Almost an apology

In his last weeks I visit my father
yellowed by medicine
dying more quickly now

leaning against the range
heating his backside
nursing his coffee

I breathe
leap into the silence
thank you for being a great dad

I am six years old
arms outstretched for love

He pauses, his gaze soft, then gently
we made some mistakes with you

SIMON REES

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Simon Rees is an emerging poet from Cardiff who has lived with his wife in Dublin since 1996. What is he emerging from? He says that he ‘fell back in love with writing poetry in 2022’ for reasons of ‘catharsis’, so clearly there was trouble of some sort. A not unrelated biographical detail is that Rees works part time as a therapist and is studying for a Master’s in psychotherapy. He interprets his route back to poetry as offering an escape ‘from a lifetime of seeking acceptance’ and as an opportunity for finally finding a voice that is truly his own.

His poems are deeply felt and direct, which is refreshing at a time when many poets equate obliqueness with sophistication. The punch delivered in this poem’s last line, as a father close to the end of his life ‘almost apologises’ to his son for mistakes made, is rather devastating. Indeed, without the poem’s title (‘Almost an apology’), the father’s quoted words might seem harsh to the point of cruelty: although this isn’t the poem’s primary meaning, it does confer an air of menace which is how the poet’s younger self might have received the father’s implied inability to express love. In a sense, the father reenacts his mistakes while ruefully acknowledging them.

The poem is explicit enough not to require too much critical analysis, but there are deft touches such as the observation of the father ‘leaning against the range / heating his backside / nursing his coffee’, which is more a poet’s than a novelist’s observation: not so much descriptive as directly arising from the emotionally charged situation, just as a lover at the moment of breakup might notice, say, the odd geometry of a window frame.

Returning to Rees’s point about catharsis… The therapeutic value of writing is one that some poets champion and others reject. Auden famously remarked, in his elegy for Yeats, that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – yet Auden also wrote in tribute to Freud, praising his capacity ‘to remember like the old and be honest like children’ – which neatly sums up what Rees does in his short poem. Rees sought catharsis originally through psychotherapy only, then, he says, in 2022 ‘a college acquaintance mentioned that her therapist had recommended that she write poetry as a way of connecting to buried emotions, and shortly afterwards I sat at the dining table with a pen and blank page, and out fell the poem “To my right hand”, which expressed deep and painful feelings of which I was unaware about my right hand which has just two fingers. Writing and sharing this poem helped a lot with my healing journey.’

A poet schooled in psychotherapy who is unafraid to explore the emotional roots of his trouble while honing his craft, Rees is (as they say) one to watch.