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Poem Of The Week: Return To Newport By Paul Henry

Return to Newport

Our steep terrace drifts up to the moon.
A milkman bows to its doors.
Streetlights droop like Uri Geller spoons.
Strays hide knives in their paws.

A train scans its freight across the town
and into the tunnel of ears,
the tinnitus of a slowly breaking dawn.
This is how love disappears

under cover of dreams, tight-lipped blinds,
with the stretch of a milk thief.
And here is its patched roof, its flaking paint,
its laughter in the eaves.

Paul Henry’s fine poem locks the hidden drama of an urban nightscape into three highly suggestive quatrains. Investing this dreamland with a peculiar surreality, Henry’s gentle rhythms and evocative rhymes, his delicious sense of language’s disposition, is seductive, drawing the reader into the landscape of the town’s dreaming with the transformative brio of his compatriot, Dylan Thomas.

For here, the visible tokens of a town that could be Newport or Llaregubb, or any setting susceptible to the sensory blandishments of poetry, bleed into anthropomorphic indivisibility in holistic metaphors whose presence effects a kind of magic on the scene.

The fracturing of the rhyme in the final stanza is a mirror to disquiet. The disappearance of love, realised in figures of decrepitude - the ‘patched roof’ and ‘flaking paint’ of terminal decline – is mitigated only by the cruel consolation of ‘laughter in the eaves’.

‘Return to Newport’ is taken from As If To Sing, published by Seren (2022)

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