KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS # 2

A FEW WORDS ABOUT SELWYN PRITCHARD
[Contribution to the launching of Letters and Characters, at Collected Works Bookshop,April 20th, 2001]

A few words about Selwyn...
I like the way he calls me "you swine" --out of The Goons-- in fact I like a lot of what he's often casting off & about --his Englishness, his Welshness, his Britishness --I especially like it here in Australia, where it's part of our New Australianness...
I like Selwyn's connection with the British literary high life! I came from the poetry underground you realise, frightened by, as much as opposing, the Oxford & London poetry scenes! --I feel I'm getting a second chance now to know those people & that poetry via Selwyn's benevolence...
I'm astonished at his sense of purpose --the battle-plan he draws up on behalf of his army of poems --I'm amused, amazed & always pleased for him when he reports a successful campaign...
I liked his Chinese poems [Lunar Frost, published by Brandl & Schlesinger] because they made good sense in an English I recognize, whatever debate they can arouse amongst other Chinese scholars & translators...
I'm very pleased for him that this book [Letters and Characters, Cornford Press], once upon a time "Pritchard's Pomerania", is now published...
"My Dear Wraithe" Selwyn addresses the first of the two long epistles comprising this fat little book --It's obvious, though, that particular manifestation, the ghost glimpsed before death, has been chased away or has given up on our happily long living poet! ["Wraithe" is an old comrade as far as the book's dramatis personae's concerned] Long may you prosper!
And yet --this is a type of night poem, as in "the dark night of the soul" --or, at least, night thoughts --as he has it himself in the second half of the book, "Quiet Night Thoughts" --but that's between the poet & his Chinese correspondents --For mine, the thoughts are anything but quiet --Every now & then they penetrate the daily life, the political commentary, the 'gross natural array' as Goethe called it (distinguishing autobiography from life)...
"Silence so complete the pulse drums in my ear." -- Selwyn fills it up with the story, or stories, of his life --his lives : the Army --wonderful anectdotes strung between The Goons & David Jones; the Socialist, out of anger it seems to me, lambasting middle & upper classes for all he
& they are worth; the anti-American; the commentator on West & East, insider of one empire, journalist in the other; the New Australian, caustically loving his new country not least because it's so far away from what he takes to be his atrocious origins --the atrocious origins of his country mind you, for his deep conservatism is really founded upon family & ancestors who would seem to be exempt from the iniquity, the inequality, the unfreedom of that country --almost that is! --a Right Wing Brother lurks!
But at the heart of the dark night, of the deafening silence, is the figure of the Little Boy. The little Hayden haunts the poem, as he haunts the poet, and he'll haunt the reader too --So very hard to conceive, to conceptualise --Terrible to read, but, I think, unavoidable :

Dead son, dead son, I can no longer
hold you in my mind
as once I held you in my arms :
it can't be done, it can't be done.

So I arrange your smiles,
print dates, chart your curve
beyond our knowing, only here
in God's gravity record the faint pulse
of love's disproof of time and space.

Letters and Characters is a poem to argue with --I've remarked to Selwyn that agreeing with its opinions is one thing, but the opposite doesnt stop one reading it--
The strength or bitterness or vitriol of the political opinions seem to me to draw off of the terrible vibe or energy from the loss of that boy, that lost boy... "Daily our eyes opened and closed on grief." "Doc Gill wrote from Australia to say / he thought I was unhinged!" Well of course he was --is-- as a poet is --unhinged from the regular round even when a celebrator of it --That's why Beauty is an interruption to the habitual, to the amnesia of the natural --Beauty, Truth --and Longing...
And a Dream arises --and not, I think, a political dream, where Selwyn's version of Paradise will have its chance of levelling the playing-field, so to speak --but a poetic dream of an unsullied country, people, language --poetic, atavistic, certainly consoling --this dream of Wales and a return to Wales, whether in person or spirit (thus language) hardly matters for it still to be a fact...
And so the narrative, unexpectedly perhaps, produces a redemption --not English, WELSH he'll say of himself; and not England but WALES --this despite "the air that tears around this latitude / between Patagonia, South Africa, and here. / It inebriates even an old man, but you know, / I miss North Wales, I do."
There is, of course, the abiding redemption of Family --the most seriously adored "characters" of the title...
Perhaps the sweetest of the little poems in this spiralling narrative is the poem for Miriam, the life-long partner, "Domestic Interior", which ends, "How lovely, lovely you were and are, / Soap in your eye, stumbling, almost falling."
Selwyn might now take that cue, --fall round and around into a Welsh-Antipodean poetry, --fall down & down, and find the soft down again...

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--April 20th, 2001; Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne
LETTERS AND CHARACTERS, published by Tim Thorne's Cornford Press (Launceston, Tasmania), 2001. Tim Thorne also spoke on the occasion.