Welcome Back to the Country Graham Clifford, Seren, £5.00
You often hear that the trick to winning a poetry competition is to write in the style of the judges. A friend of mine once told me that they were sure they only won in a competition they entered because their work was thought to be someone else's – a back-handed compliment surely? Grahame Clifford's pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country was last year's winner of the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize. The judges were Zoe Skoulding and Patrick McGuinness. Reading the pamphlet confirms the choice as one that flatters the judge's own catalogues.
This is not to be seen as an insult. Clifford's work is still accomplished, taking the better elements of the two's writing, avoiding the more experimental ends of Skoulding and focusing more on the ideas. 'A' particularly struck me as Skoulding-like, with its focus on the shape and form of a blown-up photocopied letter A:
this Times New Roman arrangement that could be far off, Da Vincian invention for cathedral building
As someone whose life seems to be spent analysing letters and words on pages I recognise the sudden strangeness a letter, long familiar, can become. I wonder what he would find of the Greek letter Omega?
I've often thought that the mark of really great poetry, and really great poets, is that their work can be spotted from anyone else's, without being labelled. I am not convinced that I would spot Clifford out from many of the pages of Poetry Wales without a name to tell me so. I would aspire to be the original, not the copy, that, like a photocopy, is slightly shrunk and reduced in quality. Clifford's voice is promising, and praised by those with good taste, but I'm not convinced it is completely unique or original. That perhaps is not his fault, but rather the nature of poetry competitions, and the culture they create. AISLING TEMPANY
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