Poetry

Abecedary Poems by Mark Williams (with illustrations by Christodoulos Moisa) Reviewed by Iain Sharp

Abecedary is Mark Williams's first publication and is, I am certain all who have seen the work will agree, to be highly commended for the excellence of its presentation. Particularly remarkable are the fine illustrations by Chris Moisa, a wealth of intricate detail and ingenious visual puns. Mr Moisa's admirable pictures of orgies, bird-bones, one-eyed omnivores, raging figures with lupine heads, mosquitos on nipples are so integral a part of the text that I am perhaps remiss in here dealing only with the eloquent pugnacity of Mr Williams's verse.

Mr Williams lives in Ponsonby and plays monopoly. He also writes poems. Indeed he writes with a vengeance - a vengeance against all the inane, inapt, inutile, inadequate romantacized delusions on, in, and by him fostered, now festered. The battered sensitive' batters back. Abecedary is a fine collection of his blows.

Notable among the pummelled are the father-and-son team (much vaunted in Roman Catholic, Methodist, and Semi-Presbyterian circles) 'Fierce and bearded' Jehova and the sullen Jew'. J. Christ. Amatorial affections, afflictions, affectations also emerge more than slightly bruised. Nor is sciamachy excluded from Mr Williams's pugilistic skills. Shadows of himself are butted.

Hence, 'First Poem' not only inaugurates the volume, but also satirizes the poet's own first adolescent efforts, inspired by

'..."self abuse", pimples

and those ridiculous short pants'

and exposes the absurdity of the familiar stance of Byronic high-school rebel:

'all that bitter arrogance

aimed only to impress disdainful sluts' Such is life, such is love. Redeem the dream. But, as Mr Williams reminds us, 'There is an end to dreams. The dissolution of an affair will most probably occur on 'a very ordinary night' and hearts might not break on cure. Thus while 'awaiting grief or frenzy' one is likely still to notice

'flowers, cigarette butts

and a broken jar...'

Similarly, in 'Act', while engaged in a form of love-making reputedly ecstatic, the poet looking up perceives ... his loved one looking down. Indeed, romantic love is perhaps most successfully communicated by telegram from some distance, 'another land'.

An abecedary is, I am informed, a type of rudimentary learning. Yet Mr Williams detects discrepancy between the rudiments of experience and the time-honoured rudiments of our prolonged miseducation. Between the real and the received ideal drops the bovine excrement. A quotation from B.F.' Skinner appears as the epigraph to the title poem

"... the next step is not to free men from control but to analyze and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed."

In the lay which follows an 'assured, superior, smug schoolmaster contemptuously relates, in unheroic couplets, his extracurricular activities with a grubby, barely pubescent female pupil, as conducted in a Triumph Spitfire sports. And afterwards

'her rape, transformed to True Romance, joins the input of t.v. school, fish-and-chips, state houses, mummy, scones and tea.'

A despondent view, a putrescent vision perhaps, but one admires the poet for the honest statement of his conviction. The undiscerning reader will possibly depart from this small volume haling Mr Williams's guts, but all must concede he has some.