The High Window on The End

The End by Gareth Writer-Davies.  £5.99. Arenig Press. 978-1999849146

Review by Jill Munro

In choosing what could be the spectacularly ill-advised collection title of ‘The End’ (‘God was I glad to reach …..’), Writer-Davies has set out his stool in terms of bravery before the reader has even opened the first page. There is, from the title, the worrying implication this could be yet another ‘misery read’, a simple dissection of a crushing diagnosis and its aftermath. However, the sun’s rays and blue skies illuminating an otherwise gloomy front cover (Cwmyoy church and graveyard, photographed by the author) reflect the contents extremely well – there is hope, despite the knowledge of the fate which will befall us all. Yes, there are poems of the diagnosis of serious illness and premature death, but there is also humour (albeit sometimes black) and levity to ensure the reader doesn’t get pulled into an existential fit of depression. Writer-Davies manages the perennial juxtaposition of the two faces of drama – comedy and tragedy – with a deft hand throughout.

The opening poem ‘Christmas Lights’ sets the scene for much of the style of later poems – spare, brutal yet with a softening humour to offset bleak reality. It is a well selected opener with the final lines of ‘please don’t send death/in his fat red suit’ – a bon mot that typifies The End. The tragic timing of the poet’s diagnosis when all around are enjoying ‘… the white/explosion of light’ at Christmastime is heart-wrenching but understated in the ‘less is more’ style Writer-Davies employs.

The poet’s relationship with religion is tested to the full by his diagnosis. Request for Prayers and Fixed Price Service illustrate both the desperation but sly humour of someone seeking God’s (any God’s) assistance with saving him from his morbid fate. A congregation are called upon to act ‘as arbitrator/pray/to save me from the incinerator’.

Poems follow on the boredom of dealing with illness (Torpor) and the need to be alone to reconcile oneself with dark thoughts (Bones and Thought Alone Can Make Monsters) which throw light on the experience negotiated by the poet. Writer-Davies removes himself, becoming an almost Audenesque dispassionate observer, when under the surgeon’s knife, which renders him like a Bird in the poem of the same name ‘to scavenge from gore and guts/enough/decay/to turn tears into sanguine flights of hope’ and also in The Anatomical Man – ‘upon the sloppy viscera/I look down’. The poet often utilises the one-word line – placing weight in just the right positioning, on many occasions, of such lines.

Trees and the natural world provide solace to many facing their own exit. Writer-Davies uses trees as a leitmotif, bringing an expression of his own desire for a greater longevity (with two poems in the collection bearing the same title – Tree). In Ash the likely reduction of his body to ‘…five pounds and three ounces’ (which is the average weight of cremated bodily ashes) is contrasted with the place he wishes to be buried ‘in the roots of the ash tree/that each year grows new/a prodigious canopy of three hundredweight’.  He portrays almost a jealousy of longevity in arboriculture.

The penultimate poem in the collection brings hope and the turning of a corner as summer comes (That Summer) when ‘there were vitamins and sin; the sun was a furnace’. This, and the final poem which really couldn’t have been called anything else but The End, show a man touched by the threat of death who, having taken time to adjust to what has happened to him, intends to ‘take/a breath and press play’. Writer-Davies has sucked us into the reality of his situation in The End, using his death-brush to reflect a light for the living, without sentimentality but with a healthy dose of humour which prevents blackness descending. This reviewer, for one, is glad Writer-Davies has survived to fight another day, potentially write many more poems and, that this is not, The End.

Jill Munro’s first collection Man from La Paz was published in 2015 by Green Bottle Press. She won the Fair Acre Press Pamphlet Competition 2015 with The Quilted Multiverse, has been short-listed for the Bridport Prize and long-listed three times for the National Poetry Competition. Jill has been awarded a Hawthorden Fellowship for 2018.