Glyn Phillips – Portrait of the Poet

I have only this collection to go on, a collation of short-story and artwork as well as poetry. Out of print, as is an earlier collection Still Life, the Portrait nevertheless provides a clear impression of this poet.

What emerges is a stance that is frequently sentimental and political. I would argue that this stance, of either strong attitude or emotion, conceals a deeper element of realism and purposeful description.

Phillips works to convey the truths of personal history and background, recreating them both for the reader and prompting questions from the reader. There are no dogmatic answers. These poems exist on the page, with all their vital energy, demanding the reader’s self-reflection.

The collection bursts with humour though, whether uproarious (My Wife’s Bum) or subtle, as in Similes:

My future is like a pencil

The more that it writes

The shorter it gets.

It is a laugh. It is also a hard take on life and death. Phillips’ work has plenty on the joy and pain of love. Where children growing up break from you (Black and White), the exasperation of it all (Feeding the Beast), and then when people die (Dad’s Birthday).

At first I took Grannie’s Teapot to be nostalgia for an industrial past that here in the Black Country has left us. This is a poem of several pages recalling a life lived, successful against the odds, the background the toxic waste in the Smethwick air, the factory work nonetheless preferable to the desolation of home life.

The poem is occasioned by an heirloom, a wartime-issue teapot that falls into the speaker’s hands after the woman’s death, and around which he constructs a life-history. It signifies that the actual word-count given continuously to the teapot’s owner, the speaker’s grandmother, is less that that of her husband and her daughter respectively. To the end, she remains an enigma, of whom something is conveyed by the teapot itself, ‘short and stout’ with it’s ‘elegant spout’. The object stands as an emblem for her, a figure toughened by work yet somehow aspiring to the elegance conveyed by the girl she had been, who ‘Loved to dance / Laughed and smiled’ – all given up to a large family and a drunken husband.

The teapot also suggests that life, of constant work and little recognition, in peacetime producing stationery items, in wartime, munitions. The teapot was wartime-issue, made to ‘economise’ on what was given to the workers. The image of the women queueing for hot water, each to fill their tiny receptacle, will stay with me for its pathos. These were enablers of the war effort, with thanks in short measure. The inscription of the owner’s initials on the teapot’s base brings us back to the name:

‘MW’ May Wilcox.

Named after the month.

Or maybe the flower.

Or maybe the may.

Or maybe the may be not.

I’ve no idea.

Yet the poet refuses to indulge her memory. He simply gives her to us, as she is recalled. He has much more to say to us. Light, the sudden breaking-through on the sun onto the Welsh coast, can be paired with Adagio for Heartstrings, the moment of peace and perspective after confusion and breakdown. It came to me, in Grannie’s Teapot and One Day We’ll Leave All This Behind that Phillips is above all a writer, even more than a poet, storyteller or humourist (he is undoubtedly all three).

As a writer he gives the thing back to us, not as he would wish it, or as we the readers would prefer it – but as it is. We the readers must take our individual lessons from it. He is using poetry in a writerly way, to convey this figure, a monument to working-class stoicism and endurance, to stand tall among us.

There’s a question under all this – what did this life mean?. Others set the conditions of her life – her employer and her husband. Work was the reason her husband took to drink, and work physically separated her from her children.

When it is all over,

…staring out the window

Watching the world drift slowly past the net curtains.

I’m not sure how much of them she ever caught in them…

…or whether her memories held any meaning at all for her, ‘the may be not’. The poet poses the unsettling question that should affect us all.

Phillips surveys the condition in which we all live, conveying it with unsparing accuracy.