by Dr <\/b>Matthew Jarvis<\/b><\/p>\n
Jonathan Edwards\u2019s approach to place in My Family and Other Superheroes<\/em> (Bridgend: Seren, 2014) is not something I want to \u2018box up\u2019 in the package of one particular theoretical notion of place or another: he seems to construct place poetically both as fixity and as shifting \u2018trajectories\u2019.[1]<\/a> But I do think that his poetic commitment to Welsh locality \u2013 most obviously to Valleys locality, or post-industrial south Wales locality more broadly \u2013 is most clearly expressed in his interest in people, in human community. To put it differently, I don\u2019t think that this is primarily a poetry of physical landmarks. Certainly, in \u2018Colliery Row\u2019,[2]<\/a> the poem\u2019s speaker is highly conscious of the street itself: there are landmarks that particular houses create and by which the poem itself emphatically navigates. Thus, the poem travels from house number five in the first stanza, to number six in the second, to a property \u2018across the road\u2019 in stanza three, to number three by the end of stanza four, and to both \u2018the other end of the row\u2019 and house number eight by stanza five. In other words, in the sense of a criss-crossing of lines from one physical point of the street to another, we find here the sort of \u2018geometric personality\u2019 that Yi-Fu Tuan attributes to a relatively fixed sense of space.[3]<\/a> However, this seems to function not as an end in itself but rather substantially as a construct within which the dramas of the street\u2019s people can take place: the bus driver who may still be drunk during his morning shift; the man who is \u2018half-naked\u2019 at \u2018the first sign of sunshine\u2019; the skateboarding kids; the woman across the road \u2018who\u2019s been walking around beneath a cloud \/ of dark hair since she watched her husband go\u2019. For Edwards, the place of the Valleys is, to a very great degree, the conjunction of its people \u2013 what Doreen Massey calls, in an admirably suggestive coinage, their \u2018throwntogetherness\u2019.[4]<\/a> \u2018What is a street for?\u2019, asks the end of \u2018Colliery Row\u2019. For Edwards, it seems to be very much about what he calls the \u2018semi-detached lives\u2019 that the street brings into contact with one another. [16]<\/a> For Chartism in Wales, including the Newport uprising of 1839, see John Davies, A History of Wales<\/em>, revised edn (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 364-7.<\/p>\n Extract from work on Jonathan Edwards’s Poetry of Place \u2013 PDF Version<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dr Matthew Jarvis Jonathan Edwards\u2019s approach to place in My Family and Other Superheroes (Bridgend: Seren, 2014) is not something I want to \u2018box up\u2019 in the package of one particular theoretical notion of place or another: he seems to construct place poetically both as fixity and as shifting \u2018trajectories\u2019.[1] But I do think … Continue reading “Extract from work on Jonathan Edwards’s poetry of place”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13396,"featured_media":0,"parent":17,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1806","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9R2R9-t8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2235,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1806\/revisions\/2235"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs such, it is unsurprising that character follows character in Edwards\u2019s poems of Welsh locality: the worker in a Merthyr kebab shop, and the woman who likes (or perhaps stalks) him;[5]<\/a> failed footballer Owen Jones, whose now-reduced life is a progression from betting shop to kebab shop and back[6]<\/a> (just like the people who \u2018lug their lives to bus stop, chip shop, chapel\u2019 in \u2018View of Valleys Village from a Hill\u2019);[7]<\/a> the travellers on the \u20187.54 to Cardiff\u2019, who are temporarily thrown into community to the extent that the poem\u2019s speaker knows that today is \u2018the third day\u2019 since the \u2018girl who got on one day \/ with a goldfish in a plastic bowl\u2019 hasn\u2019t appeared, and where there is the supportive social interchange of \u2018A Bless you<\/i>, a borrowed tissue\u2019.[8]<\/a> Indeed, even the poem \u2018Chartist Mural, John Frost Square, Newport\u2019, which takes as its focus the eponymous 1978 mural by Kenneth Budd which (to cite Rob Williams\u2019s words for The Independent<\/em>) <\/i>\u2018commemorate[d] the 1839 Chartist uprising in the city\u2019[9]<\/a> and which was controversially destroyed by Newport Council in October 2013[10]<\/a> \u2013 even this poem, which focuses so emphatically on a physical landmark, seemingly does so in order to construct a parade of characters: variously, to cite a number of examples from the poem, \u2018these men, flattened by history\u2019; \u2018bottom right, these three, forever dying\u2019; a \u2018school-trip boy who stares\u2019; \u2018king\u2019s men firing the slowest bullets in the world\u2019, and the \u2018tramp\u2019 at the end of the poem, with \u2018his duvet \/ growing from his chin\u2019. Making all of these people into a sort of symposium<\/em>,[11]<\/a> the resonant final line of the poem observes the way in which \u2018These bits-and-pieces men look at each other\u2019: the bits and pieces, in other words, of the mural itself and<\/i> of so many lives. To make a bigger point from all this: in Edwards\u2019s commitment to the many lives of so many different people \u2013 to whom we might add, for example, the eponymous character of \u2018Girl\u2019 who, in \u2018scarlet heels, six inch\u2019 is the object of the speaker\u2019s (possibly ironic?) affections;[12]<\/a> or the TalkTalk salesman who has \u2018all the flattery \/ you can stand\u2019;[13]<\/a> or the Starbucks worker, Rhian, \u2018With her Minnie Mouse voice and her Popeye \/ tattoos\u2019[14]<\/a> \u2013 in his commitment to all these people, in his commitment to the value of their everyday lives, it seems to me that Edwards\u2019s poetic engagement with Newport\u2019s Chartist mural is of fundamental importance.[15]<\/a> Edwards\u2019s poetry is an act of representation, in the political sense; it is an act of commitment to the visibility of those people-outside-power on whose behalf Chartism itself was advanced.[16]<\/a> To put it another way: Edwards\u2019s poetry of locality seems to me to be an attempt, Chartist-like, to achieve a kind of suffrage for the communities that his poems both emerge out of and create.<\/span><\/p>\n
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