Aidan Andrew Dun

UNIVERSAL 92pp. Goldmark, 14 Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9SQ £25 (paperback £10). 1 870507 75 4     

From the Times Literary Supplemment, March 14th 2003

This extraordinary poem describes life with a Brahman in the Himalayas, combining a commentary on Western godlessness with accounts of the poet's formative experiences: a family exodus to the West Indies, his father's war injuries and miracle cure, his own adolescent affairs and wanderings through North African atrocities.

First impressions are that these twelve cantos(approximately 2,500 lines) are a synthesis of Whitman, Blake, Heathcote Williams and Carlos Castaneda, but the ear soon finds a compelling and original voice emerging from the loose hexameters. In fact, Universal makes a fitting retort to recent suggestions (see TLS August 6, 2002) that contemporary poets are not facing up to the big questions. Basil Bunting said of Pound's Cantos, "There are the Alps, fools"; well, here are the Himalayas. Aidan Andrew Dun achieves loftiness of vision without becoming obscure or sounding phoney - despite all the O's and apostrophising - his diction allowing for "mortgage" as easily as "tantra", for "Heinkel bomber" as much as "superconsciousness". There is even a chat about cricket: "And you called the sun a red ball/ flying through the air at Lord's to a willow-gate at sunset". The focus is very much on how a "shipwrecked westerner" is rescued by the "sunrise incantations" of a mahatma: we hear of this sage's teachings, the odd "extraphysical experience", but he is portrayed as a real character, swinging his chrome umbrella, joking, losing his temper, as vulnerable as the next man to heart attack, secret police and the hostility of neighbours.

Universal takes us on many journeys. Like the poet when he left India, we may have to cling to the outside door-handle of the train and allow our "desanctified" selves to be swept "thundering into the fiery void without anything"; but we may also feel suddenly, with him, "full and overflowing".

JOHN GREENING

Future mythographers of humankind (if any) will struggle with the idea that two distinct men named George Bush both joined battle on separate occasions with an eastern dictator known as Satan Hussein. ‘The baseless legend of the double-Georges,’ they will suggest in contorted papers, ‘is after-embellishment invented to lend weight to the perception that the comportment of America and the West at the time was dualistic and hypocritical. The two men are one and the same cloven angel’. We were so solid on the field of Hyde Park the other night. We were thinking of the massacre threatening, the children who are to die if the state loses its reason. We all now feel the need for some new realpolitik. One possibility: to do nothing militarily while a few hundred road-vehicles manned by urban-warrior dj’s set up in the regions surrounding any current trouble-spot. Cool parties kicking-in every night within earshot of the so-called enemy would pretty soon pull more adventurous ‘enemy’ kids over the borders after sunset, happily converting to groove-culture, the only thing the West’s got to offer in their view. (Doesn’t Plato say that music brings the Golden Age?) It’s conceivable that under this form of non-violent attack any given rogue-state would gradually shrink without bloodshed. Repressive authorities would then have to check the Taoist proverb which says: Never give a sword to a man if he can’t dance.