Leon de Kock
The Road Out by Dan Wylie (Snailpress, R34)
Dan Wylie is one of those hopeless romantics whose CVs include, as a matter of necessity, extended detours into solitary, footloose travelling, shunting, ship- crewing and intermittent writing. Eventually these voyagers return to one of the points of departure, get a job teaching or working on a newspaper, and turn the journey inward. In Wylie’s case, The Road Out is decidedly a road back into the self.
This is evident from a key poem in Wylie’s collection, called Secretly. Here the poet confesses that he keeps “searching for the gate out of the garden”, the site of both his enchantment and his confinement.
The garden, with its tangles of bougainvillea hooking the poet’s history in its “tendrils and thorns”, is the individual imagination, that close, rotting place with its ever-changing borders and delightful recesses – a place of beckoning but also of entrapment.
Drawing on the fairy-tale archetype, Wylie asks: “and if I were to find a green door,/ and turn the rusted key?” He realises that he would then “tramp”from ocean to ocean, beating at the staves of the sky, looking for the stairwell back to myself, there being no other landfall, or measure, or wealth.
Some of the delight in reading Wylie’s verse is precisely the extravagant deployment of metaphor, often seemingly for its own sake, and the sudden, disconcerting turns from metaphor into literality, a wonderful technique when it works.
His is the kind of writing persona that seems to exist by imagining every lived moment as a moment of telling – life as narration. Hence, walking down the road, “I slouch towards work/ across jacarandas’ violent aftermath/ where jacketed bees rifle the limp pockets.”
It is an observing voice which seeks out violent conjunctions of inner feeling and exterior description: “In the garrulous plumbing of stacked apartments/ a thousand versions of the past shudder and hiss” (Research in Maritzburg).
Why, one may well ask, should anyone read this? Why should the navel-gazing of a former Zimbabwean now turned English lecturer in Grahamstown interest anyone?
My answer is: for the sheer selfish pleasure of the pyrotechnics in his lyrical description of conditions. The conditions themselves hardly matter (ending a love affair, loving older women, looking at gannets, various reflections on the condition of an inner life).
Lyrical poetry about the interiority of an “I” which, if successful, resonates within the inner lives of others, has had a very bad press in this country. Yet the “I” voice is widespread and quite normal in the poetry of other English-speaking cultures where lyrical utterance has been less the subject of prescription and surveillance than in South Africa.
The condition, of course, is that the inner voice must be bridged in language which is able to lead readers into a kind of recognition which is also a shifting – a momentary sense of being taken back into, but away from oneself.
This is the delight of good poetry, a negligible but exquisite thing. Wylie’s poems occasionally niggle, and they’re not uniformly brilliant. That’s because he lives dangerously as a poet, and I like that.
Leon de Kock co-edited The Heart in Exile, an anthology of recent South African poetry, published by Penguin