The End, Gareth Writer-Davies
Arenig Press, 2019 £5.99
Open ending
The End is a personal and personalised look at something that will come to us all. It doesn’t deal with the sort of mortality that’s inevitable but distant. It’s a response to an expected end (with a rough idea of how long there is to go).
In fact, it focuses on coming to terms with a grim diagnosis. Through the poems we see the speaker vacillate, often humorously, between questioning, bargaining, acceptance and rage.
Interestingly, we start with a link to birth in the form of ‘Christmas Lights’. This is where the mock-serious bargaining begins:
God
I will try to be good
please don’t send death
in his fat red suit
The pleading tone is maximised by ‘God’ as a melodramatic one-word line and all those earnest words (‘try’, please don’t’).
The poem ‘Request For Prayers’ concludes ‘pray / to save me from the incinerator’. ‘Fixed Price Offer’ sees more bargaining with the deity:
Name your price and I will reflect upon it, in the light of any other
offers received.
As the collection continues, we move from bargains to rage — there’s an entire OPOI to be written about ‘Jericho’ and its anger:
I want to shout
that the fucking coffee made a fucking ring on the table.
There’s one to be written about use of trees, too, but I’d rather skip to, er, the end and concentrate on the final poem, the eponymous ‘The End’ where we close things out with:
take
a breath and press play
That ‘play’ clearly suggests movement forward (rather than ending). What’s also notable is the absence of punctuation, not just in that line but in the publication as a whole. There are almost no full stops in the whole pamphlet. I could only count seven, and two of these were in a cento, so they belonged to someone else. (The other five were in a single poem: ‘Fixed Price Offer’.)
The omission has to be deliberate. Is there really no end? We could infer all kinds of possibilities. But I’m going to hope the lack of full stop is a sign that there’s more to come from Gareth Writer-Davies