New British Poetry: 9 Landeg White© Dr J D Ballam
Oct 25, 2003
It would be unfair and misleading not to say at the very outset that Llandeg White's WHERE THE ANGOLANS ARE PLAYING FOOTBALL: SELECTED AND NEW POETRY (Cardigan: Parthian, 2003) is anything other than the finest collection of verse I've read this year. The volume brings together poems from five of White's earlier works, (the earliest being from 1983) alongside two dozen new pieces. Although the best examples of two decades' worth of work are on show here, and the style and tone show breadth and variety, there is nothing to suggest even comparative weakness either in the earlier work or the later. Instead, there is something on nearly every page indicative of the reflections of a powerful intellect, a compassionate though never priggish understanding of people's follies and desires, and an expert control of the medium.
As much as anything, what impresses me is White's honesty-his acknowledgement of the turnings and evasions to which all writing is prone, and yet his evident determination to run the risk of his own disappointment in an effort to get at the truth of the matters that interest him. As he describes it, ...my job's to find/ a style so transparent you don't/
hear any voice of mine shouting/
Look at Me, just the depths gleaming/
without a ripple to refract the art. At times it is possible to sense the urgency with which he tries to shear away affectations of language, with the result that he achieves an intimacy of style that is distinctive in tone and very personal-very much a sense of the poems having been written for each reader singly, without any concept of a reading 'public'. A good example of this is his poem, 'Letter to My Son'. Having detailed the impressions of what he can and cannot offer him, he says, But I want to write of my love/
for you over seventeen winters,/
Both the barren anxiety/
that shadows your present choices,/
And my pride in you/
and your emerging designs There is in this poem, as in most in this collection, a simple fortitude and a commitment to taking the necessary action, saying the necessary thing, in spite of the difficulties that such decisions involve. He will drink deep with his senses, and he will act upon his beliefs though he finds it impossible to express how either act upon him. He demonstrates this in a charming, evocative poem entitled 'Charcoal', where amidst a barbecue above 'long delayed summers peering', his thoughts and senses coalesce and,
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