Barkin!

In Barkin! Mike Jenkins captures both the craziness and tragedy of his home town. These are poems and stories, using Merthyr's vibrant vernacular, about people who try to defy the oppression of a system which has made it one of the poorest places in the land.

Review :
In Barkin! Mike Jenkins returns to poetry and fiction in the Merthyr dialect which he first used in Graffiti Narratives. The poet himself is effaced in these dramatic monologues in which a Merthyr man (it is usually a man) spins a yarn, as it might be down the pub. The tone is confiding, often amused, as in ‘The girl oo become Blonde’ where a man describes how a girl on the bus to Cardiff transforms herself: she puts a black cap over er air, short black air an simple not like er fren’s purple streaks an spikes; takes out a long blonde wig from a plastic bag an puts it on; nobuddy bats an eye-lid… In Mike Jenkins’s Merthyr, anything can happen. In ‘Ewman Advert’, for example, a man standing at the bus stop becomes aware that he is being basted like a KFC chicken, mocked by passers-by. The poem is a surreal fantasy, but with a serious edge, hinting at our shoddy consumerist world where we become what we eat. The illusion eventually passes though the identification between man and battery chicken continues: A free man agen, I forget Irwin an wing back up the ill like some petrified chicken about to ave its throat slit an its guts bagged in plastic. The speakers of these poems are at the bottom of the neo-capitalist pile, but they are survivors and resistors — one of their weapons being an inventive, witty (and sometimes aggressive) use of language. In ‘Owlin at-a Moon’, a group gathers to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a club called ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buffalo’s’. They go into the beer garden/yard and one of them starts howling at the full moon: An somebuddy from over-a wall in-a bus station close by owls a really loud reply and we piss ourselves. ‘Tha’s what I like about Merthyr’, the narrator comments, ‘this town’s full o nutters’. Other poems, however, reflect the trap this world can become. When Liam writes a poem at school and wins a prize he is ragged mercilessly by his classmates: All-a boyz give me jip — ‘Yew gay or wha?’ Instantly regretting it, he reverts to type: When-a Ead o Yer starts droolin — ‘Oo Liam, what a lovely poem!’ felt gay as fuck, felt like fightin. There’ll be no more poetry for Liam. The humour can be self-defeating, too, beneath its challenging, aggressive exterior. When a drunk enters Merthyr’s first and only fish foot clinic he does so to be clever, to show what a hard man he is: ‘I wan mine done!’ ee demands. On’y make it fuckin piranhas, not them poncy fish yew do ewse! (‘Fish Foot Clinic’) Nowhere is this clearer than in the best of the stories, ‘Bus-station Clinic’. Here a long-term unemployed man comes to perceive the bus station as a ‘hospital’ where patients come for their ‘injections’. He dresses up as a doctor and approaches a dealer with a jar of cabbage water which he says will add ten years to his patients’ lives. Why not, he suggests, inject that instead of heroin. The dealer soon puts him right: ‘10 fuckin yers dildo-face! Oo wan’s 10 more fuckin yers?... The whool idea is to ave less bleedin time not more, an t blank it out not drum it up with fuckin iron brew, wha’ever.’ ‘I couldn argue with tha’, the man reflects, ‘Ee obviously knew is patients better than me.’ There are limits to poetry and fiction written exclusively in dialect, but Barkin! suggests that Mike Jenkins is far from reaching them yet.