We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we returned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind.

I may at some point review this in more depth but I thought that if I didn’t get this down now it might never happen.

James

Surely one of the most important poets of his generation being expert craftsman, innovator and wordsmith it was with warm welcome that I picked up Matthew Welton’s second collection with the super long title We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we returned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind. The collection continues Welton’s pursuit for the ‘correct’ use of the word and its antithesis in finding countless ‘correct’ meanings. More regularly than in his first collection, the rich and poetic The Book of Matthew, he uses systems poetry as method and vehicle to discuss imagery and choice.

We needed coffee opens with the sequence Virtual Airport; a melancholy prose poem in 21 sections that highlights a connection in the emotions of the sterility of the airport experience with the essential, biological lonely truth of never being ‘connected’ in a relationship whether the relationship be bad or not. It’s a beautiful lullaby also; exploring the different lights and colours, both artificial and natural. But the sequence is in essence about various emotional states of numbness people find themselves in without knowing why. This isn’t to say depression. It’s like Satre says in Nausea: ‘Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. A peculiar moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable.’ Part of section 3 reads: ‘The light from the windows is like a kind of weariness’ and it continues ‘the blurry coloured signboards show nothing that makes much sense.’ This movement from simile to metaphor convinces us of the overall description. We can see the same method applied throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. And the similarities don’t stop there. Consider paragraph one in section 11: ‘The chairs are the colour of blue chocolate-papers. The departures boards is unreadable. The ceilings are low’. Metaphor moves into statement.

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