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FOLLOWING THE WHALE
Falling ForA Dolphin I leathcote Williams (('ape £4.05)
This" slim book by the author ol‘ ll'lm/e.\'u!im1 is a ioyl'ul account in yerse ol the meeting ol a man and a dolphin. In a remote corner ol south-west Ireland. Williams seeks out his hermit dolphin. so-called; and clad in wet-suit. I‘lippers and mask. he engages in a close encounter with this mysterious sea-creature with its big brain. wide smile and amiable disposition. "l'wo air-breathing mammals Side by side: ()ne blinkered. uncoordinated And cluttered with plastic accessories; The other in careless control. .-\ wide-eyed Virtuoso . . .'
They play together and attempt to communicate —— the dolphin making a better show of it than the man. And Williams describes the feeling that grips him titan ancient bond with this
DREAMING SPIRES, OR THE AMERICAN DREAM
The Foreign Student Philippe Labro ((‘ollins {I l.‘)5 ) The American campus in the mid-Stls: a .slick. image-conscious whirl of ritual. competition and taboos. played out against the growing beat ol rock 'n’ roll and purring Buicks. Into this kills a young l’arisian student. Iinyeloped in a world both magical and alien. he struggles to become a part ol' the college clique. using ingenuity and a lair dose ol‘(iallic charm. .-\ year later. he hitch-hikes into the ('olorado sunset. abrim with worldly and wise rel'lections. leaying behind a hopeless. illicit all'air with a black girl and a record ol'straight academic ‘.-\‘s.
Simply and sensuoust written. l.abro'.s highly autobiographical story sharply eyokes the era ol' Fats Domino and I‘ilyls Presley. ol corsages and sale-dates. Seen through the sharp-witted eyes of a youngster out to make the most ol eyery snatched moment. America's narcissistic culture is thrown into
BLWING HT AND com
The release at the emotions, love in particular, dominates A Dancing Innocence (Macdonald Publishers, £6.95), Tessa Ranslord‘s sixth collection of poems and her most autobiographical. These are timeless poems but not, says Tessa, out of step with theirtime: ‘the best poetry is contemporary and will always speak to any age’. Perhaps the most personal poem, she contesses, is ‘The Dhobi‘s Dog’ in which she compares her ‘lndian sell’ and her Scottish manitestation. The tension between the two is, she says, ‘what makes me a poet and dilticultto relate to, a bit at a mixture'. India is warmth, lreedom, expressiveness, cross-culture, the
meeting at extremes but, ‘In Scotland I Iroze: hands, feet, nose,/ in thick uneasy clothes at dour boarding school:/ a wind-resistant, dismal, stern, redoubtable, grey-stone-wall liIe exemplified by rule,/ embarrassed to embrace, weep, laugh, kisszlwasl otthis race? from such a gene pool?’
The poem asks where the poet belongs, a constant quest in Tessa’s increasingly impressive oeuvre, and one she is yet to resolve. She admits that ‘particular interests might change but yourthemes remain the same‘. At times the collection reads like a memorial to her ‘gurus': Rilke, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, John McMurray, William Blake, Tagore, Teilhard de Chardin, Simone Weil, Homer, Keats. . . have they remained constant or has anyone been scored all heeras card list?
‘I’ve dropped anyone specilically connected with the church', she says ruetully and rather ironically Ior one whose own poetic vocation has been compared to a religion. Their substitutes are unlikely bedtellows, ‘nuclear physicists and the SuIis‘. But poetry, like the Lord, moves in mysterious ways its magic to pertorm and whenthe undoubted intellectualism is stripped from A Dancing Innocence it is the emotional powerthat remains, honest, unflinching and painful, the Indian governing the Scot. (Alan Taylor)
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an'tique prints and maps for presents.
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The List 9 — 22 December 1988 75