On Jeff Young’s DELIRIA (Rough Trade Books, 2023)
Jeff Young trawls the ghost roads extracting scent from each shadow,
Exhuming beats from the rhythm of Rough Trade’s track through sound;
Both of the world and within as this tale connects secret stories
To the soul as lead singer, as Young’s new fable grows ancient
And this Aigburth Angel’s adventure in being open to all stays profound.
Deliria is a road movie for those who can no longer travel
In which Young’s nameless I and his ‘Marta’ transform across Portugal.
The Porto they find could exist in the record shop’s Portobello,
Vinyl spun, air infusing as the mix of moment and memory fuses
With words stoking music, from both Young as he’s writing
All the way through to the ending containing a sweet mallard’s call.
Jeff Young dreams for you and dreams large in this elegant pamphlet story;
Akin to David Rudkin’s recent Lighthouse Keeper, this is a tale told to time
And all it creates as well as all it transfigures; from its Roy Batty quote
To the hours that I and Marta traverse and soon climb ‘upwards into
unknown galaxies’ from their soon revealed Hotel Brothel,
Guided by Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, words wend their way towards
Wisdom that can only be sourced from the light that this poet prince
Casts as he peoples his visions; from an ox in a bar, fine dust rising,
Where ‘no one gives a shit that there’s a huge biblical beast
Is on licensed premises’ to the enchanting image of a death sent
Buster Keaton dancing with a pigeon; as you slide into this story
You soon realise that Young’s diary of dream nations night.
Dreams are a form of madness, no doubt, in which the mind at last
Finds air’s purchase. Freed from the dark, age, and illness
The spirit within spends and sprees, as a holiday becomes
Holy day for the secular need for sensation that we can describe
As religious as the death of a friend spurs I’s journey. It is this
Escaping from an England into the European nacht which allows him,
And each reader beside to feel free. We are liberated by dreams
And licked back to life through Young’s language. As in all his work;
Plays and poems, Ghost Town before, Radio, he finesses the muse,
Won from past loss and from the love of his own Pearl and Amy
Into paragraphs to enchant you, encountering a horse ‘which seems
To be on fire.’ (It is the seems which enchants me) to a room full
Of rats where the Piper does not steal the children but is played
Through the penwork of a man ‘staying up all night listening for
broken hearted women,’ to a softly sung murder ballad.
The writer fills every encounter with spectres, finding both
Motion and music in this his recorded dream rodeo.
All art transforms. Art is not just about transportation.
But the act of moving the mind and the body is what the flow
Of words tries to do. With books as the score for the phantom
Instruments we imagine, orchestras and ensembles, singers
And bands who back you as you duet in turn
With what you are reading. And with what you are needing.
For the curative of the common page stages the concert
Of dreams we all hear. But which we often forget or ignore
Once the net of night meets day’s stitching
And we are sealed, stored or sutured, not in the fabric
Of night but day’s cloud spitting rain’s spite back at us,
Drenching those dreams; damning, dousing. But it is here
That Young’s visions poured through the pen warm all crowds,
Drying us to weep tears that blaze twin trails from his writing
He is a Liverpudlian La and and a Do Re who sends You
And Me to a Fa that exists off the scale, where we can see
Our dreams and then sing them. Words are melodies
In Jeff’s effing, as the Portuguese drinking toast,
Fuck The Devil is a drive to the very edge in no car.
This story is Borges and (David) Brooks, Kerouac,
Hesse’s Knulp, and Ken Kesey. It is George and Walt Whitman
And something secret from Waits’ swordfishtrombones.
It is Burroughs beset and Ballard’s overgrown urban jungle,
As the ‘craftsman of cityscape poetics’ part stanazas
Each paragraph proudly to grant every vantage point
Its own throne. This book is partly the pages that fly
When we think of time passing. It is slim enough
To be birdlike, as opening it out will make wings,
Held in the hand. In fact, from his to your own,
Gifts are granted. Jeff is Young for all ages
And present no doubt all stages of both dream
And desire; Deliria’s daze masking mourning
And recolouring at once, everything.
David Erdos 6/12/2
DELÍRIA (SIGNED COPIES) – Jeff Young
https://roughtradebooks.com/products/deliria-jeff-young.