BRYN FORTEY

I GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES by Bryn Fortey
(Outlaw Chapbooks Press)
212 Caerleon Road, Newport, South Wales, NP19 7GQ, UK

This book is a small delight. 17 poems about the blues by a great human repository of stories about black American music. Here we can read about Chuck Berry, Charley Patton, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup, Bessie Smith and Howlin' Wolf. Important names to people versed (if you'll pardon the pun) in musical history. (Crudup, for those not so well-versed, wrote 'That's All Right Mama', which Elvis Presley covered. One of those men died in penury.)

Other characters populate the book, men and women only someone with an expert's compendious knowledge would know: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lil Hardin (who married, and divorced, Louis Armstrong), Earl Zebedee Hooker, the Mound City Blue Blowers. Each poem brings a different player or band to life in a few short stanzas, telling their stories, recreating the cultural atmosphere of the times they lived in. If you love music, it's irresistible.

But there's more here. Poems about memory and how music crosses and intersects it. Which is part of its magic: put a piece of music on, and if it's important, you will leap back instantly to where you were the first time you heard it. That's the subject of what I think is the best poem, 'Honky Tonk':

more years have passed
than I like to count
and I don't know where you are
or even if you're still alive

As someone who was first published by Bryn Fortey 21 years ago in his print magazine 'Target', I had a real thrill of nostalgia when this chap arrived in the post the other day. It was better, somehow, listening to the postman open the front gate and push your letters through the door, seeing a handwritten envelope from an editor or another poet on your mat. Bradlaugh's Finger is a tribute to those more maverick times, in a way.

There's no price listed at the top of this review because I GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES is free to anybody who wants it. All you have to do is drop the author a line at the address above and ask for a copy. I'd do that, if I were you. It's an excellent read. (BH)