Robert Hunter: “Sentinel” (Ryko)

The first thing you should know is that Robert Hunter is the chief lyricist of the Grateful Dead. The second thing is that this is not a record of music but of poetry, though Mr Hunter does indulge in some song where appropriate.

Of the twenty-three poems collected on this disc, many of them stylistically rather than thematically influenced by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, six are taken from Hunter’s first published book of verse, Night Cadre (1991), including ‘Like A Basket’. It goes like this: “We knew enough to begin with but after a while we didn’t know enough any more so we put what we did know into something like a basket with your arms for handles and my feet to steady it in case it had to be set down suddenly. What we didn’t tell the basket was where to stand. By the time we realised it was necessary to do so it had run off with everything we knew to begin with and most of what we’d found out since. The general opinion was that since the feet the basket ran off on were mine it befell me to track it down. I agreed but since I had no feet it was obvious someone would have to carry me. You declined because you had no arms. Love is like that in the city.” Profound, what?!

Sentinel has a well-tempered balance between the rock and roll and the literary worlds and their languages which gives the impression that Hunter’s epiphanal ditties are honest efforts, understated and self-effacingly delivered without any charlatanesque posturing. There is also a delightful range of topics, from the high philosophical abstraction of ‘Pride of Bone’ to considering the nature of gingerbread men, a day in the life of a dog, Arthur Rimbaud’s abdication from poetry to real estate at the age of twenty and ‘Exploding Diamond Blues’ which actually does feature a bit of singing on the chorus.

The core of the album is the title poem ‘Sentinel’. It is a meditation on the position of the poetic voice, and poetry itself, vis-a-vis the world. It seems to decide that the poet is condemned to sing in the knowledge that her activity is futile. What the poet says will always be, paradoxically, utilised against her by something beyond her. Nevertheless, the poet must still say what she has to say as if her saying acts as a guardian, in a Promethean manner, for an illusive if helpless humanity. It’s pretty heavy stuff alright but definitely worth sixteen minutes of your concentration. The second longest offering, ‘Poets On Poets’, though, says it all: “Paper is cheap. The heart and pencil perform as well for you as an other. But consider what it portends to tell others whom you do not know the whimsies of your soul in a public fashion.” Aye, there’s the rub.

Hunter, an acclaimed translator of Rainer Maria Rilke, is no rock dinosaur with an ego larger than his bank balance indulging himself in a bit of ‘art’, sonny. On the contrary, he comes across as the genuine literary article. In some ways Sentinel, his fourth book of verse, is the very opposite to the ‘Dead’s musical offerings. Whether you’re a Grateful Dead fan or not, though, I’d still recommend you check out this spoken word disc. I guarantee that if you’re not already familiar with Hunter’s poetry then Sentinel will really surprise you.

• Patrick Brennan