THE GOOD IS ABROAD

"Today hasn’t happened, or not / as imagined; this humanized / desert of yapping chat, slobs, / sloppy bladder-wreck, dead shells / and tan-chapping wind …………….” (Will Daunt in Out of Here)

What is perhaps the most enchanting about Will Daunt’s poetry is the freshness with which each poem is approached – nowhere is a reader allowed an opportunity to express boredom. In continuation of that uniqueness, in “The Good is Abroad”  Mr Daunt moves from subject to subject and from situation to situation with effortless ease; and with each movement he presents us with a handful of nuggets which, though melancholy, shine in splendour. An adventurer in the truest spirit of the word, the author of “The Good is Abroad” strings his verses into a stream of emotions, each differing from the rest, each better than the previous best.  There is a lot of experimentation with rhyme and rhythm, which, though jarring at times, rarely fail to charm the reader. Take Coastcards, for instance. In this selection of four poems bunched together in a makeshift bouquet, the poet glides effortlessly from the euphoria in “Big Kite” to the tempered down notes in “Small World”, shifting to the longing of “Out of Here” and finally, to the loneliness of “Speak to Me”.

In “Eastern Gate” the poet suddenly changes track, delving on the immigrant life – no, not one of penury, but of the poverty of loneliness - as he writes

“Are they from home, to the space in your heart

 As each year away helps you feel more apart?”

Simple lines. Yet brilliant lines.

Mr Daunt displays the same grace and panache as he becomes political, touching upon situational themes as in Moss Park:

“Fourteen Bunkers are unbombed,

and lease adventures

outside history.

Silence impels,

while Asian towns implode

and England sharply darkens”

or in Channel Railways:

“Why’s England gone to ground

so quirkily?

That haste-land, that mistake of trees ……..

…… we are fast emerging from a blur

in foreign fields.

At the bend of the line, where next?”

Yes, there are those odd moments when the poet lets go of his restraint, and the poem suffers as a result. A case in point is A Place Called Harm - the very first poem in this collection.  The poet goes slightly overboard in his exuberance, and in the process loses his rhythm which is the essence of any poem. Consider this:

Left blank: how she circles and reigns in her daughters,

Too smart in the race to be smart to be caught short.

While very effective in word play as a stand alone, the last line jars the reader out of what had been an excellent rhyming poem.

Then there are the occasional, obvious clichés that have crept into some of the poems. In “The Surge of Luck”, for example, the poet finishes with “though songs might call ‘…above us, only lies’.”  The parody of a very popular song was perhaps not absolutely essential for the poem; in fact, it only serves to disrupt its magnificence.

These minor glitches notwithstanding, the collection remains a delightful read; a pleasant journey with a poet who is obviously not indulging in a soul searching exercise but is instead seeking an identity for his immediate environment. Firmly ensconced in his existence, supremely confident of his own being, the poet looks around, as if bewildered, by the very objects and situations that define his identity. As he himself says

“….. but everyone

has other drawers, where unlived living lives”

And that is where “The Good is Abroad” succeeds, in bringing that unlived living to the fore.