The Knight of the White Sun of Avalon which celebrates the Gaelic language and Gaelic culture comes at a good time, as Alex Salmond, first minister for Scotland has recently invested £2.7 million pounds to promote this dying language. The poems in these collection look at Celtic culture focusing on a wide variety of mythical figures including Banshees, Fairies, Pixies, Unicorns, Sirens and Angels. Pagan, Christian and Greek mythologies come together in the collection which seems to always bring its focus back to Scottish or Irish folk lore.
The mixture of influences which went into the creation of this collection is certainly fascinating. I particularly liked the way in which Edgar Alan Jones mixed the mythical with the modern day referring to ‘Gold and Diamonds’ which are traditional fairy tale fair and comparing them to dollars. He seems to be arguing that the age of mythology and magic is not yet dead even in this day and age.
There were, however, several things I disliked about this collection, although this may have been because this is not the sort of poetry I am accustomed to reading. Firstly I found that many of the poems seemed to be over sentimental. The first poem Alyssa describes a woman as ‘the snow-lily, the lament of the roe,’ while these images in themselves are beautiful I felt that these similes lacked the striking originality I found in the other poetry collection I have been reviewing. Edgar Alan Jones is a poet who is certainly capable of originality, as seen in his poem Athena, where he describes ‘fairy-eyes, cracked blue’ yet I didn’t feel that he displayed enough of this originality throughout the collection.
I also disliked the way women were depicted as passive yet pure, or unpure, as in The Harris Queen where Jones tells us ‘I have lost the love of the Harris queen’ going on to say two lines later ‘So now I lie by the Red sun of Barra, with a Woman unclean.’ Although I realise that this was a reflection of the time which Jones is trying to depict, I disliked the seemingly misogynistic tone of voice. It is however, possible that in some of these poems Jones is parodying the heroes of folk lore, such as the Arthurian knights, and if this were the case, then I would find the poems made more sense to me as a modern female reader.
Yet these criticisms may stem from this not being the sort of collection I would normally choose to read. It was brave of Jones to explore Celtic mythology so openly and honestly and this should be applauded. Culturally this collection is probably quite significant as a contribution to the revival of interest in Gaelic. Although I found faults with this collection my friends little boy was enchanted by it, finding it magical, accessible and fascinating, although it might be important to note that not all the poems are suitable for small children.
I think my favourite poem was Jaguar Sun as it seemed to break away from the style of the rest of the collection. It is at once a conventional love poem, yet a poem with a very unconventional layout. The way in which the phrases are broken by semi colons give the poem a natural flow almost becoming what it is describing, ‘she is an incantation; a movement in the wild’. The poem too is like an incantation, yet a strikingly innocent one, this innocence perhaps being added by the lack of capital letters.
I liked the simplicity of many of these poems as well. In some ways the collection was reminiscent of Blake. I think these poems may have lost something by not actually being in book-form when I got to read them. I can imagine them with beautiful hand crafted illustrations like the ones which appeared in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.
I would like to read more by Jones but without the sentimentality and misogyny which mars, for me, what would otherwise be, an excellent collection of poetry.
Hope Estella Whitmore
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