Giles Paley-Phillips: Really, How Interesting

Eli Tender Publishing.

By Tom Jenks

Nonsense is a quintessentially British form, a secret room in the sprawling mansion of the literary tradition where Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Spike Milligan and John Lennon share a pot of Earl Grey over a game of exquisite cadaver. Nonsense is our native form of surrealism and, like surrealism, it is more complex and powerful than many give it credit for. Seemingly innocuous at first glance with its owls and pussycats, its dormice in teapots and its runcible spoons, it would be a mistake to dismiss nonsense as mere whimsy. It is, in fact, a highly political form, challenging, mocking and subverting norms and strictures, rendering them ludicrous via its own deliberate absurdity. It was for this reason that psychedelic rock musicians in the late 1960s, wanting to express their chemically and otherwise expanded consciousnesses, tapped into the nonsense wellspring. It is no coincidence that Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles both explicitly referenced Lewis Carroll. Nonsense poets are our court jesters and we need our jesters, our wise fools, now more than ever.

With its gleeful disregard for how things are and how things should be, its joyful puncturing of pomposity and its sheer exuberant vitality, nonsense poetry is tailor made for children. As a parent myself, what I don’t like in children’s literature are books which are really manuals detailing how to become a good conforming adult. What I do like is children’s literature that is free spirited and anarchic. There is plenty of time for wearing ties and ID badges later on. It is for this reason that I am very glad that there are people like Giles Paley-Phillips around.

This is Paley-Phillips’ third collection but his first for children. Too many people turn to children’s writing thinking that it is easy, not appreciating that, in many ways, it is much more difficult than writing for adults. A leaden phrase or a fuzzy image can pass by without comment in an adult poem where the reader is usually, as indicated by the very fact that they are reading poetry in the first place, inclined to be polite and forgiving. A child, by contrast, will just get bored. Paley-Phillips does not fall into this trap. His book is peopled by fantastic characters such as a girl with springs for feet and Dave, the moustachioed giraffe. It is refreshing, too, that Paley-Phillips does not overuse the limerick, which, thanks to Lear, has emerged as the default form for nonsense poetry. He is prepared and able to adapt his form to the poem and the work here ranges from a few lines long to poems a page and more in length. In the former category comes the aforementioned hirsute giraffe:

            Dave the giraffe,

            had the biggest moustache,

            it measured from London to Romney Marsh.

In the latter comes the playful Long Poem, which is probably my favourite in the collection. As the title suggests, it is too long to reproduce here, but if you know the one about the three men in a cave on a dark and stormy night who tell a story, then you will get the general idea. I also liked Coming Apart, which sounds like it should be a Radiohead song, but is in fact about a volatile body dropping to pieces bit by bit:

            I laughed and my leg fell off today

            So I replaced it with a barrel of hay.

            Then my arm fell to the floor,

            I replaced that with an old pine door…

This is a fine example of nonsense poetry at its best: funny and flippant but with a deeper meaning, in this case an underlying theme of identity. It brought to my mind the philosophical problem of the ship of Theseus, which is gradually repaired piece by piece, giving rise to the question of whether after all of this the ship still exists and if it does exist, where exactly is it?

This charming collection shows that nonsense is alive and well and living in Sussex. Prefab Sprout had lions in their garden. Giles Paley-Phillips has them in his bathroom. Long may they stay there.

For more information, contact Eli Tender Publishing, 7 Selmeston Court, Surrey Road, Seaford, East Sussex, BN25 2NQ or visit either www.gilespaleyphillips.co.uk  or www.myspace.com/gilespaleyphillips online.