Review - Matthew M.C. Smith - The Keeper of Aeons
Matthew M. C. Smith is a Welsh writer from Swansea. He is a three times-nominated 'Best of the Net' writer (Icefloe Press 2020, Acropolis Journal 2022 and Broken Spine 2022), a Pushcart Prize nominee (Broken Spine 2022) and R.S. Thomas prize winner (Gwyl Cybi). Matthew is widely published in presses such as Poetry Wales, Barren Magazine, iambapoet, The Lonely Crowd, Icefloe Press, Arachne Press, Finished Creatures and Broken Spine Arts.
Matthew published Origin: 21 Poems in 2018 and The Keeper of Aeons in Autumn 2022.
He studied for a PhD on the subject of Robert Graves and Wales at Swansea University, completing this in 2006. He is academically published in the International Journal of Welsh Writing in English.
Matthew writes about landscape, history, identities, family and cosmology.
He is the editor of Black Bough poetry, a project created in 2019 to promote imagist micropoetry. He is the originator and organiser of weekly poetry fest @TopTweetTuesday on Twitter and the Silver Branch that platforms amazing writers.
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The Keeper of Aeons is a wide-reaching, evocative and ambitious combination of prose and poetry that, as its title suggests, spans our past and future via a brief interlude in the life of a young Matthew Smith.
In the short, one poem, prologue the observer in the International Space Station looks down and wonders if love exists outside that orbit. And indeed, what love even endures on that globe?
Part One, Aeons, is also short. It looks at the past and future, sets the scene for the rest of the collection. Bones of ancient people in a museum, astronauts stepping into a gleaming rocket.
Part Two, Ancient Navigations, takes us through the ages via the ancient caves, crags and bones of Wales. There are so many fabulous images here that it's hard to pick examples. In fact I opened pages at random and stuck my finger on a poem or prose piece and pulled out these:
Fires danced, shadows on the hill,
Tongues lost before bones (Bryn Celli Ddu)
Flies scud in half-light
glint in glacier-ruins
where minnows flicker
in golden shadows (Henrhyd Falls/Annwn)
The rich, dense imagery is like a jungle of words, almost overwhelming in its fecundity. But once you start picking your way through you find so much to love. There are echoes here of two Thomases - Dylan and R.S. - unsurprising perhaps as almost every Welsh poet will have them in their DNA. Yet Matt's writing is also like neither of them.
There is a deep affection and reverence here for landscape and history, a feeling that the stones, paths and hills are somehow alive, or at least that they hold some part of every living thing that has touched them.
One of my favourites is the long prose piece 'Fixing the Hyperdrive' - it takes us briefly from the ancient to the (relatively) modern with a boy and his love of Star Wars and his ability to use a second hand Millennium Falcon to fire his imagination. There are lovely memories of early 1980s childhood in this poem, and it grounds us before the leap into part three of the collection. But of course, as with earlier references to rockets and space, it points us to where we are going.
Star Fields vividly brings back my memories of looking at the Milky Way in the pitch dark skies of Northern Queensland. The sheer scale, that humbles you and makes you question the meaning of existence.
Part Three, Heaven's Territories, takes into a distant future where things may not be as gleaming as the rockets that we fire towards the equally luminous stars. The future is consequential, but it is not yet written.
The concluding poem, 'What is Faith?' begins
It is knowing that nothing matters
that there is nothing else
but the dance of dust
around our bodies
and the speed
of light, impossibly fast
and far, which knows
no pain, an arrow without sentience.
Again, this section contains remarkable imagery, but the poems are shorter, more concise, taking us to a conclusion in style.
This collection is a technical tour de force in imagistic prose and poetry that achieves its very ambitious target to take us on a journey through time and space unlike no other. He should be very proud of this - now the question is - where does he go from here? I can't wait to find out.
'The Keeper of Aeons' is available from The Broken Spine website.
