Writing Beer, Drinking Poetry by Gwil James Thomas

A fun, rough around the edges (i.e. inconsistent use of punctuation) poetry chapbook that looks at intoxication and sobriety, shagging around and self-reflecfion, travelling and slowly becoming comfortable with the self…

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I carried this small chapbook with me on my recent trip to Ontario, Canada, but although it was in my pocket (making it literally rough around the edges, as in dog-eared, as in slightly damaged) as I took a many hours car ride along the shore of Lake Erie from the construction site of the Gordie Howe International Bridge that crosses one of Canada’s many wet stretches of its only land border, back to Toronto, rather than reading this poetry collection I instead continued slogging through Babel – see my thoughts on that disappointingly executed great idea here…

Writing Beer, Drinking Poetry was also in my pocket as I took a pleasant little sojourn with my lover around the Toronto Islands, one of my favourite public parks in the world (that I’ve visited – I have no opinions on any parks I haven’t been in) and on this occasion much quieter than in the height of Summer, so tho it wasn’t suitable for nude bathing/reading, there were a HUGE number of migrating birds flapping and flying and landing and launching from the water on all sides, which was a fun, natural, Springtime thing to witness. There were also some tiny snakes, which I DIDN’T get excited about or scared of AT ALL. AT ALL.

Though the trip was mainly spent sprinting between various appointments with friends and family members of my lover, I did manage to grab a couple of hours one evening to live the kind of life evoked by the title of Gwil James Thomas’ pamphlet, during which I sat alone at the bar of Queen Mother Cafe and enjoyed a couple of bizarrely large “small plates”, a slightly too large martini and a perfectly sized better-than-mediocre orange wine while reading some beautiful literature.

This is the pose, the mode, of Writing Beer, Drinking Poetry: Being somewhere you don’t usually exist, with words and some kind of intoxicating bevvy in hand.

Dim lights, piped music, grungy decor and bartenders who are clearly a couple of tequilas deep before 8:00 p.m.

It’s a mode I also like to exist in…

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This is engaging and fun poetry.

More concerned with emotionality and personal growth and narrative than with all that intellectual crap that I don’t really enjoy but often forms the backbone of too much of the poetry I have been reading recently…

It’s poetry where people move and are moved, where people have moved and people have been moved… Energy and excitement, exuberance and hedonism, regret and… and… and…

(I saw an interesting thread on “X” today actually about this, how the prevalence of academese in poetry is a direct result of the smallness of the poetry market and how it ends up being dominated by the books chosen by academics (often written by academics!) to set on university reading lists. It’s a theory that sadly makes sense. Link here, but don’t be surprised if it has disappeared. That thread also linked to this article related to the topic, but I haven’t read that as I don’t have time for that, who does???)

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The highlight for me here was a piece called ‘Peaks’, which is a narrative-ish poem about attending a DIY punk gig at the top of a Spanish mountain (or hill, maybe?).

The language and description is simple yet evocative, blunt yet achingly clear… An optimism about the joys and the pleasures to be found in life yet acknowledging that gentle melancholy one feels when living through a moment that you know may (or will!) turn out to be a highlight of your life:

it / seemed / truer than / ever / that once / you reach / any peak / in life it’s / also / a long way / back to / the / bottom.

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Elsewhere, there are pieces on one night stands,  on memories of watching a drunk parent make post-pub cheese on toast (sorry, rarebit), on sobriety, on reading Bukowski and, as mentioned, lots about travel and exploration and a sense of freedom.

It’s a fun, short, selection, with most of the poems featuring an immediacy and a clarity to their paciness which makes the collection perhaps feel even zippier and shorter than it is!

Worth a look!

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