Stowaway - A Levantine Adventure — A Levantine Adventure

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Taith farddonol gyfoethog, ddychmygus gan Richard Gwyn, cyn-enillydd Llyfr y Flwyddyn yn yr iaith Saesneg, sef cyfres o gerddi yn portreadu troeon trwstan y cymeriad canolog sy'n wrthbwynt i Ulysses, â'i leisiau a'i hunaniaethau yn cyfnewid wrth oedi ym mhorthladdoedd dwyreiniol Môr y Canoldir.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Stowaway is a richly imagined poetic journey by previous Wales Book of the Year winner Richard Gwyn. The book revolves around a series of poems about misadventures of the central anti-Ulysses figure, but shifts voices and identities as we stop at port cities or 'Islands, Islands, each with its secrets' in the eastern Mediterranean.

Dosbarthu

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. Following several years in London, he spent a decade travelling on and around the Mediterranean, much of it recorded in his award-winning memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast . He is the author of three previous collections of poetry and three novels. Both his fiction and poetry are widely translated. In recent years he has travelled extensively in Latin America, resulting in the publication of The Other Tiger , his translations of Spanish American poetry (Seren, 2016). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Cardiff University

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Richard Gwyn’s fourth collection of poetry documents the lived, transformative experience of travelling. Stowaway takes us on a journey through time and place, focusing on one expansive region, the Levant. We journey throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia and witness aspects of historical events, including the fall of Byzantium, the Greco-Turkish War, and the emergence of Daesh . Here, several figures appear: a semi-divine Stowaway, a maker of golems, a poet, and a reckless traveller, among others. These shapeshifting ciphers make the collection simultaneously authentic and mythic. The ‘Stowaway’ sequence is particularly striking in this respect; Gwyn’s take on a semi-divine character familiar from Greek myth (though never fully identifiable) is both strange and irresistible. The Stowaway is supernatural, simultaneously divine and demonic, wise and foolish. He learns from living as a human but his perspective is limited. He fails and falls to earth (and the ocean) like Icarus. His first appearance recalls both Greek mythology and Hans Christian Anderson’s little mermaid: 'His appearance made of him the sea’s orphan, naked as he was; his violet eyes, a garland of seaweed draped around his neck.' (‘Stowaway I’) The speaker’s authoritative third-person narrative addresses the Stowaway’s newly-experienced, ‘palpable’ shame. ‘[H]e had lost the gift of speech’, we are told. His vulnerability and power are held together in those strange ‘violet eyes’, which also contain the silent suggestion of the ‘viole[n]t’. His crewmates both recognise him and fail to see his true form. Indeed, Stowaway is increasingly concerned with war and violence. When the melancholy traveller in ‘Taking root’ becomes aware of a ‘terrible conclusion’, we are reminded of his culpability: 'But he knows that on the horizon hovers a terrible conclusion to all that he’s contrived to build.' (‘Taking root’) The Levantine of this poem is a particularly sinister incarnation of the figure. As the previous poem, a dramatic monologue entitled ‘The Spice Markets of Antioch’, reveals, this speaker is monstrous. His building of a life (a family, more than one business empire) in ‘Taking root’ is predicated on theft and murder. Gwyn’s shift to a third-person narrative here allows for both sadness and cynicism as this knowledge of past and subsequent events is realised. This is continued in the following prose poem, which documents the exact moment and place of the ‘terrible conclusion’: ‘On the Quay: Smyrna, 13th September 1922’. Here, Gwyn details atrocities. Meanwhile, our monstrous Levantine becomes the sole survivor through sheer slipperiness. A Levantine, as ‘Taking root’ reminds us, is ‘a rootless individual who takes root wherever he finds himself’. Such an individual resembles the figure of the travelling poet, in that he involves himself – albeit briefly – in the lives of the people and places he encounters on his journey. The central contradiction of travelling seems to be that the traveller either knows himself and is lost, or knows where he is but not exactly who he is. ‘I try to remember who I am in this account’, the speaker says in ‘Worker’s Hostel’. This creates a curious distancing, particularly when the traveller’s body is afflicted by injury and illness (in ‘Hospital Stay’, for instance). The sick body is a fragile, cumbersome thing. The traveller must survive it. Paradoxically belonging nowhere and everywhere, the traveller in all his incarnations is a self-conscious, ironic and lonely figure. Overall, Gwyn’s Stowaway is multifaceted and complex, giving us no easy answers for the questions it raises over the ethical and cultural implications of such geographical adventuring. Prefaced by quotations from Cavafy, Brodsky, and Mansel, and peppered with intertextual allusions throughout, this collection is steeped in literary heritage as much as history. This creates both familiarity – all places and people, all journeys, have fundamental similarities – and distance. The figure of the poet, preoccupied as he is with the writing of experience as much as the experiencing of it, is presented as both flawed and as compelling as the other travellers who appear here.