Aisling Tempany looks at Mulfran’s Miniature Pamphlets, and wonders what a poetry pamphlet should be’


I’m fairly new to the idea of poetry pamphlets. Pamphlets seem to be suddenly everywhere, having had a revival of sorts recently. Or at least, The Guardian claims they’ve had a revival. The Guardian claims so many things having a revival, from quiffs to domestic terrorism, so no doubt tomorrow it will be claiming that blue skies have had a revival, and grey skies are so passé. Pamphlets have actually always been around. I have a few but they’re so small they just disappear under the weightier stuff that I have to read, both metaphorically and literally. A local poet said to me recently that ‘pamphlets are for other poets to read, not anyone else.’ Some publishers now view pamphlets as a stepping stone between poems in journals or magazines and a first collection. This makes me think of pamphlets the same way I feel about paying for a Masters degree to prepare for a PhD: they aren’t necessary, but some people have decided we need to do them first anyway. The recent pamphlets of the new Cardiff-based press Mulfran highlight some of the problems of poetry pamphlets, particularly in a culture not massively interested in poetry, and where people are tight with money.


These particular pamphlets are collaborative efforts of poetry and illustration, which is perhaps one of their problems, since this halves the actual poetry in them and their small size isn’t too effective for illustration. Peter Daniels’ Work and Food and Roy Morgan’s The Sychbant are probably the most effective in this respect, with illustrations that complement the writing. Roy Morgan’s poems follow a day along the Sychbant Valley. The full sequence is ‘Dawn’, ‘Morning’, ‘Noon’, ‘Evening’, ‘Dusk’, and ‘Dark.’ Where a full collection would have likely jammed these into three pages, here they are spread out with a somewhat tenuous but related image of a clock, allowing them to be viewed more meditatively over the passing of a day.


Overall though, the combination of illustrations and poetry is not as powerful as it could be. Some of the illustrations are too small on the page, ending up more like Microsoft clip art than something thoughtful. Others, like Christopher Hedley-Dent’s images for Some Languages Are Hard to Dream are so heavy and dominating that they distract from the rather fragmented poems opposite. Ceri Richards’ drawings in Malcolm Lewis’ The Hard Man seems entirely pointless, and add nothing to the hard cruel and ugly poems they visually represent (hard, cruel and ugly being a compliment to them.) I don’t know if there is a very specific connection between the poet and the painting, but I don’t care enough to find out. I suppose there might be because the effort of getting permission to use a sketch of an old man done some time back in the 60s by a dead painter seems far too fussy and complex to wind up on a page reduced to the size of a commemorative stamp. I used to work with copyright requests. If I had seen that, I’d have just wondered how many other sketches of old dead/dying men could be found on Wikimedia rights free.


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