This book of William Mallinson’s poetry and prose, and a small amount of writings by some family members, is a vehicle to demonstrate that only history—in its purest form, the past—exists. Bowing to Oscar Wilde’s dictum that most people are other people (even if they do not know it), its comments on each poem, article or story lead to the book’s conclusion that the present cannot exist, since it becomes the past as it happens, while the future is only in the mind. Many of the poems and stories were written on impulse, inspired by various events, but also, subliminally, by writers and poets such as Henry Williamson, Ted Hughes and George Orwell. The book briefly evaluates the circumstances that led to each poem and story. Refreshingly, it avoids textual analysis and categorisation, believing that poetry does not lend itself to analysis, since it is essentially personal, and thus connected to the heart which, whatever the opinions of certain psychologists, can never be encapsulated in their neatly packaged models, even if they use the word ‘psyche’ instead of ‘heart’. The same applies to some of the prose pieces.
Whether we are reading the author’s ‘Trout’, ‘Dolphin’, ‘Frog’, ‘Horse’, ‘Octopus’ or ‘The Au-pair’, the reader will be able to escape from the stiflingly overworked and stilted ‘post-modernist’ literature that has assailed our natural sensitivities to the point of killing them.
Above all, the book is a foray into free writing, and will take the reader back to childhood through the imagery evoked and strip off the layers of self-deception and falsehoods that have accumulated like dust and mud.
