Review - Bob Beagrie - Romanceros
Bob Beagrie is an award-winning poet and the author of more than a dozen books and six pamphlets. His work has been translated into Finnish, Estonian, Gaelic, Danish, Urdu, Spanish, Karelian, and Swedish. Bob is also a playwright, the co-director of Ek Zuban Press and Literature Development, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University and one-half of the experimental music and spoken word collaboration Project Lono.
Romanceros was written over a period of 4 years.
Having published Bob’s poems myself (over at The Fig Tree), and having an interest in the Spanish Civil War thanks to my borderline obsession with the poet Miguel Hernández (see my five part series on this blog) I was very much looking forward to this collection.
The Civil War itself is historically important not just in Spain (where it still echoes down in their politics) but across the world, as it took place just before the Second World War and was a conflict between the left wing Republicans and the right wing Nationalists. The man who emerged as the Nationalist leader was the fascist General Franco, and he linked up with Hitler and Mussolini to get assistance with battle plans and air strikes, infamously at Guernica and Alicante. The UK and France adopted a non-intervention stance, failing to see that Germany and Italy were using this as a dry run. Socialists in the UK did realise what was happening - in Cable Street, London, they fought off Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and, contrary to the Government’s wishes, volunteered to fight for the Republican cause in Spain along with men and women from many other countries. These poems reflect the stories and experiences of the courageous and principled people who fought for the International Brigades.
I tried to approach these poems analytically, but it was difficult because the poems tear at your emotions from the start. They are technically excellent, but it’s not long before you stop worrying about that and just drink in the images. This is a collection of war poems that point out the horrors that the volunteers faced but if you ever get lulled into thinking “why did they go?” you are pulled up very quickly by the brilliant poem Terror Blanco. But more of that later.
There is an influence of World War One poems here. This war was fought in that same era, until the bombs started falling heralding a new way of inflicting terror. The bullets rip through the pages, the blood soaks them. Death is ever present. The landscape, though, is undoubtedly Spain. It’s hard to pick from the wealth of great lines and images. This is from Romanceros
Holed up on the crest of Suicide Hill
they sip dust and gorge on shrapnel,
its slopes littered with spat-out chewed gristle
of convictions stripped back to kill or be killed
The Pioneers’ Table is a fabulous poem about the small moments that exist in the middle of the horror wher comrades sit together, where they notice who is no longer there.
There are prose-poetry pieces too. Beagrie writes these so fluently that you don’t care if they are prose or poetry or somewhere between; they are just wonderful pieces of writing.
One of these, A Chamber of Limbo, is “after Lawrie Lee”, who famously took part in this war, and he also references the poet Stephen Spender who was also there (along with W.H.Auden and George Orwell). Day of Rose Adornment, that leads with a Spender quote, begins
One minute he was complaining
then he wore a rose of crimson glory.
It had climbed upon his trellis body,
its beauty made him speechless.
I can see Spender, Auden, Sassoon and Owen nodding in approval at these lines.
In They Die So Fast in Spain, we are taken back to Britain, where a woman is trying to cope with the fact that her husband has gone to fight, she has no idea if he is alive but has the neighbours tut-tutting that he has abandoned his family.
That day by day,
walking the cobbled streets, I’m becoming
a silence-bound peninent of pasty faces?
The grimness of the battleground and the feeling that things are not going well is covered in Dead Ground
Dirty work this inching forward
the hard labour of advancing snails,
sapping the will to fight on for the forsaken -
all those little barefoot children in the fields.
Liturgy reflects the efforts of both the Arab and British volunteers at the Battle of Brunete, where Franco used air power to kill or disable all but 42 of the soldiers involved. It again transports us back to Britain - this time in the minds of these fighters:
Our heads are in the clouds, full of English drizzle,
dark mills, satanic smog smothering the valleys,
the tinkle of the shop bell, memorials to the missing,
the music of prosthetic limbs on hunger marches.
In addition to the anxious woman at home, the poems cover women on the front line. An artist killed trying to help a fallen soldier, a nurse attending a man in an ambulance.
There’s Wally is beautifully structured - it reflects the panic that takes over when a group of British soldiers come across what they think are Republicans but are actually Italian. The lines all begin “There is” or “There are”, each an image in the fractured panic of (spoiler alert) Wally’s death. It’s highly cinematic.
There is the frantic, headless, chicken-run as realisation kicks in
There are the boys ducking and diving as if caught oggy-raiding,
There is the sporadic yell and splutter of hastily returned fire
From this point on the poems reflect the retreats and chaos that accompanied the Republicans as they began to lose the war. The men who made it home were not received as heroes. In The Demobbed
Surprising themselves, some made it back home,
those raggle-taggle outlaws
who caught the first flares in their own bare hands
nursing their burns and suspicions
As mentioned earlier, you start to think whether it was worth it - fighting a war in a land that you didn’t know, a language you didn’t speak, for only a cause? Then along comes Terror Blanco, a punch-you-in-the face poem that coldly and brutally outlines what Franco did after he won. After I’d finished it I had to put the book down for a bit and come back to it later - it had stunned me. I won’t quote a part of it because it requires reading in full.
Romanceros has the feel of a labour of love, a dedication, a memorial to the brigadiers who tried to do something when appeasement was the approved policy. It’s glib to say that something’s as relevant now as it’s ever been, but I’m going to say it anyway. The message of Romanceros ,and the cause it depicts, is as relevant, and important, now as it’s ever been. We see the rise of fascist idealogies taking advantage of democracy, we see the fetishisation of World War Two rather than its warnings and the true reasons for the sacrifices that people across the world made.
This is a collection written by a highly skilled poet but underpinning it are terrific stories and images that transport you to 1930s Spain in all its nightmarish horror. You come away from it with more knowledge than when you arrived but it’s far more than a history lesson.
Romanceros is published by Drunk Muse Press and is available here.