Velocities and Drifts of Wind
by Geoffrey Winch
71 poems, 93 pages
Publisher: Dempsey and Windle
Price: £11.00
ISBN: 978-1-913329150
To order: www.dempseyandwindle.com
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Since 1992 Geoffrey Winch’s poetry has appeared regularly in journals and anthologies in the UK, US and online. Purple Patch magazine awarded him the accolade of ‘The UK’s Best Small Press Poet’ in 2011. He is an active member of a number of poetry groups in West Sussex, England where he has lived since 2001. This is his sixth collection.
Taking inspiration from Keats’ Sleep and Poetry, Winch’s poems take us on a journey through landscape, art and history to record our changing world. A sizeable number of poems in this volume are drawn from the world of art. Israeli sculptor Zadok Ben David, Scottish painter E. A. Walton, British sculptor Stephen Cox and American painter Edward Hopper are just some of the artists represented here.
A number of ekphrastic poems caught my attention. First off, is Winch’s poem ‘The City’ based on the painting of the same name by Fernand Léger. This is a large painting in the Cubist style. Painted immediately in the aftermath of World War I, in a cacophony of brightly coloured geometric shapes, it offers a discordant visual image of urban city life. The artist had a unique fascination with cities and believed they were the key to the future of our modern world. Winch personifies the city as a mother whose children ‘conform to ritual’. Here are the opening stanzas:
She’s industrious: knits warmth
with light; plasticises concrete
and steel, synthesises past
and future – electricity
is alive inside her.
Her central avenue is the key to
her tempo, regulating distances
between corners, boundaries
and measured squares.
Contrast this with ‘Counterpoint’, a poem based on Laura Knight’s painting ‘The Green Sea’ where all is calm off the Cornish coast and two female figures gaze into the sparkling iridescence of the blue-green sea, warmed by the rays of the sun:
blonde and brunette rest upon
a grass-and-rocky cliff’s top
their eyes integrating earth
with blue-sky and sea
Phyllis and Marjorie
on this bright summer’s day
and all the elements singing
in perfect harmony
Reading this poem you can almost smell ‘the warm salty air’ coming off the waves.
Turning to portraiture ‘Sitting Uncomfortably’ is Winch’s ekphrastic response to Henry Lamb’s ‘Portrait of Lytton Strachey’ which is arguably this Australian-born British artist’s most important and famous painting. Strachey was a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of the acclaimed ‘Eminent Victorians’. In his poem, Winch senses that Strachey is ‘convinced he should not be / the centre of attention – so sits uneasily / for the artist’ matching the uncertain weather beyond the window.
In ‘Venus in Kensington Gardens’, Winch describes every detail of Leon Underwood’s painting of the same name with a good dose of humour. Here are the opening stanzas which take us straight into the core of the painting dispensing with any formal introduction (hence the lack of an initial capital on the first word):
they’re perfectly aware
that she’s sitting among them
and she’s wearing no clothes
they look away or pretend
to smoke their cigarettes –
it’s only polite to do so
but the one feigning to read
his newspaper, the one with smoke
in his eyes is taking a sneaky look…
Winch’s poem, ‘Briefly, the Fauves’ concentrates on a specific art movement rather than a particular painting. He describes the Fauvists as ‘colourists of personality….hewers of landscapes, / sea-changers of the seas, / mixing palettes directly on to canvas…’
In the final lines of ‘Yellow Accompaniment’, Winch captures Kandinsky’s own descriptions of what he called ‘keen yellow’ in his book ‘Concerning the Spiritual on Art’: ‘my palette is my piano, and here I start to sing / as the sun begins its morning flight, / as I recall / that citrus tang of you.’
In addition to the poems which are centred on art, Winch writes convincingly of the West Sussex landscape, in particular, of coastal scenes. His poems also move beyond what is local to embrace scenes from other continents which take in America, Russia and Africa. Whether he is writing about walking over a pebbled beach, hearing the sound of a train rumbling through the night, re-imagining the Great Fire of London or listening to a Toccata and Fugue by J. S. Bach, his poetry is well-attuned to the senses and is often far-seeing. Several poems are prose poems and a number are cast in the form of a tanka or haiku. These short poems are effective and engaging. Here is one with which to conclude this review:
Tanka 2
I walk
through the woods
to share my troubles
with the trees:
they whisper sound advice
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