Cardiff Cut

Cardiff Cut announces itself as 'witty, obscene, defiant: an anarchic Joycean monologue steeped in the city of Cardiff'. The book is written as a stream of consciousness as one man, who for the most part of it is under the influence of one drug or another, makes his way around the capital and encounters every level of society at work and at play. As befits a work written by an author whose biography describes him as both poet and performer, an initial reaction to Cardiff Cut might be that it can only be fully appreciated in performance. However, with further reading, the narrator's voice takes on its own life in the reader's imagination, relayed as it is phonetically in a Cardiff accent and using a cut-up technique which incorporates everything from local history to song lyrics and graffiti. The power of the work is in its evocation of Cardiff nightlife, as the narrator sees, for example, 'some girl tryna rid herself ofa beerbattered fortysummit mean preen sweatridden suitwearing I am the man divorcee', or the 'little fridee blackdress stilettos in hand' he sees crossing Newport Road. Less successful are the excursions into polemic against the police and state power, the latter embodied in the figure of a corrupt mayor, which feel too much as if they have been bolted on to the narrative. And whereas many of the author's own notes (contained in an appendix) are intriguing in their revelation of the sources of the text, it is difficult to know for whose benefit he is writing when he solemnly records that 'Woolies (Woolworths)' is a shop name and that Nurofen is a brand of painkiller. Surely, as with T. S. Eliot in his critic-teasing notes in The Waste Land, the author could have made these less literal and had some fun at the reader's expense? Niall Griffiths has recently written of Lloyd Robson that he is 'one of the best dialect writers in these islands', and Cardiff Cut powerfully exemplifies the compliment. This is not a work for the faint-hearted, but as the record of an authentic Cardiff voice it demands to be listened to. -- Graham Tomlinson @ www.gwales.com