{"id":2143,"date":"2015-10-07T13:51:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T13:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aber.ac.uk\/devolvedvoices\/?page_id=2143"},"modified":"2018-04-19T15:50:33","modified_gmt":"2018-04-19T14:50:33","slug":"extract-from-work-on-meirion-jordans-moonrise-war-and-conflict","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/materials\/extract-from-work-on-meirion-jordans-moonrise-war-and-conflict\/","title":{"rendered":"Extract from work on Meirion Jordan\u2019s Moonrise: War and Conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Dr Matthew Jarvis<\/strong><\/p>\n

[In this extract I discuss aspects of Meirion Jordan\u2019s debut volume, Moonrise<\/em> (2008), which was shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Best First Collection prize.]<\/p>\n

As \u2018Home, 1919\u2019 might suggest,[1]<\/a> and as both W. S. Milne and David Wheatley observed in reviews,[2]<\/a> war is a significant thread within Moonrise<\/em>. Indeed, Milne argues that, while eight poems in the collection \u2018take war as their primary theme\u2019, there is \u2013 just as importantly \u2013 a general<\/em> engagement with conflict which means that the \u2018motif of war is woven into the texture of Jordan\u2019s poetry\u2019. Milne identifies only four of what he sees as the \u2018primary theme\u2019 war poems in the volume (\u2018Poppy field\u2019, \u2018Scharnhorst\u2019, \u2018At Srebrenica, and \u2018Dream #7912\u2019),[3]<\/a> but it is clear that war and conflict, or their machinery, figure in poems as diverse as \u2018The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society\u2019, \u2018HMS Ark Royal in Action\u2019, \u2018Hinterlands\u2019, and \u2018Dead Reckoning\u2019.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The first of this latter-named group is arguably the most outlandish, figuring characters who have an obsession with the iconography and history of both nuclear power gone wrong and of nuclear weaponry in use. Thus, alongside a sort of fandom related to events such as Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl[5]<\/a> \u2013 a fandom that shows itself in nuclear power-related sight-seeing trips and associated news-related get-togethers \u2013 the speaker and his friend see beauty in the video of \u2018Hiroshima \/ go[ing] up in forty-five\u2019, as the poem puts it, and similarly take pleasure in viewing the after-effects of nuclear weapons testing: \u2018We love to watch \/ the palm trees beating in the thorium breeze, \/ the rising heart of the cloud \/ like sunshine in our eyes\u2019. Indeed, in its rendering of an atomic explosion as a crucially aesthetic event (a thing of dynamic movement, a heart<\/em>, sunshine<\/em>), this description notably recalls the writing of William Laurence, the science journalist who was an observer during the mission which saw the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 and whose account of the event emphasizes, precisely, the colours, shapes and movements of the explosion. For example, towards the end of a narrative that becomes increasingly awe-struck, Laurence tells how, as part of the mushroom cloud moved away, \u2018it changed its shape into a flower-like form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside\u2019.[6]<\/a> Whilst there is thus an identifiable heritage to the sort of aesthetic response to nuclear explosions that Jordan imagines here, it is \u2013 at least initially \u2013 much harder to detect the \u2018Welsh-inflected\u2019 element that David Wheatley sees in what he calls the \u2018quirky fantasy\u2019 of this poem.[7]<\/a> There is, for example, no overt Welsh reference in the piece, nor is there anything which suggests a Wales-rooted form of language in Jordan\u2019s mode of expression. However, it might conceivably be possible to ascribe to the poem a sensibility which is based in a broad cultural awareness that Wales itself suffered significantly from the fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster<\/em>: as a 2011 CND briefing explains, \u2018In Britain, the areas worst affected were the hill farms of North Wales, Cumbria and South Western Scotland, where the sheep were now eating contaminated grass\u2019 as a result of which, even in 2011, CND could report that \u2018there are still restrictions on sheep in some areas of North Wales and Cumbria\u2019.[8]<\/a> Whether or not such a Wales-based association is viable \u2013 and it is certainly the case that nuclear fallout is part of Wales\u2019s material history in the period of Merion Jordan\u2019s own life \u2013 Wheatley\u2019s assessment that this is a poem of \u2018bitter ironies\u2019 is immediately easier to appreciate: in Jordan\u2019s vision here, disaster and the potential for mass destruction become a form of entertainment. However, I would suggest that Jordan takes this approach not to mock his poem\u2019s characters in some simplistic way, but rather as an attempt to explore how human beings may respond to and attempt to cope with the horrors of catastrophe \u2013 in this case, by turning such horrors, precisely, into entertainment. Indeed, the poem itself<\/em> arguably constitutes just such an attempt to deal with the spectre of technological terrors \u2013 specifically by framing them within, and thus by associating them with, the absurdities it portrays. In other words, and to put it simply, in the ludicrous behaviour of its central characters, this poem moves to make a joke out of terror (or death) itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

By strong contrast, the four-poem sequence \u2018Hinterlands\u2019 is a far more immediately serious engagement with notions of conflict.[9]<\/a> Here, then, an unspecified and ambiguous conflict (that is suggested over the course of the sequence as a whole) sees the (likewise unspecified) protagonists of the sequence called away from their \u2018valley\u2019 \u2013 a hint there, perhaps, of Jordan\u2019s south Wales origins? \u2013 to some \u2018eternal city\u2019. The first poem of the sequence (\u2018The Radio\u2019) suggests some sort of call for support, from the centre to the \u2018provinces\u2019; the second (\u2018Hinterlands\u2019) gives sight of \u2018the enemy flocking in dark clouds \/ on the horizon\u2019; and the third (\u2018Artifacts\u2019) looks \u2018Ten thousand miles down\u2019 to where \u2018our city bathes in radiation\u2019 (an interesting return, in itself, to motifs of nuclear destruction). The fourth poem (\u2018Inscriptions\u2019) then seems to acknowledge the speakers as \u2018invaders\u2019, and suggests their existence within a highly administered, war-focused society in lines that seem to offer up a degree of political satire on a state\u2019s willingness to sacrifice both freedoms and citizens to the prosecution of its military engagements:<\/span><\/p>\n

All mail is now administered
\nby the war graves commission:
\nonly the dead may send
\nor open letters. Our young
\nare shrink-wrapped and delivered to war
\nin a distant country, to think of them
\ncondemns the soul to auction.<\/p>\n

With their reference to a shipping-off of the young to conflict in \u2018a distant country\u2019, these lines could very readily be contextualised by their emergence in a decade which saw major UK armed involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan.[10]<\/a> But like the possible material context of Wales\u2019s Chernobyl fallout for \u2018The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society\u2019, there is no overt textual evidence for such an assertion and it is thus wise to bear in mind John Redmond\u2019s recent caution against too-ready critical reliance on reading poetic texts within the context of what he calls \u2018public narratives\u2019.[11]<\/a> Against this, however, there are, in this final poem of the \u2018Hinterlands\u2019 sequence, strong hints of a notion of Wales in the geographical iconography of characters waiting \u2018along the sides \/ of green hills\u2019 \u2013 as well as what can be read as suggestions of Valleys mining villages (\u2018it is all two up, two down\u2019) and traditional Welsh dress (\u2018the inhabitants parade in period dress\u2019). The country of this poem, in other words \u2013 the country from which the \u2018young \/ are shrink-wrapped and delivered to war \/ in a distant country\u2019 \u2013 may suggest a familiar, real-world one. But to reiterate: none of this is explicit and exists only at the level of potential inference. Indeed, the overall sense, in this final poem of the sequence, of producing political, cultural, and geographical landscapes that are possibly but not definitely familiar suggests that Jordan here is rooting this particular rendition of warfare in a distinctly uncanny space: in a space that is, to quote Nicholas Royle, \u2018a peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar\u2019.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> Meirion Jordan, Moonrise<\/em> (Bridgend: Seren, 2008), p. 35.
\n[2]<\/a> W. S. Milne, \u2018Omnium Gatherum of Welsh Books\u2019,\u00a0Agenda<\/em>, 44\/2-3 (spring 2009), pp. 133-149: pp. 144-5; David Wheatley, Rev. of\u00a0Moonrise<\/em> by Meirion Jordan,\u00a0Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, 5559 (16 October 2009), p. 27.
\n[3]<\/a> Milne, \u2018Omnium Gatherum\u2019, p. 144. See Jordan, Moonrise<\/em>, pp. 8, 47, 55, 57.
\n[4]<\/a> Jordan, Moonrise<\/em>, pp. 15, 36, 39-42, 56.
\n[5]<\/a> For brief summaries of these three disasters at nuclear reactor sites (variously from 1957, 1979 and 1986), see \u2018Major nuclear reactor disasters\u2019, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament<\/em>, <https:\/\/www.cnduk.org\/campaigns\/nuclear-power\/major-disasters>, accessed 6 October 2015.
\n[6]<\/a> Quoted in Craig Nelson, The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of The Atomic Era<\/em> (London: Scribner, 2014), p. 218.
\n[7]<\/a> Wheatley, Rev. of\u00a0Moonrise<\/em>, p. 27.
\n[8]<\/a> Remember Chernobyl: A Continuing Nuclear Tragedy<\/em> (London: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 2011), <https:\/\/www.cnduk.org\/campaigns\/nuclear-power\/remember-chernobyl\/item\/download\/225<\/a>>, accessed 7 October 2015, p. 3. The CND website provides an updated text which notes that \u2018The final restrictions on sheep movement in England and Wales were only lifted in 2012, twenty six years after the disaster\u2019: \u2018Remember Chernobyl: A Continuing Nuclear Tragedy\u2019, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament<\/em>, <https:\/\/www.cnduk.org\/campaigns\/nuclear-power\/remember-chernobyl<\/a>>, accessed 7 October 2015.
\n[9]<\/a> Jordan, Moonrise<\/em>, pp. 39-42.
\n[10]<\/a> \u00a0\u2018US troops led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in coalition with the UK and other nations. [. . .]\u00a0British forces peaked at 46,000 during the invasion phase and then fell away year on year to 4,100 in May 2009 when the UK formally withdrew from Iraq\u2019: \u2018Iraq War in Figures\u2019, BBC News<\/em>, 14 December 2011, <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-middle-east-11107739<\/a>>, accessed 7 October 2015. UK involvement in the Afghanistan War (in which around 140,000 UK troops served) ran from the start of the conflict in 2001 until the formal end of \u2018British combat operations in the country\u2019 in October 2014: \u2018UK Ends Afghan Combat Operations\u2019, BBC News<\/em>, 26 October 2014, <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-29776544<\/a>>, accessed 7 October 2015.
\n[11]<\/a> John Redmond, Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry<\/em> (Bridgend: Seren, 2013), p. 14.
\n[12]<\/a> Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny<\/em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.<\/p>\n

Extract from work on Meirion Jordan\u2019s Moonrise: War and Conflict – PDF version<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dr Matthew Jarvis [In this extract I discuss aspects of Meirion Jordan\u2019s debut volume, Moonrise (2008), which was shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Best First Collection prize.] As \u2018Home, 1919\u2019 might suggest,[1] and as both W. S. Milne and David Wheatley observed in reviews,[2] war is a significant thread within Moonrise. Indeed, Milne argues … Continue reading “Extract from work on Meirion Jordan\u2019s Moonrise: War and Conflict”<\/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-2143","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9R2R9-yz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2143","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=2143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2246,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2143\/revisions\/2246"}],"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=2143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}