities and possibilities of the human hand to meditate on our species’ cleverness and tenderness, cruelty and hubris, on a timespan from the Stone Age to the space age. Every time, in passages when the poem seems at risk of speculating itself into abstraction, the reader is arrested by something beautifully simple, concrete and emotional:
How does it happen, the estranging of hands
that hunted, once, the tablecloth in pairs
I remember Nigel Jenkins from the time I first moved to Swansea and he was working in the English Department of the University. He was a large, bearded man, witty and warm, quick to laugh, on reflection more like the Ghost of Christmas Present than any Jeremiah, his admonitory role in Welsh culture buried deep in bonhomie. You could often hear his voice down the corridors of the English Department, and when he entered them he’d fill them with his frame and good humour. The near-silence now in those same corridors is put down to an after effect of the pandemic lockdowns but it is impossible not to feel it also as an outcome of the devaluation of the place of literature in our cultural life. Lionel Trilling praised literature as “the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty”. Jenkins was a fascinated and immersed devotee of all these things, as a man and as a poet (not that he would have separated these two vocations). Wild Cherry is an excellent introduction to an important, underappreciated poet whose work will be enjoyed wherever the life of literature remains valued.
Steven Lovatt is an editor and tutor living in Swansea. He is a member of the International Literature Showcase, run by the British Council and the UK National Writing Centre, and his book Birdsong in a Time of Silence was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
