Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Peter Finch and Grahame Davies (Editors)
Seren 2005
This anthology of modern prose and poetry is, as might be expected, a mixed bag, bound together by a single theme: Cardiff, “Europe’s youngest capital”, as the blurb says. If you live here, or know the place well, I’ll think you’ll find it at the very least interesting. Certainly it’s a long way from the coal dust and Clarksies stuff that often forms the basis of such collections – although, in presenting the modern city, there is a danger that new clichés (the Millennium Centre armadillo, the stadium, the Saturday night St Mary Street vomitorium) will become just as predictable. I’m not sure, however, how appealing this mixed bag might be to someone who doesn’t feel at home here, consisting as it does of tasters for novels, little slices of autobiographies, and one or two stories where, I fear, the selection was based on how many times Cardiff street names were used. Having said that, there’s a lot of stuff that’s complete and worthwhile in its own right. It’s just that reading it all in one go is bit like bolting a selection box of chocolates : some of them taste nice, but overall the effect is a bit overwhelming. Probably best to dip into it to savour individual pieces.
One of the joys of reading about the place you live, apart from the recognition of places and people, is spotting where the writers get it wrong, and here Leonora Brito’s short story Digging for Victory has just such an opportunity for the pedantic and retentive: the culverted docks feeder still runs under Churchill Way, the Glamorgan Canal never did. Good to get that off my chest. Another pleasure in such a collection is coming across stuff that wouldn’t usually cross your path (a 14-poem sequence translated from the Welsh “which voices the experiences of a group of Welsh learners, and their teacher, Elfyn”, for example). Indeed, about a quarter of this book is translated – a very welcome attempt to introduce monoglot English speakers to something new, although sometimes the translation has presented obvious difficulties: for example, I needed to read the note at the end to discover why Twm Miall’s narrator’s spoken English is written in phonetic Welsh. There are plenty of other things I liked too, some familiar and some not. I’ll mention just a few: Anna Davis’s Tequila Bonkers is a coming-of-age story with a difference set around a drunken evening in the city’s bars; Phil Maillard’s The Arm uses the theming of an old Cardiff pub to make a moving point about this city of immigrants; Sheenagh Pugh’s poem Toast looks back at the hot summer the stadium was built but forward too; Ifor Thomas rhymes his way through the city’s suburbs in I Told Her I Loved Her a Lot in Splott; Andrew Craig Williams notices the Victorian street signs on the corners of the city’s endless terraces; in The Legend of Tiger Bay (a revised extract from his book Bloody Valentine – highly recommended), John Williams tells the story of what we must now learn to call Cardiff Bay, and presents a fascinating picture of the anarchic world of the docks, the other Cardiff beyond the Bute Street bridge. There’s also a little selection of poems about the city’s suburbs by J Brookes that I very much enjoyed (waiting for a train at Lisvane in the rain he paces “the soaking platform with the thought / that, three years on, the bald facts are / I miss you less now than I miss your car”.) There’s a similar thrill of recognition in Dannie Abse’s account of his visit to his childhood homes in the Heath and Albany Road. All in all, this book presents a vivid picture of this diverse and lively city I’ve leant to call home.
http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/
http://www.grahamedavies.com/
21st May 2006
See also: Real Cardiff Three
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