Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Debris" by Daniel Huws

Sometimes poetry can be the disturbance of clear blue skies, shaking the airline passengers, briefly, from their polite boredom into mild alarm, but merely coaxing a bird to bring out all its dance moves in a mid-air ballet. A quiet, precise quire of our disquiets, the poetry of Daniel Huws brings dynamism of drama, that of the recondite garret or the familial dinner table, to a laconic, punctilious close like the sibilant witness of sunlight through the window of the same room. Huws has always had that Welsh gift of using nature to narrate the seasons of "man," to feel the winds (and smoke) of time in the hair, and the tug at the hem of their clothes. Everything, or nothing, is mundane, or mythical.

In Debris, poetry from his two earlier collections Noth (1972) and The Quarry (1999) is collected alongside "uncollected" and occasional poems. Huws’s tribute to Christopher Reid in his "Author’s Preface" can equally be a testament to his own craft as a poet. Patience, a quality Huws admires in his editor, is his own great forte. When the needle on a seismograph is going mad as Hieronymo, when the world – of one individual, or the world as a civilization sees it – is going down, Huws’s poetry holds it all in the unshaking crucible of its palm, without "a single cumbersome word or phrase" or “a jarring note." The clarion call of mortality sounds through the bacchanalian mist of youth, clearly, in "The Party": "He took off his flesh and lay in his bones." 

Burnishing parergons – small moments, contemplations that sit askew to the straight highroads of existence, realizations that are of no consequence, but great import – with suppleness and poise, with an unerring eye and acute ear, Huws often produces such lines – "days of dying bred spite in our tongue" and "to have strayed in a wood which seemed like home."  

Huws pulses with the dark-vowelled flow that we find in Dylan Thomas, but he keeps that well behind an English dyke. This is his particular Welsh-ness. However, like sand between fingers that tide does sometimes breach: 

          With the voice of a flower, the voice of a child,
          You cried against the iniquity
          Of blackness, blackness clammy and choking
          …
          Your only resource was to flourish death
          In a brilliant flare of uncomprehending.

The misted past catches up with us as the poet conjures for us places, straight out of the gizzard of time, and we feel a sudden damp in our boots from that old bog of years, or quarry:

          Ages ago,
          And I still stand
          Caught in the long afternoon
          In the old quarry,
          Face to the wall,
          Counting to twenty.

Huws’s Debris is a reminder that the pluck and spirit of "small" beings – women, men, children or flowers – ensure that the world does not end tonight.

          The slow way home was through the wood
          Which creaked with age
           …
          And in the November storm
          The red campion battled so late.

The occasional poems in the volume (addressed to Ted Hughes, Jean Hawkes and Lucas Myers) are rhymed with a friendliness and accord that is the bedrock of friendship that has withstood the ravages of time. Daniel Huws writes like the restorer of old paintings, the light that is always there in the dark-overtaken masterpieces and just needs brightening. If poetry can turn to sound a silence that is ever-growing in us, around us, as in Huws, then it will have succeeded in its labour.

About the reviewer
Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.