Shadows Waltz Haltingly is the author’s most personal collection to date, charting the course of his mother’s last years battling Huntington’s Disease (or Chorea). The author does not flinch from depicting in the full effects of this horrendous illness on his mother through a splintered sequence of poems. The title’s aural stiltedness and terpsichorean imagery allude to the original name for the pathology, ‘St. Vitus’s Dance’, which refers to the strange ‘halting’ or skipping steps and jerky movements typical of the motor disturbances it induces.

 

Other topics spark off from the central theme: the neurological effects of war (‘Guns of Anguish’); while “shell shock” is cited in an acrostic tribute to Ivor Gurney (‘Twigworth Yews’). There are some intimate portraits of past poets, writers and artists touched in by psychical afflictions: Thomas Chatterton (‘Chatterton’s Scraps’), Emily Dickinson (‘Marigolds to Distraction’), Walter Sickert (‘Memory’s Egg Tempera’), Isaac Rosenberg (‘Little Giant’), Jean Rhys (‘Good Midnight, Tigress’). An underlying anxiety charges all the poems in this collection, and angst, or ‘the dizziness of freedom’, is scrutinised in verse-studies of Robert Burton (‘The Churning’), and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (‘Ragged Angel’).

 

Bookending the collection are poems metamorphosing antique objects –Staffordshire Flatbacks and stucco-moulded lions– as symbols of the human illusion of manufactured authenticity; a kind of ‘commodity-fetishism’ of the consciousness.  

 

Excerpts from Reviews

 

'Shadows Waltz Haltingly is a visually beautiful book on a tragic theme.

Alan Morrison's collection is centred on his mother's last years living with Huntington's Chorea. Although the collection is personal the opening poem has a detached clarity and purity of vocabulary reminiscent of the movement poets or Auden or Larkin. …Dylan Thomas wrote one of his most personal poems on the death of his father as a villanelle raging against the dying of the light. Morrison follows him but reinvents the form creating an extended villanelle. …Thomas's poem was more incantatory a spell, that was bound to fail, against the darkness. Morrison's villanelle painfully and brilliantly sketches the neurological effects of the illness …the poet has made his loss live for us. It is a gracious gesture from a rich and beautifully produced book.' Kalyna Review

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'The poetry in this volume is haunted, not only by the evidence of death and its effects, but by positive influences. ...A distinctive voice,  a personal signature, is a necessity, although it is a challenge that looks easy, like so many difficult tasks. Morrison’s prolific output is testament to a passionate dedication manifested in the craftsman’s care invested in his poetry. ...there is an urgency of spirit that is very promising. Alan Morrison is unafraid to lay his soul bare, and therein lies the interest. He deserves to be read sympathetically:

 

No self-pity for her, never that, only prescriptions

For fillips, pills, pick-me-ups, sips, pitiless critiques

 

Morrison is writing of Jean Rhys, crushed by life, saved by writing. He writes verse-essays on her, and on Kierkegaard and Robert Burton, the great anatomist of melancholy, the nervous condition that withers the spirit. The philosophers of anxiety strengthen the faint-hearted. It is only natural to wish to share what your reading has found, even if speaking out breaks the rules of silence. The silence is no more than the space between the lines of articulate energy, the poetry...' 

Geoffrey Heptonstall, The London Magazine

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