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Jane Yeh, The Times Literary Supplement, on The
Invisible Kings
In a prefatory note, David Morley describes
The Invisible Kings as the second section of a cycle that began with 2002’s
Scientific Papers. Readers new to his work, however, will find that The Invisible Kings succeeds as a stand alone volume, offering an introduction to Morley’s special themes
and concerns.
...Morley’s training as a marine
researcher and biologist, which overtly framed Scientific Papers, subtly permeates
his new book, with its many portrayals of the natural world. Snowfinches, redpolls, gall wasps and more populate poems in
which Morley marriesprecise observation to exquisitely musical language to produce work of rigorous beauty. The volume’s
opening poem, “You Were Broken”, is a bravura performance composed of a single sentence that branches out across
four stanzas like the “amazed, massy shade” of the very tree it depicts. The drama of its slow, centuries long
growth amid volcanic rocks, harsh winds and “blights of summer lightning” becomes a narrative of survival against
all odds, a “fabulous tale” as compelling as that of any character from myth or legend.
Morley’s interests, though, range
well beyond nature; his inspirations have included authors from Baudelaire to Brodsky, Montaigne to Milosz, giving his poetry
an unusually international, historically informed outlook. In Mandelstam Variations (1991), a book-length sequence
about Osip Mandelstam, who was persecuted in Stalinist Russia for his writings, Morley considered the nature of political
oppression, torture, exile and captivity. These ideas find their way into the new volume in poems about Paul Celan and Lety
u Pisku, a Nazi concentration camp in the Czech Republic where countless Romani were killed.
Morley’s fondness for complicated
repetitive forms and wordplay (at other times akin to Paul Muldoon’s) is turned to a serious purpose in the latter poem.
In it, Morley creates a disturbing tension between two voices, each of which parrots the other’s words, slightly changed
and in a shifting order, like a pair of distorted echoes. Each of the ghostly, unidentified speakers might be a present-day
visitor, a Romani inmate, a Nazi guard, or a bystander who did nothing - the poem’s power lies in its ambiguity, and
in the way its twinned voices are for ever locked together in history and in death.
At the heart of the collection is a long
narrative poem, “Kings”, which takes Morley’s previous explorations of Romani culture in a new direction.
Written in a mixture of English and Romani, “Kings” is a self-described “fairytale” set in Eastern
Europe during the first third of the twentieth century. Its narrator, a “wise fool”, is a Romani man whoacts as
the go-between for his clan in their dealings with outsiders. He also doublesas another sort of go between, in his role as
the clan’s seer; the spirits of Romani kings visit him in his dreams, foretelling the future. Moving backwards and forwards
in time,the poem tells the story of his life, hismarriage and the tragic slaughter of his wife and tribe.
Freely peppering “Kings”
with Romani words and phrases, Morley invents a hybrid language that not only mirrors its protagonist’s bilingual existence,
but also achieves the level of music in its own right (“lilay” is summer, “len” river): “Seven shire horses wade, their tails whish ice-shell. Last lilay on this len //
we swam a hundred horses”. Though he provides a comprehensive glossary, his introductory note suggests thepoem should
be read “at a canter”, notpainstakingly translated by the reader. Its success is due to the sustained quality
of the writing, which is densely textured and alliterative, formal and incantatory in style, recalling both Seamus Heaney’s
Beowulf and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns: “I invisible, audible, a flume of finches blowing / through the thornfields
at your riding”. “Kings” has a flavour of Homeric epic, as well as of the Divine Comedy (a line of which
forms the volume’s epigraph), a manner that grants suitable gravity to its project - the conjuring of a lost world,
one now rendered almost extinct.
In a lighter, more colloquial vein, Morley
writes elsewhere in The Invisible Kings about growing up in Blackpool, the child
of part-Romani parents. The poems “Finn of the Wiles”, “Smoke, Mirror” and “Fiction” are
bursting with sharp, pithy descriptions and linguistic energy. “Fiction” is especially forceful, half litany,
half confessional. “Fiction was the poached / life history of travelling folk”; “Fiction took the bus to
the store, was allowed / by family law to shoplift”. As Morley piles on the sardonic personifications (“Fiction
was a virgin before marriage, of course”), the poem develops into a skewed self-indictment, or self-portrait: “It’s
hard / quarrelling with Fiction. Because Fiction is you”. As an allegory for any writer’s life, not just Morley’s,
this rings true.
Tim Liardet on The Invisible Kings in The Guardian
All universes are imagined; every memorable poem creates a universe
which is sufficient unto itself and abides by its own laws. David Morley's latest collection, The Invisible Kings, devotes
all of its 80 pages to the creation of such a universe. It is one made up of the conflicts and mythologies of Morley's own
Romany heritage, its various dark gods and underworlds, its norms and constellations and, perhaps above all, its language.
The 43 poems published here achieve a unity that is profoundly organic. The collection's title gives forewarning: it is impossible
to read the word "invisible" without the kings becoming visible; by trying to imagine their invisibility, they come into view.
The strange atmospherics suffuse every page while the balance struck between mystery and disclosure can be breathtaking, never
more so than in "Kings", the epic sequence that forms the collection's centre of gravity: "I dream backwards half my life.
The same snowdrops by the river. / I watch her pick a penèrka of flowers before I speak with her." Such moments led me to
feel that Morley had not so much created a new universe as uncovered one.
Any
universe is bound together by language; and Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness:
kackaràtchi, kàulochìrilo, choochoonya, retchka, kerpèdy are characteristic of the many sweetly struck notes that occur in
a grammar whose graphemes, phonemes and explodents bubble up into a sort of acoustic joy. When I discovered that asanòo mànoosh
was a smiling man I felt the presence of something familiar, something I already knew; reading it, the subtlety of the intonation
became hearable even though I don't speak the language. The gutturals and cadences, with their faint reminiscences of Native
American languages, are never prohibitive. They create the spell within which Morley's universe turns to magic, and led me
to ask whether understanding could exist in phonetics alone. The beauty of these sounds, integrated into the poems, is most
notable in "Kings": "Address your armagànos to the àngelas, asanòo mànoosh. I am sky-drowned, / her white throat calling -
Te Avel Angle Tute Te Avel Angle Tute Te Avel Angle Tute / so like a birdcall [. . .]"
Morley is a generous host. When he inducts us nothing is left
confused. Three pages of assiduous annotations complete the collection; and on occasions a note supports an individual poem
when the mythology being dealt with requires a little more, as in the case of "Bears": "PawPaw and Paprika, two great bears
of the Egyptians / of Lancashire, the Witches' County, Chohawniskey Tem / who, when our camp plucked its tents and pulled
out its maps, / walked steadily with the wagons, ambling, always ambling". The ensuing note supplies the geography. I have
to say I am usually deterred by poetry that requires further illumination beyond the borders of its own text. But Morley's
notes are less freight than signposts to a critical path. They make each poetic statement convincing; they add to the authenticity.
Dante mapped an underworld in terza rima. In order to map his,
Morley's principal vehicle is the long line of loose blank verse: lines of 17, 18 even 25 syllables are not uncommon in this
book and account for its alacrity of vision: "My kings lie about me. My queens lie about me. They are piled about me. / Shoodrò,
they are limb-light. They have been hiding here all day from me. / / Why was I late, who am never late; why am I behind who
must herald them. / Their heads are the most fine gold, their locks black as a raven's. / / They are beautiful. They are terrible
as with banners. / I see the faces of children. I crawl to a willow. I want to touch the one thing / that is alive".
Balancing lines as long as these, from part III of "Kings", without
sacrificing music is an act of hubris. So many syllabic units threaten to confuse the differentia of poetry and prose; almost
miraculously, Morley keeps the whole book this side of prose. His long lines suit their subject by following the post-Hughesian
trick of evoking physical and metaphysical truths with a matter-of-factness which suggests that everything they talk about
is to be expected in this universe.
Les Murray has written of Morley's "refraction of the familiar",
and without doubt this book refracts expectation. But more than this, it familiarises the unfamiliar to such an extent that
by the end you know you have visited a real place and recognised its essential binding features. One of Morley's central achievements
is to bring its strangeness close to our own world, as in "Finn of the Wiles": "The Finn was lolling over some nicked bike,
/ or a poor rich kid's skinny moped". The everyday drifts in and out of sight and of earshot along the way, but every time
it does so the next shift in scale takes you further and further out. In the end, the sounds these poems make are the afterlife
of this rare and beautiful book.
Sarah Crown, poetry editor of The
Guardian writing in Poetry Review Winter 2007/08 on The Invisible
Kings
The Invisible Kings is a formal masterclass, moving fluently from blank verse to pantoum to shape poem and back
again, and demonstrating a scrupulous, at times almost academic, attention to language. The collection draws its focus from
Morley’s Romany heritage, which he mines through a series of haunting tales of kings, curses, wanderlust and rejection,
the sumptuous strangeness of the stories amplified by the Romany words with which his poems are laden. In clumsier hands such
exotic freight might prove alienating, but Morley embeds words in lines with a delicate syllabic precision, making music out
of difference. His profound, almost tactual awareness of the role sound  plays in meaning is particularly evident in the central sequence, ‘Kings’, in which the Romani is given free rein.
The Roma’s history of persecution is distilled here in the story of one man, a seer who loses both wife and adopted
tribe to the depredations of the Gajo (non-Romani). The dreamlike atmosphere created by a fantastical geography of horizons,
dawns and nameless cities is enhanced by the ghost of the alliterative form which hovers over the poem, tangling with the
rhymes and deepening the evocation of a semi-mythical past. “I beg of you,” the poem begins, “believe
in the Kings, the blacksmiths’ tribe, the Boorgoodjìdes / made up of the tamar, true twisters of sàstra, sras or srastrakàni”,
the alliterations lilt bearing the reader lightly forward, effacing the problems of comprehension.
The
internal coherence also produced by the alliterative form is enhanced by Morley’s technique of grounding his arcane
world through a focus on essentials: trees, stones, water, light. Fancy is still present, however, in the form of birds that
dart and flutter through the pages, their freedom both an echo and model for the Roma. He achieves here for birds what Alice
Oswald did for rivers, as in ‘Dotterel’ where his deft manipulation of indentations and linebreaks captures the
bright flit of their “reflux of wings, freshets, light”, or the sublime ‘Goldcrests’, which deserves
full quotation:
She
sings light, he sings lightly, from the pine-needled nestcup.
He shifts lightly; she shifts light, among the burrs in the nestcup.
How slightly, how very slight, the sky shrinks to their egg shell hue.
How slight, how very slightly, light wakes from their egg shell hue.
He sees lightly, she sees light, in the pine-needle dark.
She sang light, he sang lightly, among the cedars in the dark.
The
recherché flicker of wordplay at once underlines the profound difference in the male and female roles (though their interdependence
is revealed in the repetitions at the lines’ ends) and catches the fine modulations in the birds’ song. A model
of formal and linguistic subtlety, the poem yields effect and implication out of proportion to its brevity.
It’s
a chancy enterprise, this collection. The stateliness, the unashamed poeticalness, the grandiose natural imagery, not to mention
the wealth of Roma words – all risk accusations of pretension. But Morley carries it off by committing utterly to his
project, successfully conjuring a vanished world and granting his readers access to the experience of a vanishing people.
Les Murray on The Invisible Kings, Carcanet Press, 2007
‘David
Morley takes us on a voyage to the other half of his heritage. In a serial masterpiece of verse, he shows us a life intimate
with our own, yet more deeply Other than romantic fairytales or even authentic music from Spain and Eastern Europe had suggested it might be. He holds our world up to a language mostly kept secret up to now;
the refraction of the familiar is dizzying yet often moving’.
Michael Schmidt on The Cambridge Introduction
to Creative Writing, CUP, 2007
‘No writer–teacher is better qualified than David Morley to lift the veils on the discipline of Creative
Writing. He writes with all his feelings and a richness of metaphor that is beguiling for the general reader, the general
writer, and the teacher. The exercises are inspired, growing out of the author's profound understanding of the inviolable
connection between good writing and good and various reading. This book will be an inspiration and tool for teachers and writers
who, like Morley, understand that the development of writing involves acquiring skills, and that inborn genius benefits from
training and understanding
Michael Caines in Poetry Review, on Scientific Papers, Carcanet Press 2002
‘As a practitioner of both kinds of literature, and a teacher of both scientific and creative
writing at Warwick University, Morley is well-placed to judge of such matters. The reader in turn, should approach
this book in the spirit of Mandelstam’s scholar-gardener…Morley’s enquiries produce numerous reasons to
read this excellent book’.
Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of The Independent,
on The Gift, edited by David Morley
‘I can think of no precedent of The Gift
in its scope, nor in its involvement with NHS workers. It also gives a glimpse of David Morley’s projects for the Warwick
Writing Programme, which aim to bring together literary and scientific ways of seeing. His anthology pays a rich homage to
the art of medicine—and makes a compelling case for the medicine of art’.
Mike Phillips, Chair of Judges on Phoenix New Writing,
edited by David Morley, winner of the Arts Council Raymond Williams Prize
‘Phoenix New Writing is an engaging
and accessible book. It is at times funny, occasionally poignant and tragic, yet never pretentious. It creates a vivid picture
of Coventry life through a variation of style, language and form, displaying some talented new
writing.’
Les Murray on Mandelstam Variations
‘David Morley has written a novel as multitudinous and as tragic as those of the Russian masters, but it is a
novel about a poet in the very worst of modern times, so he has stripped away the prose. Extremis becomes essence.’
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