A Thorn in the Flesh, Eddie Linden, Hearing Eye, 52pp, £7.50 (paperback) Echo Soundings, John Weston, Shoestring Press, 88pp, £9 (paperback)

‘Every day sounds different,’ John Weston writes in ‘Reading Aloud’. This is the kind of arresting phrase that causes the reader to pause and consider. In true poetry it is elemental. The meaning is nuanced, woven into the fabric:

Notice how your voice
becomes somebody else’s.

We have different voices for different occasions. As the title suggests, John Weston is alive to the sound of words. He is very much concerned with the public nature of language, and how personal thoughts are filtered by the performing selves that speaker and hearer are.

A poem may have a subject, but poetry is about how words communicate many things through metaphor. A poem is never about one thing alone; there are other things happening in the background. For Eddie Linden there is a painful coming to terms with his life. He is angry in the sense that a raw wound is angry. Linden sheds his performing self for a frankly confessed bitter regret that life is not kinder.

‘Ave Maria’ looks back to a Catholic childhood:

With a spiritual tranquillity
that imprisoned me
in affection

Here there is nothing more violent than regret that the consolations of faith offered the slum child no protection against material realities. The next poem is ‘An Irish Birthright’. That meant for Linden poverty and exile in a Glasgow tenement’s anti-culture of ignorance and hatred.

Of course there is more to Eddie Linden than anger. There is the poetry that emerges from a reflective mode. There are laments for the poets whom Linden knew as editor of Aquarius. Two poems in particular, side by side, stand out. They are memorials for Elizabeth Smart and John Heath- Stubbs, writers distanced from the mainstream by emotional or physical afflictions:

Elizabeth without you
there could be nothing.Gone
is the love that overwhelmed
the presence of everything.

Even the love he feels is enshrouded in loss. The imagery throughout these pages is stark, the feeling vehement. These are cries from the heart.

He sees ‘Heartless men in need of love’. What they need remains unacknowledged. Haunted by the thought, Linden’s creative urge is energised. Channelling his anger, he cannot forgive indifference in others. Linden looks on the world as a relentless tide of challenges that demand from him a sense of commitment. And yet he speaks again of being ‘imprisoned in a dogma of faith’. More than one poem contains the phrase ‘a bed of dreams’. Though he insists on confronting raw reality he retreats into memories of childhood and, finally, some reconciliation. Without this, a very bitter taste would linger after imbibing these poems.

James Campbell’s informative introduction describes Linden’s sense of loss for ‘something that was never his’. He is the outsider pressing his face against the glass. The deprivation of his upbringing burns so deeply that acceptance of life does not come easily. It is almost unbearable to read such work. In the end, however, the catharsis proves rewarding. He breaks through the glass.

The necessity that drives us into the world beyond ourselves may threaten to devour the vision that is personal and peculiar to us. For John Weston the world is no less threatening (he is an experienced diplomat) but his engagement with it is more considered, more reflective, more accepting. He quotes Wallace Stevens: ‘Art must fit in with other things. It must be part of the world.’ Writing is not something set apart, a higher activity than commerce or politics. It is, rather, the world stripped of its illusions. That is the case if poetry is the essence of language.

The result is not, in Weston’s case, raw anger. Innocence would not be the word. But it can read like innocence:

Making simple mistakes
hands-on under the roof
I rediscover the thrill
of first learning when young

The retired diplomat takes delight in keeping bees. This occupies a whole sequence of poems. There is a sense of renewed contact with ordinary things after a lifetime of witnessing some of the world’s worst.

The poetry is distilled from many experiences – from the mundane domesticity of ‘Evensong’ to the possibility of war in ‘Payload’. Reflections on the natural world leaven the mood. ‘When World Lines Cross’ is an exceptionally beautiful evocation of diadem spiders and their namesakes, diadem stars, in the heavens:

I lift from camphorwood under loft dust where it has nestled fresh as new cut straw, And my breath seizes as all the threads draw tighter which measure this interval between two events.

The feeling for language is simply perfect. The half-rhyme of camphorwood and loft dust is complemented by words that half-echo each other – breath and threads, tighter and measure, interval and events. Written in the present tense, there is an engaging immediacy. The unstressed simplicity of ‘And my breath seizes’ gives balance to the rhythm.

This is not a matter of technique alone, however. It is poetry of acute sensibility. Of particular interest are the translations of the contemporary Chinese poet, Shi Tao, imprisoned not for his exquisite verse but for political dissent in a closed system. The sequence of translations from Shi Tao’s Book of the Dead is followed by an original poem, ‘A Response to a Question’, which challenges the notion that money can motivate good writing:

So, yes, we must patiently wait for the moment
when that primal urge comes on, let the poem unfold
and go where it will, but also when to stop.

For a dissident voice, the moment to write is likely to be whenever that freedom comes. For a Westerner (the question occasioning the response is from Charles Bukowski), freedom also contains its treacherous ground. The discipline required to harness the creative impulse is well understood.

For John Weston it is in part a matter of looking outside oneself to the world. There are, of course, ways of travelling and discovering that are in the mind. These poems remind us that there is as much to be found in Kew Gardens as in Serengeti National Park. The vision within is the more perceptive. Eddie Linden, admiring the blind John Heath-Stubbs, would concur on that.