Members of the Portsmouth Poetry Society joined together last Thursday at Trinity Methodist Church, Southsea, with family and friends of Brian Wells, who died earlier this year, aged 81.
The readings, music and tributes marked the launch of his book of poems, Opus 9, which had been produced in time for him to see just before he died. It was both a moving and fitting event to remember Brian who worked in visual arts as well as being a poet.
The book brings together a number of elements in his work, his interest in challenging forms, war poetry, ancient lore and an awareness of tradition.
Time allows no time is one of a number of his cyclic poems here in which five haiku begin with the last line of the previous until the last line of the poem is also the first. Typically Brian in its insistence on stopping the moment but also in its observance of a complementary shape to do so within.
Unmoving but curious describes an encounter with a deer in woodland that 'swiftly disappeared',
its deer-shaped space leaving
a leafy hollow of silence
Four poems on The Four Horsemen are grim encounters, accepting no comfort in the face of Death and his three unforgiving friends. Death Speaks begins,
Revere my sable panolpy
and rictus of my skull,
for I ride a tireless stallion
unsleeping through your night.
and there is no relief in the next four pages as Famine, Pestilence and War have their say, either.
The darkest moments are in this central section. While Autumn and a sense of endings are thematic to these last poems, it is elsewhere captured with a more relenting serenity although never without a suggestion of regret or loss. More than anything we have the expression of Brian's gentle humanity, his modest sensitivity and considered economy with words.
The feeling for tradition leads him, quite deliberately I think, to use some antiquated phrasing. Although clearly aware of and interested in modernist practice, he is more 'school of' an A.E. Housman or Ivor Gurney.
In an expertly edited book, Shattered Trees is a further statement of the horror of WW1 before ending on the perfect note with Old Winchester Hill, a love poem mainly to his wife, Sheila, but also to a favourite place. I can't think of another poet whose poems are so recognizably and sincerely their own.