Review by Nigel Kent

When I began this blog in August 2020, I wanted to bring attention to debut poets and the sterling work undertaken by small poetry presses in discovering new talent. Today sees both those aims realised. Flight of the Dragonfly Press over the last couple of years has developed a small list of publications by new exciting writers thanks to the hard work of Barbara Mercer  and Darren Beaney. The latest addition to that list is Dorian Nightingale with his debut pamphlet Songs from Last Imaginations, a collection of twenty-three poems interspersed with photographs, some accompanied by quotations. Like those photographs,  the poems are snapshots of moments in time, capturing specific states of being, such as the threshold between life and death, the  fledgling’s first flight, the pursuit of creativity, being speechless , enjoying a concert performance; all told in expertly fashioned verse, far more accomplished than one might expect from a debut publication.

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Take for example, one of my favourite poems in the collection, words unspoken. It conveys that moment when one holds one tongue, when one decides to keep one’s thoughts to oneself. The moment is portrayed as a retreat, a ‘snap back/    to the place beyond the perimeter.’ The speaker withdraws from the conversation, but it is not an easy thing to do. This is vividly conveyed through the extended metaphor of words ‘dropping to the ground/       right there in front of me,/ buckling to their knees/  whilst beseeching their worth,/ offering me their terms/   from the wet, sticky earth.’  I loved the originality of this imagery that enables the reader to share the inner conflict of the speaker, his obstinacy (‘tight-lipped’ and ‘unmoved’) versus the desire to say something (‘beseeching’, ‘offering’, ’pleading’). There is something eminently relatable here.

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As there will be for many readers, who are poets or involved in the arts,  in the poem, sparks. which captures the essence of creativity, that desire for originality. In the poem Nightingale takes the cliché of the ‘spark’ of creativity and gives it a freshness and dynamism. The speaker symbolises the creative act as a way of lighting a fire. He dismisses the conventional approach, saying ‘i never wanted to light my fire that way./ the friction of sticks within textbooks and booklets, the instructions concurred by many teachers and tutors, conveying the way/ to fashion a flame.’ Note the punctuation, the use of lower case for i and for words following full stops, the speaker is clearly a rule breaker. He wants to find his own method, a unique, personal way: ‘to uncover such things in my own inherent manner.’ Yet as all fellow poets will know this is not easy, and Nightingale explores these difficulties. He talks of ‘the shyness of my instinct’, the search for confidence; of the need ‘to spend time on my insight, to find out if it works,’ the time-consuming labour of creativity;’ of the necessity of failure (‘to know that it hurt when alternatives fail,/ the setbacks of initiative that curtail a better trail’); and of the all-consuming desire to see the creative process through (‘i so yearned to spur a spontaneous nerve./       a lightning bolt moment.’ 

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It’s true to say that there are many, many lightning bolt moments in Songs from Last Imaginations. Whilst many of them illuminate relatable experiences like words unspoken and sparks . Nightingale also explores unfamiliar experiences, such as in the poem that begins the collection, airlock. It offers a shocking and dramatic opening to the collection. It describes asphyxiation, the threshold between life and death, told in a breathless sequence of words and phrases. The poem begins: ‘gasping  rasping  breathing  barely  bearable  /  wheezing  squeezing  grasping air/  inhaling now intolerable  / de-airing  chest deflating  fast  speedily incapable  /  now in trouble. ‘  The rhythm of the lines portrays the panic and horror of the moment, which we can hear as well as visualise through the use of onomatopoeia. Furthermore, the internal rhymes, the alliteration and assonance bind each word and phrase together in a relentless drive towards the conclusion, the unfinished phrase, ‘my fateful…’, the moment of death, creating a sense of its inevitability. This is the fragility of life viscerally and memorably captured.

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airlock is a poem that has a soundtrack that is fundamental to its effect. One of Nightingale’s strengths as a poet is the attention he gives to the sound of his verse. These are poems that should be read aloud to experience the effectiveness of the poet’s craft. Nowhere is this more true than in the poems which have music as their subject, such as clair de lune and the final cut. As Nightingale’s drop-in focussed on the former, I’m going to finish by looking at the latter. It vividly creates the experience of listening to a performance of Beethoven’s piano concerto no.5. op. 73. The poem represents the poet at his best: it is a triumph of technical wizardry, as he uses a range of techniques to enable us to share the performance. For example, he writes: ‘then in from the void an emergent sensation,/   an unfolding vibration drifting through the air./ beckoning waves of seamless sound/  serenading the atmosphere.’ The masculine rhyme and the alliteration create a sense of the lightness of sound of the opening sequence of the music. Later the use of polysyllabic and conjoined words, together with a concrete representation of the waves of music, give us a sense of the flow. Towards the end of the poem, he writes in lines of diminishing syllables reinforcing the sense of the music stumbling towards an exhausted conclusion, and significantly, there is almost a half a page of white space before the final line ‘unable to continue.’

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It is no coincidence that Nightingale has called his poems ‘songs’ in the title of the collection, for these are poems with their own distinctive music. His command of form and poetic technique are exceptional and suggest that Dorian Nightingale will be a name to look out for in the future. I certainly will be.