Poetry Review: "Hijacked over China with Jane Austen" by W. H. Petty. |
By: Roger Hansford |
A well-presented cover with good colour use and justly laudatory review statements effectively markets this work. Many readers will have an affinity with Petty's writing.
His synaesthetic style approaches background-first, creating surprise as with the ‘bracken hill crackling about the stones/of cottages’. Unifying his work are an inventive use of compound words – ‘rock-burst fields’, ‘owl-poised church’ – and the imagery of food, drink, and the ‘fat’ sun. Named colours are consistently employed to mark time passage and distance: ‘The yellow load/of afternoon’; ‘a grey time’, ‘the moon-long road’. Petty is atmospheric not photographic, wrapping you in café atmospheres and high-speed rail travel, catching you in a sudden downpour, ‘bursting in diamond activity/over the road’.
Although loosely structured, the collection can be understood thematically. Many of Petty’s themes are insightful and play to his strengths. Petty’s Poet is ‘busy’ as the teeth of grazing sheep among his thoughts; in Dredger his metaphor promotes clarity of poetic vision – past, present and future. His two love poems face each other on the page, exchanging ‘spin-the-world regret’ and ‘pine-over-hill feelings’. In Turbulence, Petty’s apparently natural scenes are ‘stiff with ancient terrors’. Tensioning the quotidian in this way, Petty reaches the crux of his achievement with this theme group: Market and Detail among other titles belie his ‘library of fear’.
Petty’s dualism, starkest in the title-poem, is effective on international themes, interweaving his tourism with moments lived ‘a long war or so ago’. In Stones his rural-urban dichotomy treats an unoriginal opposition with refreshing lyricism: ‘city winking/through its red night’. Only on the themes of politics and humanity is Petty unclear, and only when rhyming is he pedestrian. A full reading of his atmospheres will reveal his control over parallel truths. In the meantime, ‘the train yawned into our taunting university’.
SOURCES:
This review appeared in South 34: A Poetry Magazine from the Southern Counties, October 2006. Totton: Hobbs the Printers Limited. ISSN 0959-1133.
At the time of publication, Hijacked over China with Jane Austen by W. H. Petty (2006) was available for £6.95 from Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford BD9 4HH.