A Bumper Stack of Smokestacks

Between Stations

Andrew Willoughby

Smokestack, 2016

57pp 

Andrew Willoughby’s Between Stations is a bravura book-length poem spanning 48 pages and, geographically speaking, from Teesside to Siberia via Helsinki, Finland, and, more symbolically, the Finland Station, accompanied by ‘a raggle-taggle bunch of Finnish travelling poets’. One is immediately swept up on this dialectical train journey-cum-pilgrimage of the left-wing Muse by the poetic thrust of Willoughby’s blank verse that powers forwards at full linguistic throttle:

From Middlesbrough to Saltburn past Coatham Marshes

as early winter comes sweeping in today from Siberia.

Restless snow flurries start to obscure looming shapes –

the final historical remains of ironworks, steel mills,

stranded black locomotives that pulled the smelt in pigs

from weary morning to never-dark childhood night,

to be converted into steel that still spans the globe.

There’s a deft use of alliteration that bristles through some striking descriptions:

Abandoned buildings, that still spew out smoke

in my attic-stored adolescent sketch books,

haunt the eye like shells of bombed cathedrals.

This was all marshland once; hidden slag-heaps

lie under grass covered bumps lining the sides

of trickling inlets of the Tees with its metal cranes:

intricate insect totems poke their heads at the North Sea.

Willoughby dishes up some marvellous imagery:

no resistance then could stop the North’s razing

and now no entreaty too could save the Salamander

in the lone blast furnace: the fiery heart – last survivor

of the hundreds that lined the river banks an age ago,

making this the land of dragons with satsuma skies

welcoming the Welshmen who came to Eston mines,

There’s a stream-of-consciousness sense to Willoughby’s breathlessly peripatetic poetry as it puts up Baltic and Russian images to startle the eye like pine trees or signal posts speeding by:

conjured up the masses transported past those trees,

and compromised poets punished for incorrect lines

looking over the steppes to the edge of the forest,

looking for the Baba Yaga’s chicken legged house –

oh to be caught in it running away into the pines!

Hungry skinny witches preferred to slow gulags.

The assonantal effects of the following passage are particularly striking:

In Turku I ate karhunliha, the flesh of my familiar:

bumbled and stumbled like a half mad circus bruin

sleeping down in the cellar of my old friend’s house,

drank through panic attacks, began to meet the cast

of the northbound trip, that endless locomotive hurtling.

As are the alliterative effects in the trope: ‘the ice broke on the/ Aurajoki that Easter morning and the black icy lump/ broke inside me, but the healing was incomplete’. This poetry is no less explosive when providing necessary exposition:

a lost poet with flowing hair offered to take me to Siberia

for Fenn-Ugrian congress of course I growled an affirmative.

In this little hometown train carriage I ponder my choices

wonder if it was random chance or some norn-woven web

that always said solid blonde Kalle and wild wanderer Esa

were meant to be the poles at the extremes of my journey

Willoughby’s absolute immersion in the tectonics of poetic language never lets up in its finger-licking alliterative feast: ‘the drinkers of fire and milk, salt sucker truth seekers/ suspended but still moving in the eye of Blake’s eternity/ in the land of strong vodka’. The sceneries and settings shift almost dreamlike giving the disorienting timeless sense of travel, and there are some captivating passages on the poet’s native Teesside and surrounds:

We are all proud of the Dorman Long signs on tracks,

girders and bridges studied on travels, that confirm for us

that these towns have made their mark though we know

too well that blood and sacrifice paid for our identity tags:

legends of fallen lads pushed down into the furnace smelt

by their own grim fathers to end their molten sufferings,

400 men and boys crushed and broken in our mines,

with their cathedral height shafts and heavy rock falls.

Who are we now without our steel? Nationalist graffiti

sprayed on house walls and the distant flag of St George

planted at the top of the iron drained hills…

There’s also some fascinating historical back-story to England’s North-East as signposted by the Viking-originated place names: ‘…from Odin’s Berg 

to Roseberry Topping, sacrificial mound to summer idyll, 

the ferric seam magnetised them: haphazard pilgrims

Celts and Saxons, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scots and Geordies

Yorkshire folk, Norfolk exiles, Christian, Sikh, Jew and Muslim.

Willoughby maps a polemical landscape, not simply picturesque –of his Thatcherism-gutted native industrial heartlands: ‘…we dolefully mourn work’s gradual withdrawal here,/ count the cost in benefits and workless agony of dead fires’ –the word ‘dolefully’ would seem to be a deliberate choice of wording for ‘dole’. The poet is episodically preoccupied by the still sore wound of a removed tumour on his neck, and the image of the wound resurfaces every so often as a marker for mortality (maybe thanatophobia –fear of death– is a more common symptom of the disorientation of travel than I’d previously thought!):

I don’t want to think of the sinister totem birds of Den Haag

that haunted me horrendously after the death of my mother,

and flapped towards me again as I waited for the removal

of the ominous neck lump I sensed must be a malignancy,

and spread its wings over our marriage bed as seas raged

That passage almost seems to hinge on the g-alliterations –‘Haag’, ‘malignancy’, ‘wings’, ‘marriage’, ‘raged’. Much of this poem is a kind of internal monologue –here, the poet asks himself questions as to whether all is chance or somehow predestined, including those he has met on his travels, and also ponders on the possibility of a predetermination in names:

That night you threw dice that came up Khanty Mansisk

You’d been drinking away the days with Esa Hirvonen,

pondering the significance of his name: why would

Jesus of the Elk have been sent to you as a compadre

if you weren’t meant to see something in the wilds?

Why had you met Kalle the storyteller outside the Alko

that time if you weren’t meant to need his rocky strength

and his absurd wit to temper your wild flights of fancy?

The k-alliteration, serendipitous or not, is particularly striking: ‘Khanty Mansisk’, ‘drinking’, ‘Elk’, ‘Kalle’, ‘Alko’, ‘rocky’. The poet concludes that ‘predestination is not a belief I can easily sign up to./ There is only the present’; contemplating his wound and how he ‘got the diagnosis of three death spots,/ dark multiple headed dragon I foresaw and faced down’, he contemplates free will and chance as opposed to predestination, that he could have chosen to have ‘ignored my wife’s concerns and let the lump further ripen’. This passage concludes on a striking affirmation of what used to be rather patronisingly termed ‘self-improvement’ from this poet’s point of view as an autodidact from a working-class Northern background:

I could have been Billy Liar and stayed unsafe at home;

(That film made as many choices as On the Road for me

I’d never be the one to turn down the trip with Julie Christie.)

My heads packed full of this stuff: on a red brick estate

it’s all you can build your eventual escape routes from;

the lucky detritus of art and culture fallen from the table,

just enough inspiration to keep going, to see it through –

the loneliness of the long distance poet, Sisu in Finnish

tempered by poetry, comedy, punk, flashy shards of rock’n’roll.

Willoughby’s travelling verse than swerves into the sinuous Ginsbergesque as he describes Esa, one of his Finnish companions:

The kind of man who’d invite you to go to Siberia

in a post festival downtown downbeat shady green bar

after three days of binging on black underworld potions,

caught in the surging ebb and flow of his runo days

with malt whisky and beer chasers beginning to kick in

with the growling literary conversation never diminished;

your slowed down Boro gabble, his ponderous deep drawl:

One almost gets the feel of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh sort of scenario:

…as we sink into the sea green

light of another day in the shady bar world discussing

the necessary relationship of ugliness to beauty

the hidden tenderness in the works of Charles Bukowski

I particularly like the close to this passage with its parochial touch back to the poet’s home and its local phrases and sayings:

Once it’s said there’s no going back: the Teesside iron

in the backbone will sustain you far away from home:

chant now – the smoke in the lungs and the fire in the bones,

the smoke in the lungs and the fire in the bones

the smoke in the lungs and the fire in the bones.

Before describing the rest of his Finnish fellow-travellers, Willoughby itemises his cultural companions, books and a cassette tape:

I selected my companions from our new home randomly –

light travelling was desirable so only a slim volume of

Songs of Innocence and Experience (unillustrated)

a basic (useless) Russian Guide and Thubron’s In Siberia

made it in my back pack with a tape of Blonde on Blonde

and my ancient battered walkman…

…

Finally, stuffed in my back pocket a crumpled print out

of Ob-Ugrian folk songs in poorly rhymed translations

The alliterative effect heightens kinetically with the locomotion:

day and night in clanking train heading through the Urals

on the platzenkartz upper bunk I doze on, killing time,

as the steppes take over from suburban settlements

while William Blake sings ‘weep ‘weep in my back pocket,

There then follows a comparison to the Hammer film set on a train to Hell, and Peter Cushing morphs into Osip Mandelstam on the page. The alliterations and rhythms of the lines are infectious: ‘with Kyril the curly haired convivial soft pornographer/

breaking out his private stash of black label vodka’. The gushing language delights in itself, pouring forth image after image:

Ash clung to Esa’s Christ beard, making him a grey Pompeii

figure whilst we guffawed and snorted beer from our lout-snouts

he sat still and bewildered with man of constant sorrow eyes

hanging on to his lace thin dignity, as we pulled into Moscow

the waitress handing him a napkin with no hint of a smile;

a Russian Veronica clothed in the palest hue of the sky

offering him only stern succour as I contemplate Vlad Lenin,

avoid Kalle’s eye, attempt to wipe off my conspirator’s grin.

Willoughby is deft at description and the use of sense-impression, as in this passage:

In the Moscow station in the new free market Russia

in the gaze of the marble eyes of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

an old, old man slowly dropped his wooden stick

in the neon room looking over at the newly ironic statue,

how it clattered harshly on the cold marble cafeteria floor

as we drank hot watery coffee on arrival from Petersburg!

Willoughby occasionally surprises us with internal and end-line rhymes which contribute to the melodic almost singsong sense of the poem as a whole: ‘…my thumb and finger/ caressed the St Christopher mother gave me long ago/ as we passed the heroes’ murals of the Moscow Metro’. Willoughby was brought up Roman Catholic, something he evokes with the nostalgia of an agnostic –or perhaps a ‘lapsed’ Catholic:

I remembered the Sunday candles and those stations

of the cross carried out in Lent, how the depths of her in prayer

silently threading the rosary beads through work worn hands

The poet sums up Catholicism for him as ‘the religion that still haunts me’. One assumes, with mentions of ‘meditation’ and ‘satori’ the poet has since experimented with some form of Buddhism. Sense impressions permeate this poem –particularly olfactory ones, and smell is arguably the most memory-inducing:

At South Bank I get the smell of incense in my nostrils

instead of the pungent sulphur stench of brimstone

from the shut-down, silent coke ovens so familiar here.

The thickets of description pile on hypnotically as alliteration bristles on the tongue:

on the Smith’s Dock Road, looking for clues in the overgrowth

from the wild undergrowth bursting through broken fences,

in the graffiti on the junkyard wall, in a discarded worker’s glove,

a red tall poppy, swirls of barbed wire and an old circus poster

…

contemplate the wabi-sabi Buddha orange of worker’s glove

I photographed against the dusty path where wildflowers

poked through the fence from the old steelworks’ verge

dangling over the five fingers that have no need for hands

Baudelaire’s Terrain Vague reversed; industry receding

the opposite of mineral and gas rich Siberian hinterlands.

Willoughby has a very filmic eye and this is played on impressively in the following phantasmagorical passage when scenes from the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin merge into Abba circa ’76 and then back to contemporary Russia:

Ville our reluctant leader calls us all to the Uralic train

as Sergei Eisenstein whispers in my ear: check out this montage –

of the steps from Potemkin to the old, old man’s bleary eyes

opening to Agnetha and Anni-Frid still Top of the Pops

provoking from him a long heartfelt sigh, cut to them

singing the volga boat song and segueing into a chorus

of Money Money Money as next cut screens frozen homeless,

with their beards of frost and their winter hearts stopped,

getting zipped into bags in morgues in a few months’ time

now the state has stopped cradling them in unwieldy paws,

next the attendants discuss the exploding Chechen widows:

End-rhymes become more frequent:

the topic of today lingering in the near future day-mare feature

as we move sharply between the metallic tracks and lines

I try to show Sergei my forefathers in the trip’s foundations

looking at the sleepers for the tell tale Dorman Long signs

before we are transported by this otherworldly locomotive

over the distant mountains to where the golden lady shines.

I particularly like the p-alliteration in the following trope: ‘Ville tells us of a recent spate of deaths of drinkers/ who imbibed a concoction of paint thinner and cheap perfume,/ and to beware of accepting any random stranger’s hip flask,/ lest it turn us all bad potato blind…’ –‘paint’, ‘cheap’, ‘perfume’, ‘accepting’, ‘hip’, ‘potato’. But if that’s infectious, the more culturally acclimatised k-alliterations of the following lines are positively intoxicating: ‘The track and train’s rattle sounds just like balalaika music,/ Kalle and Esa start singing Kalinka, Kalinka, Kalinka Moloko!’ and the ks continue stalk through the lines with ‘walkman’, ‘Siberski Korona’, ‘flasks’ and the strikingly Dylan Thomas-esque phrase ‘all kalinking day’. With ‘Korona’ and the later image ‘milk guzzlers’ I’m –no doubt irrelevantly– reminded of the Korova Milk Bar in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and the fact that the Droogs’ idiolect, ‘Nadsat’, is basically Russian-corrupted English.  

Some passages are absolutely hypnotic in terms of description, images, sense impressions –particularly olfactory and gustatory– rhythm, alliteration, and serendipitous internal and sometimes end-of-line rhymes (to my mind blank verse with occasional accidental rhymes as and when they turn up naturally is the most effective form for long narrative poems):

Through my half-cut pupils the carriage matron’s Brezhnev’s wife

beetle browed, sitting stern and lumpen by the hot water boiler,

that sacred fountain of the long distance economy carriage.

Her pungent coffee masks the smell of ripe feet dangling,

protruding from the rows of public bunks that line aisles

of the carriage all down both sides in clusters of eight.

One travelling group, of an unidentifiable ethnicity,

exudes strangely the sweet sharp smell of Spanish lemons,

And there’s a real sense of humanity and earthiness, replete with the stream-of-consciousness style, quite Joycean in juxtapositions of the scatological with the high cultural: 

filling my mind with black Goya visions as I clutch my cock

and try to piss straight into the stinking toilet’s hole

misquoting: the dream of reason brings forth monsters

as though the mantra will protect my threatened soul;

I’m worried about the silent man who breathes smoke

from out of the cancer hole in his prison tattooed neck

who stands between the carriages in a nicotine cloud

with the stare of one with absolutely nothing left to lose,

I’m glad I don’t know the meaning of his jailhouse tattoos

We switch back ‘Towards Redcar’ where ‘a skipped heartbeat makes you fear the fear’, and that ‘fear’, I sense, is the fear of death which for some of us, especially poets, is ever-present in mind; there’s a sense that here the poet is trying to calm his beating heart and beating mind, as if trying to abate a panic attack by meditative techniques of focusing: ‘employ breathing strategies, empty the dark spots/ out through the palms of your hands’. This experience reminds the poet of his brush with a near-fatal cancer some time before, and how back then he learnt to focus on the moment: 

deal with the now, carve out a little non-thinking time, focus

your eyes away from lines of pine after shrinking pine, realise

the train full of poets is one of the memories used to survive

when your head swam with the implications of part of you

already being dead inside, that eternity was there in every journey

if you used imagination’s key to open up one of the spots in time,

There then comes a wonderful flourish of ghostly nostalgia for the poet’s native derelict industrial home:

Outside the window the dead forms of the steelworks’ buildings,

that haunt you because they are more vivid in your mind’s eye,

play their own music made of many layers of voices of forgotten men

who worked hard shifts inside to keep their children fed and alive,

but you cannot pick out any word to help a single voice survive.

The panic is corroborated: 

You didn’t know how to keep the fear beast from his feast

on the fast skips of the life pump in the days of the diner,

chess was not your game as you got another vodka down

on top of some fried eggs hoping the panic would subside

Then the ghost of Mayakovsky distracts Willoughby ‘from atop a dainty doily dressed table’. Willoughby lands back with a bump in his native Redcar, on a train terrorised by well-lubricated football supporters whose team has just lost a match:

Redcar: a bunch of rowdy auld lads stumble off singing,

bring me back to the now with a sudden whiff of danger

as they start to terrorise all my fellow passengers,

full of bitter and cheap shots stirred up by football failure

Willoughby notes how the shared supporting of a football team ‘doesn’t always lead to solidarity but bloodshed,/ still carry terrace rhythms in my head: a bass-line armoury’. There then ensues a beautifully judged passage hinged with g- and c-alliterations and filled with brilliantly observed descriptions:

A Middlesbrough granny talks soft to her grandchild

trying to pull her frightened eyes off the ageing man-boys

from the fading frontline gang, she’s too long in the tooth

to tell them to mind their ps and qs and the conductor’s

staying well away to live to collect tickets on another day.

when they’re gone she visibly relaxes, her stiff shoulders

lose the weight and the little girl talks about snowmen

while I remember the long years that passed by before

my daughter and I got to build one, when my weekend

and a snowfall at last coincided: will we use old coal Dad?

Yes we’ll use coal love, carrots for a nose and carbon for eyes.

I recall my other protection on the platzencartz plunge:

the little blue photo album with precious pieces of frozen time

when my magical gift and me would Saturday adventure

along the shores and up the hills to rock pools and bilberries.

Here the ‘frozen time’ of old photographs and memories nicely echoes the poet’s previous attempt to palliate a panic attack by meditatively focusing on ‘spots in time’. 

Between Stations is, at times, highly didactic, very much verse-travelogue; this didacticism is never overbearing but always fascinating and much of it is, after all, verbalised by Willoughby’s travelling companions:

On the bunk below me a white haired babushka lies in bed

her little granddaughter sleeping opposite. Above, Kalle says

be careful getting down now don’t dangle your balls man

over the narrow, hard bunk’s raised edge, we are like

strange trolls living above this innocent little family.

It’s interesting the fearsome figures of Russian mythology

and old folk tales may well be of Fenn-Ugric ethnicity

have you noticed how my classic Finnish upturned nose

is like a troll or elfs? And it’s not difficult to see with his

long blonde hair hanging free how my mate’s daughter

awoke once with two Finn bards in her house and told me

she thought the king of the elves and the king of the fairies

were crashing on their Middlesbrough living room floor.

There’s a lusciously alliterative trope in ‘stopping by on the way to fitful sleep notices the little one/ carefully hides his pocket bottle and speaks softly’. Willoughby’s reveries, however, often have a harder edge of social realism, as in the following:

Reading songs of innocence I hear William singing gaily

about the joy of the frolicking lamb and am carried off

into a dream world where the children aren’t shoved down

mines and up chimneys and shot in school gymnasiums

or beaten at checkpoints…

Some startling alliterative effect in the following flourish:

I see the bruise darkening on the babushka’s battered brow

as she inspects my wee attempts at human credentials

the little girl feeding ducks, the little girl in daddy’s arms

amongst the grandiose gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey,

In the next passage Willoughby goes full tilt into contemporary polemic on the parlous state of British society and how after years of remorseless Tory austerity the poorer communities are returning to pre-welfare state Thirties-style ghettoes with all the social diseases associated with the slums of that period (and the recent shocking blaze that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a council tower block housing 600 of the poorest residents in the richest borough of Kensington, West London, was hugely symbolic of structural urban neglect in those areas not yet ‘gentrified’ –ironically, the recent refurbishing involving zinc cladding on the outside of the tower actually caught light and carried the flames higher and all over the edifice):

how we once made so much wealth but have health rates

like some parts of the third world, how malnutrition and rickets

are returning, TB’s not dead and homelessness is growing

This is not hyperbole, it is indeed true that tuberculosis is coming back significantly in poorer communities due to too many people being packed in close proximity in properties partitioned into ‘rabbit hutch’ flats and bedsits in our cities where the tubercule bacilli bacteria can germinate and thrive. There is again some effective use of naturally falling rhyme:

They are driving the workers out of the city with house prices.

William Blake said that brothels are built of bricks of religion

and that all the prisons are constructed with bricks of law

and now this is what we have all been working for

Willoughby’s polemic cranks up to a steepening pitch of justifiable fury –a poetically controlled tirade against Tory-driven austerity cuts and social cleansing –or ‘gentrification’ as some euphemise it– and it’s particularly heartening to read another poet specifically calling out the fiscal and rhetorical attacks on the unemployed, sick and disabled (which I have written about at length in my latest Smokestack collection Tan Raptures): 

clearing out the capitals driving the suffering out of sight

with invisible bricks of economy, deaf to the howls of the sick,

disabled and dying stripped of benefits by sanctimonious pricks

pontificating on shirkers, scroungers and hard working families

and tossing thousands more on the rigged market’s scrapheap.

Is this deep rage within me what gripped Lenin’s gut the day he

jumped out of the moving Tampere train to stay free? How can it

serve our small city with its existential motto Erimus: we shall be?

The narrative swerves back to historical and post-industrial Teesside in another of the poet’s masterfully alliterative and assonantal displays dripping with polemic:

I begin to reflect again how some of those who lost their lives

to the iron from our own haunted hills that line this short route

held hopes once that Bolshevik ideals could free them too,

from their meagre existence in this boomtown hinterland;

near-slaves to the devouring Victorian furnace fires,

always kept in debt to the mine-owner’s company stores,

their iron masters expanded into gross giants on profits

made from the world’s desire for hard but malleable metal.

They walked up and out to listen to radicals like Shepard,

defied bosses’ orders and sticks of the company guards while

long lines, many made like these below me from Teesside steel,

were laid into wilderness across the steppes and the great plains

opening for cheap whisky, smallpox and free enterprise –

The polemic then departs for America and its disenfranchised native inhabitants many of whom are still, unbelievably, hemmed in reservations:

swathes cut through peoples with suspect theologies:

Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Apache, Crow,

Manifest Destiny on its iron horse brought death to buffalo.

And it is here that industry, something missed for its gutting by Thatcherism in the Eighties which resulted in destroying mining and manufacturing communities in the poet’s native Teesside and heaping unemployment on its population, is here, in the context of Russia and America seen as something oppositely exploitative and destructive in itself:

In Siberia, our exported steel made alliance with slaughter

on a high speed locomotive named Historical Necessity –

ideology hid the relentless reaping of modernisation,

futurists praised machine, speed and sleek locomotion

as shamanic bones grew stark in the hidden graves,

steppe roamers were ‘encouraged’ into mines and factories,

Cossacks were commanded to swap horses for shining tractors,

roads and tracks advanced to the circle of the Arctic,

Khanty and Mansi seers joined Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse

in the broken circles of the ghost dancers’ hoop,

those lost caretakers, not owners, of the precious land

where nature’s spirit groans now beneath the whip hand

of all those who only believe in ever-growing production,

don’t know Blake’s wisdom of a world that can’t be measured.

The v- and k-alliterations in the following passage give the lines a real kick:

Esa Hirvonen starts twitching in nocturnal vodka withdrawal

he has fallen through a holy lovi again and become a bat

shapeshifter flittering and skittering through inky night air

serenaded by monk spirit with matching wild man beard

he turned himself into back on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg

and became, in the dining car, half jokingly…

Willougby’s soundtrack of the mind has now moved on from 1976 to ’78:

with a clutch of formidable Fenn-Ugrian/Ruski mammas

shaking his let-down tumbling prophet’s hair apocalyptically

to the unlikely flashing disco’s unrequested Boney M track

blaring out ‘Ra Ra Rasputin lover of the Russian Queen’

On a liquid diet of ‘shots and bottles’, Esa is alcoholic with delirium tremens:

in Udmurtia he heard the voices of the Fenn Ugrian dead

before he met his fox familiar in a mushroom style vision,

…

last night I saw his limbs twitching under bunk blankets

and swear he started drinking again in his sleep to stop it

his pocket vodka medicine response…

A game of chess is played as the scenery grows vaster, described beautifully: ‘as the vast steppes roll by in visions of endless grass/ and the incredible shrinking Northern birches glow silver/ in the sluggish rising sun’s autumnal morning light’. Once more, Willoughby’s guiding ghosts from the writing-desk in the sky join him: ‘I hear poor Osip applauding and/ Mayakovsky snort approval/ as he brings down my helpless king to the level of a pawn/

Old Blakie refuses advice…’. Willoughby again reminisces on his native Teesside:

…all Teessiders know that their worst fears

are realised as the spaces in between are now black not tangerine

from the furnace and the flare stacks, the shade that had faded to pale

since fiery childhood nights…

The closing paragraph of this passage is a particularly striking example of the many prosodic and linguistic ingredients that mingle to make the winning Willoughby goulash of language: heightened alliteration, assonance and sibilance, rhythmic impetus (often sprung rhythm), rangy lines, strong images:

Now from this little train’s window I note inky blackness, see spaces

between the stars and try not to calculate the distance from birth

to death thinking instead of Jesus of the Elk suffering on the tracks

when we disembarked at stops to stretch our legs and purchase sausage

from women of indeterminate age with each hard year etched on them.

Not to mention an occasional, serendipitous use of subtle internal rhyme: note the chiming of ‘sausage’ and ‘age’ –even, partially, ‘purchase’ and ‘sausage’– and the ‘women’ and ‘them’ of the last line. The poem as a whole begins to reach its peak awareness or epiphany around this point –the i-assonance is striking in the first line of the following excerpt, while the more blatant end-rhymes of the third and fourth lines is notable:

Slicing the salami with a Swiss army knife to take with watery tea

brewed up with the carriage matron’s rationed slow trickle

we talk about things that haunt us: the things we cannot change

the soldiers dead from his army service, the lovers out of range;

We now learn that ‘Esa has done his national service, hard to imagine him in uniform,’ and that there are ‘things he’d seen but had never been able to write a poem about.

Esa sometimes carries a weight upon him that can’t be shared

that disappears in his flaring electric glow when he hits the stage,

the aspect of the poet that cannot be seen in words on the page.

Again, the end-rhymes are notable, all the more so because they happen so seldom. Willoughby now begins to meditate on the posterity of the poet that is in the ink in the print on the page of his books –assuming he is a published poet!– and his name inscribed on the spine as a clothbound headstone, as it were, the creative itch to somehow outlast oneself, but this posterity, even fantasised immortality, comes as well through one’s words living on in the minds of other men afterwards:

The page is all that’s left of you whispers Osip Mandelstam

even if you left them only in the heads of others to be saved,

I think I have left and lost far too many in the recesses of my head

whilst working in thankless jobs or pissing it all up the wall

but the moment of the poet in the poem is eternal says Blake

Osip Mandelstam’s optimistic aphorism omits only the unthinkable problem of all humankind’s possible eventual extinction, which would of course preclude even the long-term –but not infinite– consolation for the mortal that his poetry or other writing might somehow last forever through the minds of future humans; this impossible projection jettisons the possibility that ultimately what has been passed on can no more be passed on once the last human passes on. Perhaps Blake’s more transcendental, spiritualistic aphorism is more hopeful in its Swedenborgian flexibility of hinted afterlives, even if it risks a slip into solipsism which Osip Mandelstam almost avoids in his: Mandelstam’s glimpse of posterity is dependent on other people, Blake’s is self-dependent.

Willoughby’s ruminations tilt into the misty realms of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, as he contemplates the possibility that creative talent, poetic talent, inspiration, something divined in the imagination, is not necessarily the unique product of an individual’s mind (or soul), but is something channelled through them, perhaps from spirit guides, meaning the poet, writer, artist, musician, creative –is not so much an inventive genius as an amanuensis or medium; this is something numerous creative minds, especially poets, have speculated on in various periods, perhaps less so in our more secular age, but it’s certainly something I’ve often contemplated much myself, and have expressed in some of my own poetry, and share with Willoughby a very strong inner-sense that there is some truth in it (interestingly, like Willoughby, I’m was also raised a Roman Catholic, am also, as an adult, a ‘lapsed Catholic’ socialist, and also have Scandinavian affinities –in my case, in relation to Sweden). After all, the original meaning of the term inspiration is to inspirit, to put the spirit into something; it’s only because we live in a more secular age that this underlying definition is neglected. This tilt into mysticism implies a plurality of meanings in the poem’s title: the stations the poet is between while writing it can be interpreted metaphysically as Birth and Death or Heaven and Hell as much as literally/geographically Helsinki and Novosibirsk; suddenly we’re travelling light on the Swedenborgian Express. 

From the mystical to the chthonic, the earthy, the physical, in another brilliantly descriptive, alliteratively bristling passage:

a spine-jarring bus from Pityak to Khanty Mansisk –

take a piss stop on rough roads, empty tins of tasteless beer

purchased at a station cafe by brave comrades Kalle and Aki,

look out over devastated cut down Taiga, and endless steppes at

the vast dark space lit by myriad oil, furnace and gas fires,

those familiar orange skies in a science fiction landscape

that also feel homely only to those of us from Middlesbrough,

as men transform open plains to get at buried, revered remnants:

prehistoric fauna is alchemical black gold and coal paid for in blood.

Esa reaches down and casually hands you a fossil from the floor;

quartz, shale and fragments of old bones scattered round our boots:

wonder how far you’d have to wander off this pockmarked road

The poet’s associations flit from Siberia to industrially derelict Saltburn –where he reminisces on ‘The last shift …witnessed’– and to Finland, apparently itself fairly rich in iron and steel as the poet’s native Teesside:

But I know it’s still iron and steel that somehow connects me to words:

in Finland the first time with a group of poets Kalle invited us to stay

at the site of an iron age fort at Voipaala; when I first opened Kalevala,

it was at Runo 10: the origin of iron, where the shaman Vainamoinen

must find the spell to stop the blood flowing fast from close to the bone,

the wound an axe has made, seeks the roots of the problem in the stone.

Remember the realisation as you got off the first Siberia train and Kalle

pointed out the Dorman Long sign on the railway sleeper? Recognition

that the tracks that bore you here really were from your hometown…

The poet and his fellow Finnish verse-revellers spend some time ‘in the nearby dance hall the DJ puts on Bony M and Jesus of the Elk/ is really transformed into my dream of disco Rasputin’; the ‘raggy-arsed poets’ are then ‘…joined by Mikhael –/ the translator kodiak bear man with black beard who looks/ like he should be carrying a machine gun in a violin case’. Willoughby’s philosophical ruminations abound: ‘I ponder all the secrets

I can never know, the truths or lies of past broken relationships,

the family matters taken to the grave with grandparents schooled

in the sudden shift of subject and the use of the tight pursed lip,

The poet notes ‘unsteady weather has torn/ the roof off the building just around the corner and the rumble grows/ ominously for yet another bombing, yet another war on terror’. This passage grows more phantasmagorical as the magical becomes the grimly imaginable rigged with reminders of mortality: 

every minute of the one journey will get emptied of the sacred joy

of old Blakie’s imagination, every grain of sand a suspect device

not the tiny gate way to the infinite, the touchstone of eternity,

But the poet remains defiantly poetic, spiritualistic:

…the eternal rocking of the raging white horse winter sea,

I begin to rethink the meaning of the motto we shall be, we shall be

remember the day I looked out over ten thousand miles of steppes

into the taiga on the horizon and felt Blake’s Tyger looking back at me.

As if in a dreamlike trance the poet contemplates the destination of his trip:

The whole conference feels like a dream I had on the Siberian train:

I wonder if all of everything since is still part of the fantasia arising

from the rattle of the tracks outside Pityak, it’s time soon to hold a stone

in the palm of the hand gathered from Saltburn’s old smuggler’s shore

so its heft can outweigh memory…

Then he recalls details:

…I remember meeting Riina Katajavuori again

in the elevator on the morning of Fenn Ugric conference, me and her,

after the toasts of the night before, missing our children with her baby

only recently born, we measured our distances in the same non-language

and that they ‘talked about the natural etymology of our names/ how hers translates as juniper mountain and mine by the willows’. A badly hungover Willoughby attempts to deliver his talk at the conference:

At the packed lecture theatre everybody’s mood went giddy but mine –

I had a new name: Willaboo Andy, Chairman of the British Delegation.

There was a Union Jack on the stage, I was a panel member

representing the whole nation: the Finns laughed in the audience

till they fell off their chairs, as I sat there, hungover-dishevelled-desperate

for a morning beer, trying to not draw attention to myself, bluffing it

I thought as I hit the panel’s translation button…

Saltburn again:

as the tiny diesel train slowly moves towards the off-white Pease bricks

of Saltburn’s Victorian railway arches, a town built on industrial profit

by one of the sons of the first masters of rail, steam, iron and coal,

The poet returns to the image of the ‘The Golden Woman’ depicted by the shaman of the Khanty, a reindeer-herding people of Western Siberia, and this leitmotif manifests very much as Willoughby’s own White Goddess Muse; we then get a surreal trope: Under ‘the memorial to her power we pose and cavort, find some craic/ about flying saucers and desire for Amazonian goddesses from outer space’ (note the Irish term ‘craic’ which means a bit of gossip or enjoyable conversation and is also commonly used in Northumberland, particularly Newcastle, as well as, presumably, Teesside). Willoughby’s reverie then swerves through female icons of Catholicism and Christianity through to the secular, proletarian women of Soviet-era poster art who, in their hard-working sinuous depictions, are Amazonian:

but secretly I looked at the serenity the artist put in the image of her face

remembered Fatima, Bernadette and Lourdes and revolved old thoughts

about the female power of the universe, remember how it’s easier to pray

to or via a woman’s image, think about the sensitive eyes of Jesus Christ

in renaissance paintings and tacky memes and the masculinity of Soviet

propaganda where strong worker women bulge with muscle and purpose

equipped with biceps and iron will, drive tractors and smash fascism,

Willoughby then muses on the creative, moon-driven femininity in himself as a poet in an almost Romantic lyrical flourish:

She’s still on my mind the golden woman, the idea she’s in all women,

all the women I have known and failed, the woman I love now back home

and in me too if I learn to listen, in the forests and by the running streams.

I particularly like the following trope with its wonderful deployment of alliteration and o-assonance: ‘small wooden dwellings for the workers and the people of the Steppes/

no longer roaming nomads: houses contain and sanitise, homogenise/ the cultures, bring small comforts…’. Next, ‘a drive to the hill where the Ob and Irtisch rivers meet far below,

making one mighty stream to flow into the circle of the Arctic’ yet a sense that, in spite of the vast distance from his native North-East England, the Siberian landscape has geological similarities: ‘so far from home but on another iron leyline,/ this was ferric country, the mines below my feet like the ones from home’. 

Willoughby brilliantly communicates the sense of vertiginous disorientation and existential angst of the sensitive mind while travelling:

Stalin gave the native people ‘productive’ lives beneath us in vast caverns

and the monument is a grotesque tribute to their former nomadic lives.

There’s a glass lift in it, we ride it to the top like an inverted miners’ cage,

at the top I look out, not to the inviting North Sea of child memory,

not to the seven sisters of local legend or the purple heather tint of moors,

but to the endless flat plains of bogland and steppes, ten thousand miles

and a million years of something stretched to nothing understood,

to the point of insanity by sheer vastness of the plains, endless horizons.

Infinity is as incomprehensible and terrifying a concept as is oblivion, and the splintering effect of the mind in travel can heighten the death-sense to a vertigo (I know, I’ve always experienced this myself when travelling abroad). And this is a Kierkegaardian vertigo, the Danish philosopher’s ‘dizziness of freedom’ –anxiety. The poet mentally returns to his native Cleveland for some historical commentary:

At Marske with its ancient Viking name you can see from the train to the sea;

I have looked for hours at the waves, it’s a Cleveland boy’s common dream

to glean ideas of adventure, James Cook grew up here, before the iron seam

was uncovered…

Willoughby then turns his historical eye back to Siberia:

In Siberia I thought how men below had not so long ago roamed the wild

what a soul cage they entered to keep up with the plan for a new world!

I knew as I looked across the plains too the foolishness of Napoleon

and of Hitler, here in Eurasia a thousand battalions could die in winter

west of the Urals they empty the cities and hide in this vast unknown

waiting for their allies: the ice and snow giants, to deal a devastating blow.

The poet’s episodic thanatophobia rumbles towards full-blown panic again:

I felt the panic rising and breathed deep to get myself under some control,

a man could disappear here, brushed out of time like Blake’s little fly

in a space like this it’s easy to see how millions of humans could die:

But then Willoughby reminds himself: 

fear is overcome with love and common feeling, connection with

Russia, with Siberia, with the teachers and the myriad dead below

this moment, where terror became an ecstasy I cannot describe,

I stored away and used to fight for life on the sandy winter beach,

And the poet resolves:

Eternity is in a million blades of grass, heaven in a chunk of ironstone

in our hands, not utopian, there are none so blind who will not see

we do not own the land, we cannot claim it as private or public property

we are made of it and return to it and all that’s left is infinite energy,

There is an inner-silence which the poet takes with him back from the vast, ego-shrinking wilderness of the Siberian steppes:

and the silence is the treasure that I brought down and took back home

to be examined without language in the precious moments of being alone

to be carried carefully, returned to in the minutes before words form

in emergencies of health and faith, in moments of overflow of facts,

retreated to when confronted with Brecht’s wrongly named Bestial Acts.

One’s reminded here of the concept of an ‘oceanic consciousness’, something of which many thinkers and writers have written, coined by Romain Rolland as ‘oceanic feeling’ to mean the fragmentation of the individual ego and its immersion in a universal awareness, a religious or meditative state, something which the writer Arthur Koestler alluded with a sense of peace as he planned his a very calm suicide. 

As the poet returns to his native Teesside he reminisces once more on its haunting industrial past:

It’s quiet here on the coast now with no notes in our Teesside Requiem

no roar from the fire’s furnace, no steady note of a steelworks hum,

we all mumble our mantra the smoke in the lungs the fire in the bones:

we used to build ships, we used to make steel, we worked the blue stone,

There then comes an inspirited, uplifting and defiant spiritualistic-cum-socialistic train of thought, nicely complemented by naturally falling end-rhymes:

want to tell the people everywhere; consider this word: bountiful

it doesn’t mean you should start counting and hoarding what can’t be kept

its meaning is all encompassing, can only be brought about by sharing all,

dream of a new international thinking, cause the corporations to fall.

As the ‘voices rant and babble online, in parliaments, on television’, the poet’s thoughts are elevated far above the everyday murmurings of consumer capitalism, and as they often do, drift onto a stream of thought punctuated by Catholicism:

I have no intention of joining any party that seeks to control me

and will not start to let form or decorum make me watch my words.

I dismount the shabby Teesside train recalling Advent and Lent:

old rituals observed in a childhood shifted out of synch with time,

While the Protestant denominations were ever more pragmatic and practical in their applications of Christian teaching to industrial purpose:

industrialists funded temperance and Methodist churches

on our expanding ferric frontier to keep the workers sober,

washed and so called civilised for the rigours of the daily grind.

Then comes a beautifully observed depiction of a Catholic childhood in the North-East of England and a bittersweet meditation on the doubt-filled and guilt-ridden residues left in lapsed Catholic adulthood:

Hungry Irish held onto Catholicism to suffer beautifully in,

left redemption urges in the weave and weft of my words,

left echoes of a rapidly ageing moral world in my time line.

We all know, began Father Brennan’s shut-eyed Easter sermon,

that men and boys unlike women do not cry, no, they do not cry.

Candles dripped wax tears onto fingernails to be peeled off:

counting the tedious minutes as Christ was led to crucifixion.

Reflect how the church was still full then back in the early seventies

benches lined with shipbuilders, process workers, factory girls and wives.

Again, in the following passage, brilliant uses of alliteration, assonance and sense-impression really bring the scenes to life:

On the way back from Siberia as winter’s first bite gripped the bones

I saw a holy moment of my own that will always give me hope

in Pityak Market we wandered, ate shazlik more rat than chicken,

laughed at Finn Rock star image in the ramshackle men’s toilets

wondering if whoever put it up could see the homo-erotic allure

in the bare chest stance of Ville Valo…

The haunted, mystical, dipsomaniac poet Esa is here depicted through the eyes of some children almost like a kind of clowning magician or Pied Piper:

…his pocket bottle’s lit him up

his hair is matted like Rasputin’s though he’s off stage the blue lights on

he wanders off up a dim path to the outer stalls where he seeks a gift

for a lady he may have a chance with back in Moscow, a mob of urchins

in his wake, we worry he won’t return, lose sight of him, as the tension

hits its height he reappears with children leading him by the sleeve,

he mimes, they laugh, he goofs around with his purple poet’s hat

they are are all lit up by his inner radiance. For the first time I believe

that its possible that love might save this glowing suffering man.

Esa is certainly one of the most colourful characters I’ve come across in a narrative poem. Perhaps inevitably, a spot of sickness ensues towards the last lap of the return journey: ‘Rita’s bad water gives Kalle and me a type/ of evil dysentery on the last limping leg back to the Finland Station/ while Esa and Aki get robbed by bad policemen in St Petersburg’. 

Finally we come to the closing passage of this immersive, impressive and accomplished long poem, a fitting final flourish –philosophical, polemical, spiritual, mournful, hopeful– which really needs to be excerpted in full to appreciate:

I sit until the last passenger disembarks onto the concrete platform,

only minutes have passed on the mobile phone’s luminous face

but we are stretched and torn in a chasm between past and present

round here too – between the age of steel and ships receding,

and an Empire falling, the advent of microchips and hypermarkets.

Cyberspace, Worldwide Web, Social Networks whirl a maelstrom,

full of claim and counterclaim, truth, lies, hate and propaganda;

the shock of my own fifty years spanning such a shift in epochs!

Shocking that this information age and cheap budget airline travel,

that sets you free from time to time, year on year, to write and wander,

has done nothing much for those people still eking out their lives

in this sprawling post-industrial landscape, despite its weird wonders.

All the money made here has left us is its lingering remnants:

in the eerie moonscape of the last smouldering slag-heap

thin shades of pale smoke trace lines in a star-filled sky,

the dead blast furnace no longer dyes the night faint amber,

meanwhile out on the salt marshes a dirty winged swan

dips his curved neck in cold water to scrape for survival;

whilst out in Siberia one of the last tigers makes a slow kill.

I soft finger the scar on my neck, contemplate life and radiation

then take a long slow sip from a hip flask; between stations.

Andy Willoughby’s Between Stations really is a delight to read, a heartfelt and deep-thinking work taking in not only Blake, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Mandelstam, but also echoing the likes of Nordic thinkers Kierkegaard and Swedenborg; an extraordinary verse-travelogue of the soul, which takes us vast distances of landscape and thought, and tackles the vaster themes of life, friendship, love, anxiety and death with great poetic technique and courage. Highly recommended.

Alan Morrison © 2017

Alan Morrison on

Bob Beagrie

Leásungspell

(Smokestack Books, 2016)

124pp

www.leasungspell.com

Bob Beagrie’s Leásungspell has to be one of the most linguistically ambitious long poems published in quite some time, being composed in what its author describes as ‘a heteroglossic hybrid of Old English, Modern English and Northumbrian, Yorkshire and Cleveland Dialects’. A guide to the pronunciation of the ten vowel-sounds used and five extra consonants is studiously provided to help the reader navigate the strange text, which calls to mind Anglo-Saxon tinged with Chaucerian English; as well as a compendious Glossary of names and terms; and an audio link at www.leasungspell.com usefully provides an aural sense of the pronunciations – all at the back of the book.

Such historically rooted, demotic-esoteric, linguistic-hybrid verse seems at the moment to be carving out its own niche in contemporary English poetry, and Smokestack Books has been quick to champion it, both in Beagrie, and also Steve Ely whose Oswald’s Book of Hours, Englaland and, most recently, Incendium Amoris, delve the Anglo-Saxon demotic, something that seems to be cementing itself almost as his style-signature. But Beagrie’s Leásungspell, unapologetically, takes this type of linguistic experiment to its nth degree. 

Not being sufficiently qualified in Old English –or North-Eastern dialect– it’s almost impossible for me to critically review the main body of the text of Leásungspell, mainly because my grasp of the text is significantly limited by its linguistic abstruseness –at least, on first and second glances, that is; and though I did appreciate at least the hinted-at sounds of the poem’s singing lines, my comprehension of it, in the main, is too vague to be able to analyse it (which is a bit of a pity: an approach whereby the text could have been written and published both in its pseudo-Old English and in modern English would, I’d have thought, have made a bit more sense). To illustrate this problem, here is the opening to the main body of the poem:

Huisht, lads, haad ya gobs

the lǽgens namd this Dunum Sinus

touh this fayer dai tar beo sliht segn

o’ thor mihtig stone burg wid the byh scimerian

gelic a sylfur scutel, blinden the eye

as God’s awn leoht, te sceaw me the gan

fram the Horne o’ Heortness stician streahtan

te the wafe-swell lic a beald hope fore firmnesse.

’touh in triewd I fele alyhtnys

te be ootsyde its fritgeard; an’ the festeran

stenc o’ mislice spellion widin

the flocc o’ God’s giefan scipo.

Mi arende beo hard ’touh nadinc ofermicel,

fram sculdor te lyfted fingors in faerness,

but thri dais trec at most, ’touh frecendlic –

la so ficol, fyl o’ hydden pliht,

beset wid demon an’ haden

But what I can comment on are the modern English Prologue and Epilogue of the main poem. The ‘Prologue: Hallowed Ground’, subtitled ‘A walk with Andy Willoughby to Anish Kapoor’s Temenos’, is a page’s worth of muscularly rhythmic rhyming verse in long rangy lines dripping with gorgeous images and infectious alliteration:

We are two grown-up-lost-boys gone awandering over the border

To mooch about the claggy bones of this town’s birth and boom

Trudging the cold, bleak wasteland of post-industrial disorder,

Under weatherworn stone faces staring stoically as from a tomb.

Industry’s bustle has ebbed to a trickle of warehouses, scrap yard

Desolate wharfs, gantries, rotting remains of the first coal staithes.

And here, again, the alliteration and assonance work brilliantly:

The Captain Cook, The Glass Barrel, The Lord Byron, The Ship –

(The town’s oldest pub where sea captains sat in the cabin out back

handing sailors their pay packets). Though there’s not one drip

From a working pump today. …

Beagrie displays a painterly talent for description:

Piles of coal hemmed in by sleepers stacked in khaki uniforms

(dreaming of Carboniferous forests). No one lives here anymore.

Vulcan Street, past the ground chosen by Bolkow and Vaughan

For the first iron works and their salt well, Middlesbrough pottery;

We ask how many corpses have washed up on these tidal banks

And reach the spirit cage, worm hole, a piece of divine jewellery,

The sense of place here is impeccable, the descriptions pile up hypnotically, and alliteration and assonance continue to do their work tantalising teeth and tongue: 

I’m swamped by the impression that it has always been there,

Pre-dating these empty docks, the railway lines and the site

Of the farmstead before the sprawl, even the muttered prayer

Of Hilda’s monk crossing the Tees to Streonshalh, and the hills

It holds in its lens; as if the negative space of its organic form –

(An airborne specimen of phytoplankton) applied its patient will

To be caught in the net, pegged into being by a crown of thorns,

Staking out a sacred space where gods, ghosts and monsters dwell.

The ‘Epilogue: Transported’ comprises 15 non-rhyming quatrains, but even though there are no end-rhymes here, the meter and sprung rhythm lend a cadence which feels a little like near-rhyme on the ear –here are the first three stanzas:

Reaching the top you grip upon a metal rail

Knees atremble on the Shimmering Way

Eyes fixed, resist the glance down at the drop,

The cross hatch shadow over slate grey water.

This bridge is a moment spanning a century

Suspending cloud from each blue girder

And a yellow gondola strung on steel sinews

Running the stream of traffic from bank to bank.

Ride the spine of the diplodocus skeleton

Frozen mid-munch on the weeds and sludge

Of muddy flats, silvered by sunshine at low tide;

On one side the marshes, wetlands to Seal Sands,

Beagrie’s intimate descriptions of the place in question are nicely couched, while the end-of-stanza enjambments lend a continuous fluidic quality to the poem as a whole, rather like the running water of the river depicted: 

The tangle of chemical plants, then on to Seaton.

On the other the urban sprawl of terraced houses

Town centre, church spires, looming tower blocks

And the distant, hooked peak of Odinsberg –

So maybe today this bridge has become Bifrost

Connecting us to the mead hall of a one eyed

Pagan god, a raven perched on each shoulder,

Watching a longboat glide up the steel river

To plunder the hamlets of Norton and Sockburn

To nail a Saxon skin to the door of their kirk,

Hack off a Christian head or two for goblets,

And you, as ripe for picking as a Bramble

The ‘Pagan god, a raven perched on each shoulder’ is an explicit reference to the Nordic leading god Odin (Woden in Anglo-Saxon), as, of course, previously cited in the place name ‘Odinsberg’. 

There is the occasional internal rhyme which adds to the poem’s cadences:

In mid-September; who once pricked a finger,

Who stubbed a bare toe and swore, who fell

Off a wall or out of a tree, who let a secret slip,

Who tossed a smooth pebble into the sea,

Beagrie intriguingly juxtaposes modern remembrances and associations with the ancient: 

Who declared, ‘I’ll love you forever!’ and meant it,

Who remembers the childish fear of the dark,

Who was once lost in a supermarket, who once

Spat ‘Who the hell cares?’ and refused to try,

Who over-did it at a party, threw up on the carpet,

Who once refused to admit ‘I’m sorry’ and then

Cried yourself to sleep; now stand wondering

If all this feeling is real, or just the blue-print

…

There then comes some poignant, deeply moving social comment on those working-class lives turned self-destructive: 

On threads that catch their belly roars, that churn

Your guts, and bring to mind the suicides

Who’ve faced the drop without a hope

Of bouncing back, and workmen who’d haul

Heavy bikes up the steep flights of steps

On bitter mornings to save a precious penny,

While industry’s flames set the sky ablaze,

Rumbling like a war machine through dreams

In that last verse the short and long ‘i’ assonances really do power the lines, as do the long ‘a’ assonances, which continue into the next verse, as do short ‘a’ assonances, one supposing that, this being a Northern poet and not a Southern poet, ‘past’ and ‘Blast’ are probably to be pronounced with the short rather than longer ‘a’-sound and so echoing ‘lads’, ‘lasses’ and ‘flash’:

Of local lads and lasses. Today the sleepless

River takes your thoughts away, past the mothballed

Blast furnace and out to sea, with the white flash

Of a gull’s wings as it banks in an effortless arc

The closing lines of the ‘Epilogue’ have a wonderfully haunted, wistful quality:

Beneath your uncertain feet, as if it is the Herald

And you the Witness to this expanding moment –

Caught mid-point upon the Rainbow Bridge,

Listening with pricked ears to the tell-tale creak

Of tectonics; of terrains – of histories, scraping

Against one another, and holding your breath,

Like you did climbing the stairs, late at night,

Hours after the time you’d promised to be home.

This is probably the shortest poetry review I’ve written yet, but the reason is, as aforementioned, the linguistic near-impenetrability of the main text which precludes close critical analysis, in part due to my own shortcomings in comprehending its Old English. For those who have read and grasped much of the 14^th century English of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, or, better still, the works of Chaucer, perhaps, with close and patient application, and with the assistance of Beagrie’s Grants for the Arts-funded audio accompaniment, all may be illumined, and appreciated for its author’s palpable and extraordinary linguistic application. 

Alan Morrison © 2017

Alan Morrison on

Larry Beckett

Paul Bunyan

(Smokestack Books, 2015)

96pp

Includes free CD of a complete live performance by Larry Beckett of Paul Bunyan

Long blank verse narrative poems seem to be resurgent in recent years, which is something to be celebrated and appreciated, especially since decades of postmodernist poetics have seen in the main a reductionism not only in terms of meaning but also in terms of form which has meant –with, of course, some exceptions– that the pared down shorter –or supplemental– poem form has predominated. But larger themes and longer narratives demand a longer poetic form and, in many cases, the entire length of a book. And it’s not simply the scope of themes or the length of narrative that demands a longer form, it’s also demanded if there’s to be a relatively unrestricted and ambitious exploration of poetic language.

The eponymous hero of the poem is a giant lumberjack from American folklore whose origins are in the oral traditions of North American loggers; Bunyan was later popularized by writer William B. Laughead in a 1916 promotional pamphlet for the Red River Lumber Company. Or, as the blurb on the back of the book explains: ‘Paul Bunyan re-tells the legend of the giant lumberjack for the twenty-first century. Drawing on logger folklore, James Stevens’ stories and the Davy Crockett almanacs, Larry Beckett’s poem is a modern epic in ‘long-winded’ blank verse’. 

The rangy sprung rhythm lines, muscular music and verbal exuberance of Larry Beckett’s Paul Bunyan calls to mind, at once, the lively narrative verse of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s blank verse Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, and the life-affirming lyrical transcendentalism of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson; American antecedents apart, one also gets the sense, to some extent, of the rapturous singsong style of Dylan Thomas, particularly passages of Under Milk Wood, and ‘Fern Hill’. Beckett’s buoyant blank verse bounces along with a joie de vivre which is instantly infectious on the ear and eye, catapulting itself off the page with sprung rhythm, comprising spondees (two long syllables) and trochees (a long then short syllable): 

Out of the wild North woods, in the thick of the timber

And through the twirling of the winter of the blue snow,

Within an inch of sunup, with the dream shift ending,

A man mountain, all hustle, all muscle and bull bones,

An easy winner, full of swagger, a walking earthquake,

A skyscraper, looking over the tallest American tree,

A smart apple, a wonder inventor, the sun’s historian,

A cock-a-doodle hero, a hobo, loud, shrewd, brawling,

Rowdy, brash as the earth, stomping, big-hearted, raw,

Paul Bunyan lumbered and belly-laughed back at the stars.

Some of the Americanisms present from the outset, such as ‘sunup’ and ‘smart apple’, lend a sumptuousness to the language and imagery which is immediately appetising. There’s no doubt in my mind that on the basis of its ebullient beginning alone, Paul Bunyan has an instant place in the canon of the American epic poem. 

The painterly descriptiveness of the following lines is exceptional, while the deluge of images become the more tangible for serendipitous euphonies, assonances and alliterations: 

He was rigged out in a slouch hat, a red work shirt

Under his faithful mackinaw with its hickory buttons,

Suspenders and high-water stag pants, which were tucked

Into his brass-hooked and buckskin-laced black boots,

And this foot-loose blue ox was sashaying at his side:

Babe, who was combed with a garden rake, who measured

Exactly forty-two ax handles and a plug of Star tobacco

Just look at the amount of k- and b-alliterations in those seven lines: ‘mackinaw’, ‘hickory’, ‘hooked’, ‘buckskin’, ‘black’, ‘ox’, ‘rake’, ‘exactly’, ‘ax’, ‘tobacco’; ‘brass’, ‘buckskin’, ‘black boots’, ‘blue’, ‘Babe’, ‘tobacco’; and the wonderful assonances: ‘slouch’, ‘hooked’, ‘boots’, ‘foot-loose blue ox’, ‘tobacco’ etc. This is very physical poetic language that cracks and crunches its way across the page and is absolutely intoxicating. 

Beckett plays much with colouristic imagery:

Out of the scud covering up the dusty morning stars,

The baby-blue snowflakes of the first blue snowfall

Were scurrying down sky-blue, all over, like butterflies,

In flurries, blue as Monday, blue as the moon, as heaven,

Decorating the pines, blue as a ribbon, blue as bluegrass,

As blue songs and blue laws, and glittering on the boughs

Like jays and berries: it was icing up the evergreens,

Sticking to itself, and stacking up in balls and drifts

Like fury, and the seconds were as tight as the icicles;

It was quiet like it’s quiet before the sour beginning

Of the redbreast’s la-de-dah…

Then, a bit later, we get ‘white pine’ to add to the wide spectrum of colours: blue, evergreen, redbreast, white pine. Beckett’s alliteration is in full throttle throughout and yet never seems to be obtrusive to itself or to the flow of the lines –while the colouristic imagery continues:

When the big stick was whittled on down to a whistle,

It crackled, it swished, it got the shivers in its limbs,

And when it snapped, it tilted, timber splintered, twigs

All tore off, and it rip-roared down in green confusion.

The phrase ‘green confusion’ is delightful. After building and pioneering the iconic North American log cabin, Bunyan is joined by a hullabaloo of fellow lumberjacks from a gallimaufry of ethnic backgrounds –Beckett beckons them in and the nicknames tumble forth in a poetic eruption on the page:

On the roofs and welded the timber as tight as anything.

Now all the burly, joking, gallivanting lumberjacks

Showed up and rolled in, sailing, thumbing, and hiking,

Foreigners out of the old countries, and talking funny,

Like Limeys, Micks, Frogs, Canucks, and Scandihoovians,

And Yankee Doodle boys hailing from the four corners

Of the United States, Fly-up-the-creeks from Florida,

Evergreen men from Washington, Pine tree men from Maine,

California Golden Bears, with Corn Crackers, Knickerbockers,

Granite Boys, Green Mountain Boys, Old Liners, Old Colonials,

Buckeyes, Muskrats, Panhandlers, Mudcats, Yellowhammers,

Hardheads, Sandhillers, Tarheels, from down East and Dixie,

An all-star team, and the ruggedest crew ever crowed:

Wrestlers, wreckers, boozers, barnstormers, roustabouts,

Breadwinners, ramblers, fiddlers, roughnecks, runaways,

Penpushers, windjammers, daredevils, and crackhunters,

And no galoot in the whole gang under eight feet tall,

Come in with a caterwaul to join Paul Bunyan’s camp

On the river and kick off the original lumber drive.

A ‘galoot’, incidentally, is ‘an awkward, eccentric or foolish person’; what’s undeniable is Beckett’s unbound vocabulary. Some passages read almost as an American melange of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Where the strawberry bushes, where the raspberry trees

All ran wild on the slopes with berries as big as plums

By the plash and swizzle of the rock-and-rye springs,

Under the gillygaloo, which brooded up on the steep

Of Pyramid Forty, with its stand of one million pines,

…

And way over behind beyond, the whangdoodle whistled.

Delicious images abound, such as ‘soil/ Smooth as butter’, and gustatory sense-impressions proliferate through the alliteratively bristling lines:

Where the red clover cows gave milk that didn’t sour

And the devil grass cows gave straight cough medicine,

Where the green vegetables were rooted so god-awful deep

It took an inventor to pick them, and where a redneck

One day chanced to see sparrowgrass sprout up so hard

It went roots and all into the air, and lived on nothing

But the climate, and he saw vines dragging punkins along,

And when he got tangled up, he went for his jackknife

And found a big cowcumber that had ripened in his pocket.

When Pea Soup Shorty clattered the triangle for breakfast,

The boys stampeded for the cookshack and grabbed up forks

At a pine table so long a story started up at one end

Was so tall at the other end they had to hire a flunky

To shovel it out the door. Now first off, and for starters,

There was oatmeal mush, logging berries, hasty pudding,

Eggs fried over easy, over hard, sourdough biscuits,

Klondike spuds, pilgrim marbles, apple grunt, sowbelly,

With all the trimmings…

The term ‘punkins’ is American slang for pumpkins while ‘cowcumber’ means cucumber; ‘pilgrim marbles’ might possibly allude to Marble cakes, ‘apple grunt’ is a dish made of apples and pie-crust, and ‘sowbelly’ is salted pork. Such colourful and sumptuous terms are a gift to a poet. Colouristic images continue to populate the poem: ‘red clover’, ‘green vegetables’, ‘redneck’. It’s gustatory imagery galore in the following passage, pockmarked with o- and a-assonances –we’re reminded of the famously gargantuan American appetite:

When they rolled sugar cookies down the table the boys

At the foot got gypped, and so Big Ole the blacksmith

Dreamed up the hole and toted the doughnuts on a stick.

All this was only horse ovaries before the main dish:

Hotcakes! They had a choice between pancakes, flatcakes,

Slapjacks, griddlecakes, stovelids, battercakes, flapjacks,

In piles, topped with skid grease, floating in maple slick.

Then the eponymous lumberjack hero readies himself to speak: ‘And Paul Bunyan standing out on American mud, ready/ To big-talk to his bunch of drifters, and brag up logging’. In a way, the dialogues in the poem are the least interesting things about it, at least, in linguistic terms, although even these narrative-propelling speeches couch occasionally colourful phrases, such as ‘stick to it/ Like it was old whiskey’, and

Two, there’s no brawling and no boozing in the woods:

I might see a little back-of-the-shanty roughhousing,

Or a short nip on a cold Sunday…

I love the o-assonance in ‘no boozing in the woods’. Bunyan’s rallying call to his fellow lumberjacks gives a real sense of the lumberjack-lingo which sounds almost like old seafaring language:

I need upwards of half of you as sawyers, to fall

The trees, whirling an axe sharp as sunlight around you

Till you steam, and ache all over, till your veins bulge;

I need plenty of swampers, to bust up the scenery,

And slash and rut the trails, and to lop off the limbs

From the down pine, which calls for backbone and stay;

And I need ox-strong skidders, to tug the logs to sleighs

And snake the load across the ice, over the toteroad

On down to the rollway, on the slopes of the branch;

And at the spring breakup I need the top lumberjacks

As the water rats, who’ll ride the logs down the river

Into the snags and jams, just for the glory of it.

Now take a breath of this almighty Appalachian air,

Grin like an old pioneer, and pitch into the timber!’

One is almost reminded of the sunny and blustery animism of Dylan Thomas’s landscape in ‘Fern Hill’ here:

Winter broke out in the up country with a big bang

And a big wind, blowing all morning without a letup,

Wheezing like a harmonium, whooping through the boughs

Of the stiff pines, squabbling with itself, puffing so hard

It tossed rocks like kisses…

Bunyan doesn’t adapt well to paperwork, he’d much prefer being outside swinging his axe –here we get again colouristic images:

This foolishness was foxing Paul Bunyan,

Who was up to here in his ledgers, logging the logging,

Who, with such-and-such receivables, so-and-so payables,

His red invoices, his black bills, his ice cream payroll, was

Writing his chronicles, and book-balancing like an acrobat.

And a little later, mention of his ‘green fountain pen’; colours clearly have much symbolism for Beckett. Frustrated by being kept indoors on the accounts, Bunyan exclaims with wonderful assonance: ‘I’m missing the whole hoot owl morning!’. Just when you think the language can’t get any more colourful we are introduced to foreman Shot Gunderson:

The original push Paul signed on was Shot Gunderson,

The iron eater, the bear tamer, the all-creation hunter,

The rip-snorting snuff chewer, who could knock a cougar

Spang out of a bull pine with one good tobacco squirt.

Beckett’s delight in language is tangible as alliteratively relays the back story to Shot Gunderson:

He was a big noise on account of his mouth thunder,

And he was a slam-down jack-up bawl-out old bastard

Who might reel it off for days, like a one-man riot,

And it’s said he could cuss the quills off a porcupine.

One time all his curses were written down in a book

Called The Ox-Skinner’s Dictionary, but it burned up,

And the story goes it was by spontaneous combustion.

Shot Gunderson was breaking in his highball system

On the Tadpole River, up in the Bullfrog Lake country,

And he was croaking so loud into this absurd wind

His voice cracked up into nothing, into a squeak,

And without his old thunder it was goodbye job, but

Shot’s back talk had caught on real glorious with the boys,

And from that day on lumberjacks used flowery lingo.

What I particularly admire about Beckett’s blank verse is its approximate precision on the page in terms of line lengths and syllables –most lines count as either 13 or 14 syllables; this discipline helps give the sense of the verse almost bursting its banks as it bumps up against anything but arbitrary line breaks and enjambments. Next up we have the new replacement foreman:

The new foreman was punch-drunk Chris Crosshaul, who

Was a white water maniac and loved to ride the logs

With a hundred-damn-verse song, and a fanatic smile,

And who hustled the timber down White River, rolling

By the unreal badlands…

Then we are introduced to a ‘Swedish mountain man’ (and I’m reminded that there were many Swedish immigrants to turn-of-the-century America, one of whom was legendary labour activist Joe Hill, real name Joseph Hillström (1879–1915), who worked as an itinerant labourer): 

Big Swede, the bull of the woods, was swaggering up

Out of nowhere, sure as Shenandoah, yellow-haired,

Sky-tall and red-faced, grinning his great buck teeth,

His eyes blue fight, and his big paws jammed in his pockets.

Beckett’s lines bounce along sing-song-like buoyed on never-obtrusive assonance and alliteration: ‘Up there the springs are burbling, and the phillyloo bird,/ With a big beak like a stork and no feathers to spare,/ Sails with its belly up to the sun to ward off colds’. 

As the dialogue becomes more prevalent one feels as if, in some respects, Paul Bunyan is not so much a verse-narrative as a novel-in-verse, even if it’s relatively uneventful and the real energy and verve is in the verse itself rather than the narrative. 

The eponymous giant is given giant lungs by Beckett:

Old Paul spit and reddened, stamped on his heel and roared.

Now he had three voices: first, his snort, inside a room,

Was gracious, like a sea breeze, just a curl in the air;

Second, in the great outdoors, his yell was a living gale;

And third, his roar was so loud it would light a fire

In the woods and snuff it, like he boomed this morning:

A passage relaying a series of colourful insults exchanged between Bunyan and Big Swede is the first point in the poem for me that one begins to sense the narrative overtaking the verse somewhat and one is sensitive at this point to the perennial challenge of sustaining narratives in verse over long distances, which, for instance, demonstrates just how titanic John Milton’s talent was. Then, in the following passage, one senses for the first time that Beckett is at risk of tripping over himself in the thickets of his verbiage:

And now it was Bunyan on top of the bucking Swede,

Walloping him pow! in the kisser with a hard right!

It was real dusty up there, and the two fist fighters,

Trading argument settlers, were wrapped up in a cloud,

It was bad, it was blue murder, the blood was flying,

The absolute booms of the jawbreaking, haymaking,

Heart-busting punches had all the bunkhouses wobbling

In the lumber camp, and the whole territory rocked.

It was a knock-down drag-out by Dakota rules:

Nevertheless, this is still highly effective, kinetic verse. The fight over, the two pugilistic lumberjacks make peace again and Bunyan, impressed by Big Swede’s use of his fists and the ‘blue fight’ in his eyes, makes him his ‘straw boss’. Bunyan is brought up short by the sudden blotting of his log books:

They saw the mountains go boom in the awful shock wave

From the big fight between Paul Bunyan and Big Swede,

And the lumberjack shanties shake till they were timber,

And looking through the sticks and damage, old Paul yelped:

The ink barrels in his head office had split their ribs

And spilled ink all over his day journals and log books;

The tallies were splashed, and the characters were smeared,

The rigmarole was illegible, everything was blackened

Up to volume ten thousand…

It occurs to Bunyan that this is some sort of punishment for his having wasted too much time fist-fighting with his foreman: ‘While I brawl and I feather

My cap I catastrophe what I love; I’m all the mayhem

I need, I banged up these shanties, these innocent books

With my own fist! Look: my bouncing chronicles are spoiled,

Bunyan blames himself squarely then resolves to rewrite his histories:

And I don’t care how many god-damn dollars I pile up

Or prayers I squawk to the sky, I can’t buy them back.

Okay, the boys and I are in a pinch, it’s time to light

Into a whiz-bang and history-making job, and quick;

Oh my crazy lumberjacks…

That’s some lip-smacking c- and k-alliteration! Then the lumberjack has an epiphany:

He was still stymied a couple of pots of coffee later,

When, popping his knuckles, he sauntered to the window

And sprawled back: it was hard to swallow, but he saw

What looked like a pine forest out there, out of nowhere,

With a chance of trees, and all of them big and bare,

Buckskin and topless, like a logger’s kingdom come,

It was better than a kick in the head by a blue ox!

And again there’s a verbal singsong flourish worthy of Dylan Thomas: 

         …and he dilly-

Dallied awhile on the way back to his pencil shoving.

Highballing like fire through the amazing orchard,

Shearing the trees into big blue butts, the timber beasts,

Appleknockers, animals and punks, floaters and palookas,

Broke into the green timber: the double drive was led

On the left Side-by-Side by the bull moose, Big Swede,

On the right by the ramrod, Soupbone Tom, log-hungry

And money-mad, who was so skinny he had to stand

In the sun ten lousy minutes to throw a shadow,

An ‘Appleknocker’ is an American nickname for a country bumpkin. In such a vast work it’s inevitable there will be some relatively flatter, more prosaic passages here and there, and maybe that’s a blessing in a way as it gives the reader a pause for breath amid the denser parts, but when Beckett cranks up the language again to fever pitch –one might almost term his verse style as verbally obsessive– it’s a blessed reverberation: 

…the bible pounders, with their nerve

And their noise, on the punks and whittlers, who whipped

All morning without any muscle, and the sightseers

And witnesses, out gawking instead of pitching in, and

On the buckwheaters, who were all thumbs, hopeless, slow

As grandmas, and didn’t know a broadax from a banjo.

The listing of the different types of trees is evocative:

…tackling the barber poles, crooked

As ram’s horns, hollow trees, redtops dying of beetles,

Wolf trees, on a perhaps, fat pines and bastard firs,

Rampikes, blowdowns, and the clear long-bodied saw timber,

And falling the ice-broken bayonet tops, stagheads, cripples,

Timber with stubs, burls, swells, crowfeet, spike knots,

Scars, and pitch pockets…

All these trees observed ‘out in the windshake woods’ –a phrase which strongly recalls Dylan Thomas. Beckett has a real taste for gustatory and tactile images: ‘…bite off a chaw of fancy dynamite/ Eating tobacco, grab hold of his ax by the blister end,/ Whistle something while planting his bergman calked shoes’. Beckett is, simply, a master of description:

…with a high forehead full of logic wrinkles,

And with sky-pale blue eyes behind his golden spectacles,

Which perched on his long snout, and who bit on his lips

And fiddled with his necktie, as he scraped a jackknife

Beckett’s poetry is as ‘bouncing’ as Bunyan’s chronicles, courtesy of alliteration, in this trope, the b-sounds that almost buzz from the page: ‘And scribbled on the bluff, making numbers, up and down,/ And all oblivious to Paul Bunyan, which is no breeze./ Paul waved his burly arms’. Beckett also manages to grease his dialogue with near-tangible images: ‘I think I’ll just help myself to a chaw of this here/ Peerless spit-or-puke tobacco: you’re welcome to it/ If you like, it tastes ferocious’. The character Bunyan is chatting to is depicted –rather ironically given the verbally dense style of the poem in which he’s set– as boasting a big vocabulary:

Why hell, you know since all of you hillbillies are hooked

On chewing tobacco, I ought to market an out west brand;

Ads, billboards, sandwich boys, listen to the campaign:

Dazzle the boss, and wow all the gals with just one nip

Of this champion funky all-American plug tobacco!

I’d have to scalp it, you see, knock it down dirt-cheap

To cut under the boys back east; I could branch out

And pocket a cool million, oh and I mean clean up!

It sure beats melting in these god-forsaken boondocks.’

This dialogue, which hardly stands out as particularly verbose, is followed by the line: ‘Old Paul was thinking this bird swallowed a dictionary’. Beckett himself might be accused of such, but I for one applaud his hearty appetite for language (indeed, Beckett actually lists the Concise Oxford Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus in his bibliography for the book –shouldn’t all poets do this though?– as well as, among numerous other books, Woods Words: A Comprehensive Dictionary of Loggers’ Terms, The Folk Songs of North America and American Thesaurus of Slang). Next, a rather verbose land surveyor joins Bunyan’s lumberjack outfit:

‘Hi ya, Mister Bunyan. I’m John Rodgers Inkslinger,

Answer man, math whiz, ballyhoo man, land surveyor,

Country doctor, local comic, and back street philosopher.

I’m actually working on a rough geography problem.’

Impressed by Bunyan’s undiscovered grasp of surveying, 

Inkslinger squinted with surprise, and started jabbering,

‘Well, I’ll be hornswoggled! You’d make a hot surveyor;

Why you’re no country egg, or frontier rowdy! Look,

Why don’t you hook up with me and be a mud chicken?

With your latitude and my longitude, there’s no limit;

Suddenly Inkslinger realises Bunyan’s ox has trampled his tools –both the surveyor and Bunyan are similarly bereft:

Your dumb stinking ox trampled on my instruments!

My charts, my scopes, my pencils, my lines, my tables,

My cheating sticks, they’re all stomped on by the blue beast,

It’s all over! Ah, I might as well just kiss it off!’

‘Hang on, Johnny. I apologize for the blue ox, honest,

But don’t you act like a nincompoop and start bawling!

Okay, two-fisted calamity’s knocked you for a loop:

What do you do, caterwaul like a kid, or bang back

Like a cowboy? I say why dive, on a random punch?

I all but wiped out my tall chronicles in a fight,

But damn if I was whipped: I just spit and jolted on.

Now, don’t boohoo: come on, let’s tromp over to the camp.

No sweat, you’ll get your share of sun circles,

Beckett’s turns of phrase are always striking: ‘Nothing this side of sunlight can lick a lumberjack’. The p-alliteration piles up hypnotically in the following trope: ‘Inkslinger spluttered, stretched out his arms, wobbled/ And said oh-oh like a moo cow, doubled up like a sack/ Of Idaho potatoes, and slumped into a mud puddle’. Again, Beckett’s lines jostle and bristle with alliteration, assonance and sibilance:

Oh, say a gyascutus: it’s big as a buck in winter,

And with blue lightning in its eyes, jack rabbit ears,

Mountain lion jaws, and a yowl like a southeast blow,

It’s no wonder you can’t see it till after a snake bite,

Sloping across the foothills, up on its telescope legs,

Hanging on tight with its rainbow tail, and eating rocks.

If your pleasure’s fire water, I can bring you a fat jug

Of my wild juniper moonshine: it’s righteous, cutthroat,

And with beer back, look out! It’s a true antifogmatic,

It’ll whoopee you up in no time, as sure as preaching.

Would you go for the complete works of Bigmouth Bill,

In forty volumes, with woodcuts, a forward, backward,

Index, glossary, concordance, gazetteer, and almanac?’

The wonderful term ‘antifogmatic’ refers to ‘a drink of liquor taken to counteract the effect of fog or dampness’. A character called Johnny devotedly salvages Bunyan’s ink-blotted chronicles:

Johnny came back out with book one of the chronicles:

He’d traced over the goose feather scratches in the paper

In white ink, religiously, bringing back the alphabet,

And he’d salvaged all of the ten thousand volumes.

Old Paul stared, and he said with a catch in his voice,

‘I’m proud to know you, Johnny; but why’d you do all this?’

‘I’m in love with you, high pockets, what do you think?

No, really: sulking gets to be duller than Wisconsin

After a while, and patching up the chronicles was fun.’

‘Oh Johnny Inkslinger, you’re in! Shake hands, partner.’

The chiming of ‘Wisconsin’ with ‘chronicles’ works particularly nicely here. Beckett’s constantly inventive turns of phrase keep the verse alive and kicking:

Kicking out the jams, tangling with the skookumchuck:

Waterfalls, whirlpools, narrows, tiderips, neverstills.

The slough pigs at the tail end of the misty parade,

Whirling swingdogs, yawping, laid back, sacking the rear,

Rolling the draggers and strays in the almighty water,

…

One old strong-arm logger fought free of the varmints

And slooped straight out of the blue, falling so far

The dang bluebirds built a nest on his windy head

And hatched their daughters and sons before he hit home.

Old Paul saw the whole gallinipper sneak attack,

And he shuttled Brimstone Bill the bullwhacker south

On a hot pony and at full pay for the Pecos River

To round up fighting Texas bumblebees, big and pronto.

The lines are bursting with alliteration and assonance:

But after a dogfight, the insect mobs fixed it up

And went in cahoots, cranking out a bunch of crossbreeds:

The moskittos, with stingers at both the front and back,

And just a monstropolous fancy for hooktenders’ oxen.

The word ‘monstropolous’ is eye-catching: it means ‘An increasing forgetfullness, that expands in proportion and dimensions, much like that a monster’. It’s no mean feat that Beckett keeps up the poetic momentum whilst also sustaining a narrative that needs to catch the attention as much as it can –personally, I’ve been reading this long poem for the poetry as opposed to attempting to follow the narrative too closely. It’s interesting to have insight into lumberjack folklore, inclusive of its own mythical forest monsters:

Old Paul shouldered his pine-butt straight-barrel flintlock

And hiked on out to hunt in the freezing Michigan woods.

Just a spit and a holler out of camp, he got a flash

Of an actual gumberoo, looking for burned-out woods,

With a pumpkin head and a potbelly like a stove,

Ape arms and crazy legs sticking out round its waist;

It’d heave itself off a slope and roll down sideways,

Squeaking like a pulley, and scared of nothing but fire,

Because if it ever rubbed up against a flame, kerblam.

At times one can almost imagine a tobacco-spitting old timer from a 50s Western chewing on these colourful anecdotal lines:

It minded him of when he sighted a whirling whimpus,

Which was a scraggly bastard, as big as a rain barrel,

With its plow horse legs all grown together at the fetlock

Into one hoof, and skinny arms which were so long

It steadied itself by propping on its palms. If a man

Was dumb enough to sidle up next to a whimpus,

It would cakewalk and whirligig like a wino on ice:

A crack from the whirling fists would cream the guy,

And the whirling whimpus would lick him up like pudding.

And then there are the ‘huggags’:

He thought of his staring contest with a flock of huggags,

Which stood thirteen feet high and weighed in at three tons,

With mud balls instead of heads and warts on their snouts,

Gunny sacks for ears, pine needle coats, and big flat feet.

The huggags go grazing in herds, on pitch and sweat,

And when it’s time for shut-eye, since they have no knees

And can’t flop down, the herd faces northwest by the moon

And sags against the trees, which, under three-ton pressure,

Begin to slant after a couple of nights;

One can’t help thinking of Mark Twain and his river-hobo at times in this text:

The long grasses hang on and mob out of the mud

Under the green snarl of wild holly and huckleberry,

And up with the looting bluejays and whiskey jacks,

In the tight bark whose calligraphy nobody can read,

The old evergreen timber muscles toward the light.

Beckett is often partial to the neologism, as in, for example, ‘circumbustification’, and ‘gully-whumping’: ‘I feel so gully-whumping good when I look out/ On a Northern morning and see the pine cones bulge/ On the branches, and the daylight lean against the trees’. 

I caught myself imagining the following colourful insult being spoken by a Western old timer followed by the ting of his tobacco as its spat into a tin: ‘You jerkwater slow-poke wishy-washy deadhead/ Flat-beer pussyfooting lollygagging drag-ass punks!’. One almost expects the hackneyed American cowboy term ‘two-bit…’ to come up at some point. Bunyan’s hearty insults continue:

You bunch of whittlers are useful as a one-legged man

At a kicking match! I want to see Swedish steam

Spout out of your temples; get dirty, give her snoose!

I catch a man boondoggling and I’ll eat him for lunch!

Beckett opts for the phonetic spelling ‘snoose’, which is actually spelt ‘snus’: Swedish for snuff. I’m grateful for learning that ‘lollygagging’ (wasteful idling) and ‘boondoggling’ (wasting time or money on something which gives the impression of having value) actually are real words and not Lewis Carroll-esque portmanteaus as in his Jabberwocky, for example; though some terms are what might be termed Beckettian portmanteaus, such as ‘diddlewhacky’. ‘Double-bit’ does turn up: ‘and let them swing their double-bit heads/ Like sodbusters in August out mowing the south forty’ –‘sodbuster’ is a person or thing which ‘breaks the sod’ i.e. soil. 

Bunyan and the lumberjacks then get caught up in a log-jam:

Old Paul rounded up the river rats and the boom pokes

And started the drive, yelling tips from the book of snags;

But as soon as the wood was wet they hit a log jam,

With a big pole stuck and a whole stack-up behind it,

And if a monkey were to shin up the jackpot to free it,

He’d be sure to be crunched before he could say scat.

There comes, as is common in most of this epic poem, some bravura alliteration and assonance: 

Old Paul fired off his shotgun, aiming to tickle Babe’s ass

With buckshot till his tail twirled like a screw in the water,

Which washed it backwards, and untangled the rack heap.

Bunyan and his river hogs, with their peaveys in their fists,

Steadied out on the timber, and barreled down the flood

On the backs of the logs, heading for a far-off sawmill.

…

Old Paul yanked his slouch hat down to his boiling ears

And took a bite of his squirting tobacco, spiked his log

And snarled at the white water as they all coasted by

The tingling spruce groves, on the lookout for boulders.

Beckett’s powers of description and simile are everywhere in evidence: ‘When they burbled round a long crescent in the river/ Paul stiffened up like a scarecrow in a frost and shouted’. Beckett’s phrases are also brilliantly alliterative, such as ‘cook and the woodpeckers’ and ‘lollapaloozing drive’. At times, however, the expressions can get a little bit over the top, as in the following Cassius Clay-like proclamation:

‘Whoopee! I’m long-legged, I’m rambunctious, I’m ripe!

I’m all bouncy, I’m the spotted horse nobody can ride!

Yeah, I waddle like an ox and I crow like a cyclone,

I punch like a landslide and I fuck like a hummingbird!

There’s a wonderful flourish of gustatory images when the group’s cook is introduced:

The pot wrestler, known to the boys as the belly robber,

Was named Pea Soup Shorty, and was so dead-in-the-bone

And let-it-slide lazy, he’d railroaded his flunkies

Into sniffing the green slop in the kettle for him

Because, he said, it tuckered him out to breathe that deep.

He ruled out groceries one by one: first, porcupine stew,

And then slumgullion, bubble and squeak, and mystery pie,

Till he’d cut all the meals back to nothing but pea soup,

Pea soup today and forever, with a taste like fog.

The imagery here is mainly green –‘green shirt’, ‘greenhorn’ etc. –in-keeping with the pea soup:

…Pea Soup Shorty strolled out there

With a half a hog and three crates of Arkansas chicken,

Which is long for salt pork, dumped it in with black pepper,

Bloomed up a fire under the lake and made pea soup.

When he was running low, he sliced each pea in two

And boiled up a barrel of the world’s first split pea soup;

And when they gave out, the bum salted a green shirt

And dunked it in the kettle, and nobody noticed. After

That, Brimstone Bill the bullwhacker walked up to Paul

To squawk for the boys, and blared till he was blue:

‘Oh, for crying out loud in the clatterwhacking morning!

I love Beckett’s phrase ‘Bloomed up a fire’. If sometimes one has the sense of a slip into prose here and there, it’s still beautifully phrased poetic prose: ‘Blowhard Ike stooped a little under the tools and lingo,/ And sidled out the door while Johnny covered up a smile’. And the names of the characters are always striking, as in ‘Jerusalem Slim’, ‘Pumphandle Joe’, ‘Brimstone Bill’ etc. The physicality of the descriptive anecdotes throughout are always engrossing:

I hid my pinto and bunked in a squatter’s shack,

And he said to go sling the gab with his kin in Ragtown.

Well, by sunup I was three hours on the road east,

Raking my gooseneck spurs and no sign of the outlaws,

And my huddle in Ragtown sent me out to Shinbone Peak,

Far south: the sun sat in the crotch of the two summits,

Just like the old jackass prospector had whispered to me,

There are times when Beckett risks tripping himself up by his own verbal thickets: 

Johnny Inkslinger was a skinflint with his ink, since

By rigging up a hose from the ink barrel to his ink stick

And saving seventeen minutes a page by not dunking it,

It’s like he went through a barrel in a couple of squirts,

But such moments are, impressively, the exception. Beckett’s linguistic inventiveness is amazingly sustained throughout –here’s another brilliantly acrobatic passage:

Kerblooey! All of the rib-splintering barrels exploded

To blue heaven with a whoosh of bamblustercation,

Flooring Ike, jolting Sam to the top of a black ridge

Of ink and sourdough, spouting across the ice fields!

The blowup plowed under a green mile of oak saplings

And when it cracked a fence close to the blacksmith’s shed,

Big Ole broke out wonder-struck, still holding his hammer,

And gawking up at Sourdough Sam, riding the flood

Just like a broncobuster high-rolling with the bucks

On top of a hot sunfishing and jackknifing horse,

But he was waving a stump, and bawling at his blood.

Note the delightful neologism ‘bamblustercation’, while ‘broncobuster’ is in fact an actual word for a cowboy who breaks in wild or untamed horses (broncos). Beckett’s descriptions just sing on the page: ‘Say a whirl on a sternwheeler down the Muddysippi,/ With those tall drifting days full of old jokes and whiskey,/ The sky all mare’s-tail clouds, the haymaking sun high/ In the sticky air’. Sometimes it’s almost like reading a cowboy equivalent of Dylan Thomas:

Into the poker midnights where the stakes are fat

And your luck’s holding, shoot! and the peacocking gals

Tugging on your arms, slow-talking and sleepy-eyed,

The stars outside rocking to a skinny harmonica,

And day breaking with the whippoorwills streaking home,

As you roll into New Orleans so all-fired husky

The wonderful ‘whippoorwill’ is a North American nightjar (bird). Sometimes Beckett gets a little bit surreal (not entirely unlike his famous Irish namesake): ‘Hot Biscuit Slim as the new greaseball, a red-eyed man/ Who just pined away, and only spoke on cloudy Thursdays’. We get some more Beckettian portmanteaus in ‘spitnew’ and ‘spanglorious’. Beckett’s epic is picaresque –indeed, many of the lumberjack’s nicknames are piratical– and often quite comical, as in the following passage:

Slim sniffed out the polecat in back of the explosion,

And he straightened up, tugged at his cap, squinted at Ike,

Shook his head, shook it, nodded, spit an arc of tobacco,

Coiled into his windup, slanted his arm with his elbow high,

Ripped out a pitch, and knocked him out with an old doughnut.

Double-Jawed Phalen, who once went scrounging for cheese

And ate a grindstone by mistake, was the only man

Who had the tusks to bite into one of Slim’s doughnuts.

When Ike woke up and hauled his headache to the door

He saw the whole cuckoo outfit loafing around Red Lake

And lumber jammed in the lake as black as a crow’s eye.

Sourdough Sam was leaning on a crutch up a sugarloaf hill,

…

Slim’s kitchen smells turned out so scrumdiddliumptious,

When the noon gabriel blew the boys didn’t finish a stroke,

But all roared straight in, leaving their axes in mid-air.

The delightfully evocative and ludicrous portmanteau ‘scrumdiddliumptious’ is of course the name of one of the Wonka bars in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

We learn that Johnny Inkslinger drinking stamina is peerless: ‘his stomach was immortal; he could/ Down a brush whiskey still without so much as a hiccup’. ‘It’s got me as puzzled as a squeal pig in a washtub’ is one of legion ebullient similes of Beckett’s, as is ‘cavorted like a two-gun tornado’. I love the bouncing b-alliteration in the trope: ‘Shivering on his hoofs, swimming, with his ribs rawboned,/ His bellow sour, and the hump on his back ballooning’. We learn that Big Swede is ‘the North Sea all-star milking champ’ (as in milking cows). There’s a very poetic phrase in ‘all dripping with risk, like icicles in April’. Just look at the way the o-assonance powers through the following passage:

He spouted it like an old song, and it wore his voice down

To a wheeze, but a swig of whiskey would fix him up,

And he whisked out a crate of Inkslinger’s white lightning,

Oiled his tonsils on the half hour, and went on droning

At the blue ox. He was on his thirteenth bottle, when

He flared up, with his eyes popping, and fire alarms

In his ears, drunk as a rainbow trout, and he hooted,

And the wonderful -ck-alliteration in this passage:

The tall clouds cracked and it rained like all hickory,

Babe hobbling nowhere in the black mud, and the spray

Spitting off his tail was building into the Rogue River,

Till up on a mistletoe hill, the weather unwinding,

That Beckett never lets up being as descriptively inventive as possible in each and every line is nothing short of astounding: ‘It was so awful chilly, talk froze in the crackling air,/ 

And the lumberjacks walked around bumping into words’. Beckett’s alliterative technique is remarkable because it never seems obtrusive: ‘Which was sticking up through a hole in the calico sky,/ With falling axes and a great stack of crosscut saws/ Brazed into one, chewing up bark’. Again, Beckett channels Dylan Thomas:

It squiggled and galumphed to the rub-a-dub ocean,

Slap into Puget Sound, the grave old Paul had dug

For the blue ox, wide open for all the whopping logs

Booming over the cockeyed river, and the cockeyed roads,

Again, the alliteration in this passage manages to be near-tangible yet unobtrusively so:

Manage it, and so a wrangler, name of Old Lightheart,

Dragged a bunch of scissorbills off the farms to the east,

And changed them from hay shakers into buffalo boys:

He lit into his saddle tramp pitch and sold them all,

Stripped off their sheep-stinking laundry, dressed them up

In buckskin duds, bandannas, and buzzard wing chaps,

And set his boys to circle herding, lasso looping, guitar

Picking, and buffalo milking out in the pine-rail corral.

And here:

Of this here hair-curling and bare-chested buffalo milk

Would give the lumberjacks the go for all-out logging.

There wasn’t a glass of milk or a doughnut but was spiked

With it, and Jersey lightning was branch water next to it.

More Beckettian portmanteaus crop up: ‘rantankerous’, apparently a conscious corruption of cantankerous, and ‘conflabberation’. Sometimes the very descriptive, physical, simile-rich narrations and expositions of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow spring to mind:

…a whingding of rain

Was coming up from China, and when he whipped back

His big bearskin rug, the water spindled into the air.

Slabwood was cackling to himself, hoisting the bottle,

When Inkslinger dropped in for a powwow, and old Paul

Handed him a cup of java and a question mark.

‘I’ll tell you, old scout: the lowdown is, the camp’s hurting.’

Johnny poured a streak of moo into the bellywash,

Sugared it up to kill the taste, and tried explaterating:

One can hear Humphrey Bogart lackadaisically mumbling, ‘He slumped down by Johnny and rippled through a wish book’. Beckett can even make a list of items from a mail-order catalogue sound poetic: ‘Quilts, rockers, silverware, trombones, tubs, umbrellas!’. There’s so much to pick up from Beckett’s cowboy-vocabulary, such as ‘caboose’ which is a railroad carriage. As Inkslinger remarks, almost meta-textually: 

‘There’s times when I could swear I was in a dime novel,

But then I shine up my memory, and I snap out of it:

Like now, ask me who in the whole showboating country

Can walk out and flimflam a rainstorm, and I’ll say

Oh, a lumberjack, tall as the Sierras, and heading east.’

Beckett really gets the language doing the work, the heavy-lifting of the narrative; there’s more poetic muscle, more colour and image in one line of Beckett’s blank verse than there is in an entire poem in a typical supplement of today. Indeed, Beckett’s impasto poetry is the complete opposite of the contemporary understated, pared-down postmodernist columnated prose that’s so popular among, well, primarily, its exponents –because Beckett’s is poetry that delights in language (as opposed to most contemporary poetry, which is suspicious of it):

The heifer storm jumped out into the daylight and lit up

On Paul’s shoulder, where it sat, looking pale and grouchy;

And with a rainy word and the directions home, old Paul

Slapped it on its rump, and it floated out of the pines

And puffed away towards Iowa, shooting off rainbows.

Sometimes the narrative is truly witty:

Inkslinger was rummaging around the big kitchen

On the lookout for cookies, and saw Sour Face Murphy

Up on a stool, peeling spuds into a bucket of water,

And Sour Face was so ugly the water was fermenting.

Beckett’s seemingly boundless arsenal of images never ceases to strike the eye and ear:

The Galloping Kid, behind a team of ponies, shook

The reins and drove the salt and pepper wagon across

The table, hauling fruit pits, coffee grounds, and eggshells

Out to toss to the tigermonks, who got so strong on

This trash, they took to wrestling blond wolves for fun.

Beckett channels Raymond Chandler again with this description of a character called ‘Slow Mus\ic’:

He was good-looking as an actor, almost always broke,

And famous for hooking imaginary fish all by himself,

Like the goofang, swimming backwards to keep the water

Out of its eyes,…

More b-alliteration makes the lines bounce:

When he was money-raising at the ballyhoo lectures

He talked dimensions that’d amaze all the gum chewers,

And when he was bankrolled, wham! he was out on the job,

Baldheaded, full of salt, and bawling for the impossible.

The way the following lines stack up on top of one another and with the rhythmic crank of the repeated ‘And’s is reminiscent of the mesmerism of nursery rhymes like ‘The House That Jack Built’:

The journal box was famous, the air brakes wonderful,

The cowcatcher would handle a day herd of longhorns,

And the whistle could sing I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.

Now when the mud chickens were all done drawing pictures,

And the powder monkeys had holes in all of the mountains,

And the iron men dropped the rails, and the section gangs

Had hooked them up, and the lever jerkers set the switches,

And the train delayers stacked up tickets and schedules,

And the tent stake drivers had no more nails to nail,

And the carnival crew banged all of the cars together,

And the car inspectors were smiling, and the yard masters

Were snoozing, and the paperweights had full ink barrels,

And the last handrail was shined up by the last porter,

And all the throttle pullers, fire eaters, ticket snatchers

And air givers said okay, the god-damn railway officials

Showed up in thousands and held a banquet in the firebox.

You can hear the pistons and smell the steam in the following descriptive passage:

There she was in the daylight, the Eagle and her coaches,

Her boxcars, her flatcars, her tank cars, and her caboose:

The engineer and fireman couldn’t climb up the gangway

Without carrying bedrolls, so they rode in a balloon

Up where the mules hauled coal out of the tender in cars

And unloaded it in front of the two-ton scoop shovel

By the fire door, with black coal flying into a white fire;

And pretty soon, when the safety valve showed a feather,

The engineer spit, tugged on his hat, and then cranked up

The four-barrel push-pull motor which drove the throttle.

And, again, one of countless examples of Beckett’s absolute mastery of alliterative effect:

Nobody had opened the throttle beyond the third notch.

The train boomed by the one-horse towns, mixing up

The slickers, by the fat farms, stacking hay, shucking corn,

The language in dialogue and monologue limbers up towards a life-affirming fever pitch in the final passages:

The blowups, the jokes and bellyaches, the slams, the scuffles

And the beautiful fistfights, where we became pals backwards,

I can name the years for history by the insane weather

And the scrapes with animals and greenhorns, oh my land,

We’ve charged all over the American map like a railroad,

Finally, Bunyan finds himself with the poem come full circle:

‘Out of the wild North woods, in the thick of the timber

And through the twirling of the winter of the blue snow,

Within an inch of sunup, with the dream shift ending,

A man mountain, all hustle, all muscle and bull bones,

An easy winner, full of swagger, a walking earthquake,

A skyscraper, looking over the tallest American tree,

A smart apple, a wonder inventor, the sun’s historian,

A cock-a-doodle hero, a hobo, loud, shrewd, brawling,

Rowdy, brash as the earth, stomping, big-hearted, raw,

Paul Bunyan lumbered and belly-laughed back at the stars.’

This circularity is fitting since the narrative of this novel-in-verse doesn’t really have a destination but is more a patchwork of highly colourful and vivid anecdotes, almost like a thread of spun yarns from the mouths of a motley collection of lumberjacks. Epic, folkloric, peripatetic, breathtakingly poetic, Larry Beckett’s Paul Bunyan is a rich feast for the senses with some of the meatiest poetry you’re likely to read anywhere today.

My only slight criticism is that it is perhaps a bit too epic in length for the patchy narrative it conveys, while the thick lashings of language with dizzying array of images, colloquialisms, similes and sense-impressions heaping themselves up line after line for 90-odd pages can become a little bit overbearing and one is forced to pause many times throughout to metaphorically ‘come up for air’ from the copious lexicon –and to that purpose the splitting up of the poem into 9 sections, or chapters, provides helpful stopping-off points. 

But Paul Bunyan is a barnstormer of a poem, and Larry Beckett is a formidable talent. Highly recommended, with recourse to the audio recording.  

Alan Morrison © 2017

Alan Morrison on

John Seed

Brandon Pithouse

Recollections of the Durham Coalfield

(Smokestack Books, 2016)

120pp

Poetry as social document is something often integral to many of the collections and long poems published by Smokestack, but John Seed’s Brandon Pithouse, subtitled Recollections of the Durham Coalfield is one of the most explicit poetic montages-cum-social document of the Smokestack canon. It is a very visual, filmic work, having something in common with the filmic poetry of W.H Auden (Coal Face; Night Mail et al), Joseph MacLeod (Script from Norway), and Tony Harrison (Gaze of the Gorgon; Prometheus et al), as well as with the more montage radio ballad form of broadcast oral history pioneered and exemplified by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker, particularly The Big Hewer (1961), which was about the miners of the Northumberland, Durham, South Wales and East Midlands coalfields. The cover is also worthy of note, which is a reproduction of a photographic cover of a magazine called COAL, priced 4D, June 1947 issue –what’s striking to the eye is when looking at the Smokestack cover with Brandon Pithouse written at the top, the first thing that strikes the eye is the word COAL writ in large capitals as the logo of the magazine inset. 

It may or may not have been helpful, depending on one’s opinion, for Seed’s elucidation of the book’s purpose and conscious architecture to have appeared as a Foreword at the beginning of the book rather than as a Postscript at the back. That said, I read through and reviewed the book before reading the Postscript, hence my architectonic take on its literary form mutates and alternates throughout my review (I discuss his Postscript at the end of this review). 

Brandon Pithouse is split into 25 sections. There is a scriptural feel to the spare pared-down opening to what one presumes to be a long poem:

Crunch of icy tyre-tracks underfoot

Daylight already old

Looking beyond the visible beyond

Brandon Pithouse

Ragpath Drift

This continues onto a second page, this time the text is right-justified:

in short breeches

low shoes and

cotton skull-cap

swinging his

5 lb pick while

sweat runs white

down black cheeks

always in peril

of gas or

fall of stone

or sudden flood or

whoever he is

An absence of punctuation means caesuras do the breath-work in this stripped-down but imagistically evocative triplet of tercets:

grandmother sent me a good door-string

six farthing candles for bait

some of her best currant bread

bait poke over my shoulder

candle-box in my pocket through darkness

along the black wagon-way up

past the pit-pond by the pick shop to the pit-heap

clanking of engines creaking pulleys overhead

hoarse voices of men calling answering

The use of alliteration in those lines is particularly striking. The rather breathless unpunctuated lines almost mimic the laboured breathing of being down the pits, while the omission of the definitive article in the first line reinforces this:

at the pit’s-mouth banksman calling down the shaft

hewers coming up two by two or three by six or

anyhow as the rope brought them

men emptying corves

boys wailing rough coals

discarding stones and slates

long line of sheds the screens

Seed deftly employs various poetic forms and sometimes ruptures into poetic prose in a manner reminiscent of David Jones (see In Parenthesis):

Low Main seam (coal 20 inches thick) – 57ft. from the surface

Hutton seam (coal 32 inches thick) – 157ft. from the surface

Harvey seam (coal 24 inches thick) – 312ft. from the surface

Busty seam (coal 48 inches thick) – 418ft. from the surface

Brockwell seam (coal 34 inches thick) – 522ft. from the surface

one minute to descend by cage

five hundred and thirty seven concrete steps to the Busty

ten minutes carrying an eight-pound electric lamp tokens shot

powder sharp picks

Describing the physical reality of the pit shaft and mine Seed speaks as plainly as possible but yet there is something poetic in his phrases: ‘strong pillars of coal to support the roof’ and ‘an immense number of dark passages’. This is proletarian poetry in the truest sense; its language is sinuous, industrial, utilitarian, as is its plentiful nomenclature:

Miners are hewers

stone-sinkers putters enginemen timber-drawers shot-firers

waste-men horse-keepers and drivers underground …

And banksmen masons fitters joiners sawyers blacksmiths

boilersmiths horse-shoers plumbers saddlers painters

electricians lamp-repairers platelayers smiths’ strikers winding

enginemen engine drivers hauliers ostlers carters…

Then there are little poetic eruptions as in this pictorial aside:

You walk into any pit house ten o’ clock at night

find the same thing

red hot fire

a tired-looking woman

heavy damp clothes hanging up

all over the place

With its irregular lines, tilt towards prose, unpunctuated lines and industrial imagery, one is instantly reminded of the rustbelt poetry of American blue collar poet Fred Voss. There’s a sense of poetry as Notes:

Bromdun Bramdom Brampdon Brandon

1871: 1926 inhabitants 10 streets 281 houses

‘miserable huts’ for families one small room

ladder to the unceiled attic

The next stanza is basically a haiku:

floors of square quarls

iron boiler one side of the fireplace

round oven the other

Then we get some social history:

still collecting water from rain barrels from springs in the fields

scores of bee-hive coke ovens south of the pit

Irish housed in Railway and South Streets ‘Little Ireland’

For those who like their poetry pared-down, spare and to the point, John Seed’s almost staccato 

two‐up two‐down cottages

each brick stamped with the name of the colliery company

cold water tap in the pantry

backyard the tin bath

wood back gate the goal

and next to the coalhouse the ash-pit

lav ash-midden netty

whitewashed walls and tied with string

squares of newspaper or occasionally

soft paper wrappings from oranges

Seed is excellent at using sense impressions, domestic images and unobtrusive alliteration to build up effects:

Wash day the devil’s birthday

living room reeking with steam

dodging damp vests drawers shirts sheets pillow-cases

drying pegged out across the

front of the fire place

dim light of an oil-lamp or candle

Brandon Pithouse is littered with potted social histories:

sinkers at Blackhall in 1909

for their wives and families

built huts out of

packing cases on the beach banks

at Blackhall Rocks there were still

families of pitmen in the 1930s

Irish immigrants tin miners

from Cornwall among them

Sometimes one wishes incidental vignettes weren’t quite so pithily expressed:

Going in-bye to his work

some men in front of him

got into a refuge hole to

let a set of tubs pass

but he went on

mind elsewhere

hit

and died the same day

We get some facts and figures:

Coalminers as % of occupied males in County Durham

1841 16.1

1851 21.1

1861 20.8

1871 17.1

1881 24.3

1891 25.0

1901 26.0

1911 33.4

Next we get what appear to be anecdotes from various miners emphasizing that Seed’s work is very much oral history as poetry. One Dick Morris talks of how fathers took their sons down the pits as kids to get them ‘acclimatised/ the inevitable way of life’. Another called William Cowburn confesses ‘but then I’m not frightened to admit/ I was terrified when I went down the pit’. These appear to be transcripts sculpted into poems:

I asked to go into the pit

to get away from school

I would go to school now

if I could be allowed

The constant shift in poetic form helps to keep up the momentum of the poem and avoid it stalling, and the shifts from lyrical poetry to prose is strongly reminiscent of David Jones’ In Parenthesis. There’s much bittersweet wit and irony in the trope: ‘In winter time the hours are harder and when we/ come home we are fit enough to go to bed’. The narrator, who may or may not be Seed himself (?), or a relative of Seed’s (?), mentions, ominously, how he escaped the coal pit: ‘I left to join the/ army goodbye to Wingate pit’. This narrator is a knowledge-hungry miner, perhaps an autodidact: ‘15 hours out of the house every day I go to school at night/ we’re in school two hours I hurt myself very sore to get/ scholarship’.

A miner in parentheses called James Agee explains how only objects, the tangible, things you can touch, taste and smell sum up the mining life far better than any writing: 

If I could do it I’d do no writing at all here. It would be

photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of

cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and

iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.

(James Agee)

This poem is almost like a kind of séance with the ghosts of miners as the time seems to shift:

First task when he reports for work at midnight

collect a token he strings round his neck

identification in case of accident every day

three miners are killed (1939)

every day he collects his safety lamp his token

There’s a fascinating description of the mineshaft: ‘The shaft is a perpendicular drift, sometimes made semielliptical/ at the mouth by means of boards’. Coal mining vernacular is quite fascinating:

Three raps: man riding

Two raps: start

One rap: stop.

When the chummens had taken the place of the fullens and the cage

had been rapped away the winderman would lift the cage off the keps

I’ve no idea what ‘chummens’, ‘fullens’, ‘winderman’ or ‘keps’ mean –perhaps Durham dialect?– but they all sound wonderful. The coal mine is clearly a place of considerable risk:

Nobody puts his helmet light on

in the cage you’d

blind each other you

drop down in the dark

————–

The only means of ascending or descending the shaft was in a kibble

or loop

He came out of the workings to the shaft bottom and shouted

‘Bend away to bank’

Swinging up the shaft the spring hook at the end of the rope caught

an iron bunton which broke the hook and the loop and he dropped

486 feet to the bottom

At times the depictions of the perils of the pit are truly gruesome: ‘going down/ a hook of another rope caught him by the hough/ ripped off the skin of his leg like a stocking’. We then read of one Isaac Rickerby who ‘was crushed between the/ cage and the shaft timbers’ at Broomside Colliery, and another at Thornley Colliery. The names of some of the coal miner casualties are redacted with Xs. And at Haswell

            …The crab, a

sort of huge drum revolving horizontally, to which a rope was

attached, moved by a horse, was a very slow method of traction.

Some obstruction took place, and the corf, full of men, hung in the

shaft for an hour-and-a-half, exposed to a strong downward

current of air

it was 3 on a dark winter morning and nothing could be seen

Tak had!

Presumably ‘Tak had’ is Durham pronunciation for ‘Take heed’? I think ‘corf’ is here meant as a metal container. At times there is a real Joycean stream-of-consciousness in full flow:

and blue stone soft like when we were kids we used to write with

at school

when it got wet it buried you like the houses on the Isle of White

are sliding into the sea

in this band of stone are the fossils of the dinosaur we called it

blos stone or mall

And perhaps more explicitly in the following flourish which seems to almost lapse into word association:

sandstone strata sequence of Westphalian coal measures bands

of shale

steam coal house coal chinley coal gas coal claggy coal manufact –

uring coal sea coal bunker coal pan coal crow coal sooty coal

roondy coal coking coal cannel coal brown coal shaly coal parrot

coal beany coal

The alliteration in the following passage is very effective:

Old workings and air-ways where nobody was working so

quiet you could hear your own heart beating in the strata the

forms of a leaf or a fish in the stone the iron quartz pyrites

sparkling like gold

The following trope is rather puzzling geographically speaking: ‘some coalfaces were 6 miles out/ under the North Sea Bohemia’s coast’. Seed depicts the darkness all year round for the miner:

The darkness never changes. Seasons make no difference. Spring

and summer, autumn and winter, morning, noon, and night, are

all the same.

Coal and stone, stone and coal – above, around, beneath.

Seed then quotes from the Book of Job:

There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s

eye hath not seen: The lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the

fierce lion passed by it.

(Job 28: 3, 7-8)

Indeed, this is a life lived in darkness: ‘they rarely saw daylight for six months of the year/ apart from Sundays the whole night’s rest lasting till daylight/ the one family dinner of the week’. And as for the climate, it’s always extremes, as Seed puts it most economically:

You do get

All sorts of temperatures

Down the mine sometimes

It’s cold as winter sometimes

Hot as hell

There is a sense of timelessness as time and dates shift –a macrocosmic oral history: ‘Winter of 1844 we had neither, food, shoes, nor light in our first/ shift’. Here, then, the term ‘shift’ takes on more than just one meaning. Are we eavesdropping on the memories of revenant coal miners?

The wagon-man, Tommy Dixon, visited me, and cheered me on

through the gloomy night; and when I wept for my mother, he

sang that nice little hymn,

‘In darkest shades if / Thou appear my dawning has begun’.

He also brought me some cake, and stuck a candle beside me.

We are left to imagine the grisly fate of a lad who hid some gunpowder ‘in a piece of gas piping which he had thrust down his/ trouser leg to hide it xxxx xxxx, when a spark from the lamp/ hanging on his belt fell into the open end of the pipe/ when a spark from the lamp/

hanging on his belt fell into the open end of the pipe’. Seed is deft at alliterative effects, as in the following trope:

Midges sometimes put out the candle.

The pit is choke full of black clocks creeping all about.

Nasty things they never bit me.

Some of the pastimes of miners down the pit seem distinctly macabre:

I often caught mice.

I took a stick and split it and fixed the mouse’s tail in it.

If I caught two or three I made them fight. They pull one

another’s noses off.

Sometimes I hung them with a horse’s hair.

The mice are numerous in the pit. They get at your bait-bags

and they get at the horse’s corn.

Cats breed sometimes in the pit and the young ones grow up

healthy.

Black clocks breed in the pit. I never meddled with them except

I could put my foot on them.

A great many midges came about when I had a candle.

‘Black clocks’ are a type of beetle. One of the miner-revenants appears to be a boy:

when the pits were idle I wandered

Houghton-le-Spring Hetton Lambton

Newbottle Shiney Row

Philadelphia Fence Houses Colliery Row Warden Haw

Copthill

every wood dene pond and whin-cover

was known to us in our search for

blackberries mushrooms cat-haws crab-apples nuts

not a bird’s nest in wall hedge or tree for miles around

escaped our vigilance

Remains of what some trapped miners had subsisted on were discovered: 

many who escaped to the higher workings

must have subsisted for some time on

candles horse-flesh and horse-beans

part of a dead horse was found near…

The pits were sufficiently damp in some parts for fungus to sprout:

Mushrooms

grow in the pits

at the bottom of the props

and where the muck’s fallen

100 yards or more from the shaft

There are numerous tragic and often grisly accounts of the fates of miners:

Burnhope Colliery he

finished his shift

ravelling out-bye

along a new travelling way

passing the upcast shaft

there was a door he opened

and stepped into the shaft

and fell

to the bottom

Occasionally there are redactions and it’s not clear what they are concealing or protecting from public consumption, since in the following example the name of the killed miner is mentioned at the end:

xxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx carried away down by the rush of

coals. Xxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xxxxx, xxx

xxx xxxxxxxx, William Robinson, was beyond hope

Seed uses deliberate repetitions of the manner of many miners’ demises to emphasize the terrible uniformity in the causes of death:

Crushed by tubs on engine plane Struck on head by horse

Crushed between wagons and wall Fall of stone Crushed by

tubs on engine plane Crushed by tubs on engine plane

Crushed by the cage starting as he was getting into it

Explosion of a shot Run over by four tubs of stone Head

crushed between tub and timbers Fall of stone Fall of coal

and stone Crushed on pulley wheel…

The anonymity of the casualties makes it all the more chilling. There’s a fascinating quote from one W. Stanley Jevons on the hazards of the Davy lamp:

‘It was supposed that George Stephenson and Sir H. Davy had

discovered a true safety lamp. But, in truth, this very ingenious

invention is like the compass that Sir Thomas More describes in

his Utopia as given to a distant people. It gave them such

confidence in navigation that they were ‘farther from care than

danger.’ No lamp has been made, or, perhaps, can be made, that

will prevent accidents when a feeder of gas is tapped, or a careless

miner opens his lamp, or a drop of water cracks a heated glass, or

a boy stumbles and breaks his lamp.’

It’s not entirely clear how much of Seed’s book is drawn from coal miner transcripts but the considerable employment of prose throughout suggests much of the work is drawn from such sources, though I might be wrong; it then occurs to me to skip to the back of the book and there sure enough is a Postscript by Seed which details his extensive use of transcripts and other sources throughout. In these senses, then, much of Brandon Pithouse can be classified as ‘found poetry’. Whether transcript prose or transcript poetry, it still makes for intriguing reading:

putting is sore work dragging the coal corves or tubs

using a harness called the ‘soames’

a chain passed between the legs hooked to an iron ring

attached to a

leather belt blisters as big as shillings and half-crown pieces

blisters of one day broken the next and the

girdle stuck to the wound crawling on hands and knees

dragging the coal through the tunnels from the workings to

the passages where pony putters could be used

dis thoo think we deserve to toil awl day in livin’ tombs?

That last line in dialect is a nicely evocative touch. We get a taste of Durham wit in some anecdotes and jokes included throughout –the following one is priceless:

Hangman to a murderer on the scaffold at Durham Gaol:

‘You can have a reprieve if you start work, putting at the drift.’

Condemned man: ‘Pull that lever.’

‘Putting at the drift’ obviously means to go down the pit –there’s a sense of synecdoche in the imagery of a lever used both for dropping the hatch for a hanging and for lowering the cage of miners into the pit. One George Hancock tells us:

I was 15 year old and nine month

when I started to hand-putt

and that is the worst job God ever created

shoving it behind a tub

And, ‘for Ralph Hawkins’:

Smash me heart marra

me puttin’s a’ done after his

first day down the pit

head in his hands

he told his mother he

wished he was 65

Gas is one of the perils of pit-life –the repetitions of ‘damp’ in the following passage is accumulatively effective:

Carbon monoxide is colourless odourless tasteless lighter than air

damps or foul airs kill insensibly

they are most in hot weather

infallible trial is by a dog and candles show it

in south winds colliers suffer from carbonic acid gas

white damp black damp and fire damp heavy sulphurous air not

fit for breath

black damp or stink could knock a man down

Some tropes are mini-poems, almost haiku:

Traces of gas in the dark

tiny little sparks in mid-air

or bubbling on the wet

black surfaces

In many respects Brandon Pithouse would work particularly well for radio as a work for voices very much along the lines of Ewan MacColl’s The Big Hewer (1961) as cited in my opening paragraph. The scriptural layout of parts of the text almost suggest this:

Jim Green

I’ve seen fellas who were deaf

stone deaf underground

and they would

tap

sound of knuckles tapping a surface

the roof

and they would tell you

if

it’s

safe

and if they said it wasn’t safe you better take notice of them

because them seem to know something you didn’t

We come upon what appears to be part of an 18^th century transcript about a pit disaster:

and heard the blow, and see what it threw out of the pit, and

shatter’d about the Gins: There was one thing very strange in it,

as I was told, That a Youth of 15 or 16 Years of Age, was blown

up the Pit and Shaft, and carried by the blast about 40 Yards from

the shaft, the Corps was found all intire, save the back part of his

head, which was cut off, though the Shaft is sixty Fathoms deep,

which is an Argument of the mighty Force this Blast is of.

1705

This is actually a trail of 18^th century transcripts reporting various pit disasters. We come upon another from 1708, one from ‘Lampton Colliery near Chester-le-Street, 1766’, a pit fire and explosion in 1806 and so on. On occasion Seed’s descriptions of these tragedies is more poetically engaged in terms of language and image:

Heworth morning of the 25th May 1812 about half past eleven

darkness like early twilight

inverted cone of black dust carried away on a strong west wind

falling a continued shower a mile and a half around

covered the roads so thickly

footsteps of passengers were strongly imprinted in it

clothes, tobacco-boxes, shoes, the only indexes by which they

could be recognised

Such descriptions are not for the faint-hearted and that Seed can wring poetry out of them is a tribute to his craftsmanship:

bodies in ghastly confusion: some like mummies, scorched dry

baked. One wanted its head, another an arm. The power of

the fire was visible upon them all; but its effects were

extremely various: some were almost torn to pieces, others

as if they had sunk down overpowered with sleep. Some

much burnt, but not much mangled. Others buried amongst

a confused wreck of broken brattices, trapdoors, trams, and

corves, with their legs broken, or their bodies otherwise

miserably scorched and lacerated.

The trope ‘as if they had sunk down overpowered with sleep’ is particularly powerful; as is the following lyrical passage, which, in its sparseness, is all the more potent:

From the position in which he was found

as if he’d been asleep

when the explosion happened

and never after

opened his eyes

That the tone and form of each anecdote varies goes in the work’s favour:

William Bell working in the pit morning of the disaster

Hebburn 1849 he was knocked down and rendered deaf and

while he was making his way to the shaft he

fell and knew nothing until he found himself at home

The pits, it seems, are littered with bones and corpses of miners or ghoulish memories of their grim witnessing –and not only of miners, but pit-ponies and horses as well:

…a horse lying dead directly in

the passage his head turned over his

shoulders as if in the falling he

had made a last effort to escape

Some accounts are composed more prosaically: ‘It came like a heavy wind it blew all the candles out and small/ coal about and it blew Richard Cooper down and the door upon/

him’. And the homes of so many miners’ families often reduced to funeral parlours:

As I knew many of the pitmen there at Haswell, I walked over

to see their families.

In the Long Row every house save one had its dead.

In one house five coffins – two on the bed, two on the dresser,

and one on the floor.

Latticed throughout this work are almost stream-of-consciousness passages:

collieries idle or working short

time the foundry gone the township

one little part of the wreckage

hard times together

criss-crossing of kinship and friendship networks

little to do and nowhere to go

gas-lit main street

bare bones of existence abject poverty multitude of meanings

exploited sweated underpaid health ruined maimed

It’s also important to note that Brandon Pithouse is not only a very oral but also visual work in terms of its layout on the page: many of the lines are double-spaced as if to give pause for breath between the lines or simply emphases to them; some passages are presented as poems, others as blocks of prose; it is a restless work which constantly shifts in shape on the page. Seed includes a striking quote from writer Sid Chaplin (OBE; 1916-86) who was himself from a Durham mining family and worked down the pit as a teenager before educating himself and then embarking on a fruitful literary career:

‘I have to guard myself against waxing poetic on the theme of this

great galaxy of villages each with the pit as its focal point, and each

nurturing a sort of semi-tribal community which in the light of

present-day urban society, seems almost a dream of paradise – a

sort of pitman’s Paradiso, safely set in the remote past. The

corrective is to remember the harshness, the filth, the disease,

above all the smells. At the same time, their achievements cry out

for celebration. Against all the odds, they and the folk who

inhabited them built up communities prepared for every

contingency, little societies of great strength and resilience and full

of vigour and humour.’

Chaplin’s literary gifts are tangibly in evidence in such glorious phrases as ‘galaxy of villages’ and ‘pitman’s Paradiso’. Some of Seed’s anecdotal histories are quite sublime vignettes:

6th December 1934 I met a man

trudging under the rain along a

muddy road a mirror the

omniscient narrator he was

small sturdy perhaps forty-five his

unprotected clothes were wet

an empty pipe in his mouth

out of habit he said

no tobacco in his pocket aye

and no prospect of affording any

Similarly to MacColl’s works Seed’s organises each topic associated with coal mining and so we move methodically through themes: from pit disasters to horse-keeping etc. The transcripts headed by the italicised name of the speaking miner as a script would be set out suggest verbatim transcription and it’s interesting to see how Seed uses line breaks and enjambments as if, presumably, emphasizing where the speaker pauses for breath between tropes, and this also gives the strong impression of the pithier and shorter verbal sentences more typical of the North of England: 

Dennis Fisher

first job I ever had

I was placed into the stables to work

I could have been a horse-keeper if I

wanted to I liked the ponies

liked working with the ponies

and without those ponies

and we had two hundred of them in Chilton colliery

there wouldn’t have been

any coal production whatsoever

without the pit ponies

they were the ones that did all the work

taking the empty tubs in

to the coal-face for the coal-hewers

and bringing the full ones out

and it’s not

it’s not on the level

when you go down the mine it’s not level

you’re going up steep hills

and going down steep banks

it wasn’t very easy work for the

pit ponies

You can almost hear Fisher pause for breath abruptly at each line-break. The deceptive simplicity of some of the poems camouflage fine craftsmanship:

Some people have a feast every pay-day

and some have spiced cakes and having spent

their money will live poor towards the end

of the fortnight for three or four days

or more until payday come again perhaps

they’ve only potatoes and salt for some days

Seed’s unshowy prosodic craftsmanship places much oral emphasis in line breaks and spacing of lines to give greater emphases, as in ‘for Edmund Hardy’:

Occasionally the pit ponies

were brought out of the pit

and ran loose in two fields

again and again they ran

from one end to the other

And here:

I have seen men working in the pit all day

with only a bottle of water

and oatmeal in it

Everything down to toileting is detailed: ‘no flush toilets them days/ a fire hose/ to wash all the excrement down a pipe/ onto the Pit Dene’. There’s a poignant juxtaposition of the young men lost down the pit with those lost simultaneously in WWI:

in 1914

a miner was severely injured every two hours

and killed every six hours

like a soldier remembering a campaign he said

the lads in the ‘C’ drift where I was

in there

there’s only one left alive

all of them died young

Hank and all them

Hank collapsed and died

Wally Purvis Clemensey

all big hitters all gone

them’s the empty chair in the club

and they all worked in the same flat

One miner is found dead in a surprising manner but in a scene otherwise undisrupted:

the deceased fell out from between two props 

there was no timber displaced

tub was on the way 

pony standing quietly

Some moments in the book are quite oblique:

flaming place that’s safe in the pit?

Let the coal

Stay

There

One transcript, shaped into a poem on the page, relates the sad story of a pit boy killed on his first day:

the Friday night

there was a little laddie standing

at the pit gates

he asked a dark night he asked me

could he accompany me to Birtley

afraid of the dark you see

& I asked him who he was he says

I’ve left school today

Catholic school at Birtley

I’ve been to the colliery office

to get a job

he says me mother’s a widow

and I can get a job at the pit

so the manager’s told uz that I can

start on Monday

I says come on sonnie I says

you can go half way when I go

up Eighton Banks you can

go along to the huts where he was living in Birtley

canny little lad he was

so anyway I was chairman of the Lodge

and on the Tuesday following

never thought anymore about it

a man came from the pit to tell uz

that I had to go straight to the pit

there’d been a fatal accident

didn’t know who it was

so off I went I

left me breakfast

and went to Bewick Main Pit

it’s about a mile and a half or

two mile

here’s this little lad

lying in the ambulance house

head off

top

been caught with the girder

he was killed outright

second day down the pit

at the Catholic school on Friday afternoon

and got his leaving certificate at fourteen

killed eh

nice state of affairs

and a widow to start with

from the first world war

Another transcript, presumably from an audio interview, includes some phonetically emphasized Durham pronunciation and idiolect:

When it did come away me and Jimmy were sitting in the tail

end getting wa bait. And Bob R. and Tommy C. was the

officials.

Could hear this bloody noise. Looked alang the face. And there’s

coming alang …

Within half an hour the whole Mullergit five hundred metres in

was flooded completely. Reet alang the face, reet alang the

tailgate.

And it took six weeks to pump down they found an under –

ground lake and also stone archways which wasn’t on the plans

at all and they hadn’t a clue where these archways came from.

There was a swally in one of the gates. And you had to jump on

the boat to get through the water.

We get a depiction of the physical handicaps caused by years working in the pits, bow legs (or rickets), rheumatism etc.:

bent double into the wind sometimes

they could hardly walk

shadowy figures in the twilight

they’d be soaking wet by the time they got to work

and it was a wet pit

soaking wet still when they got home

not a bit of wonder they’re all

rheumatic bent old men now

for all their strange appearance you knew

no harm would come to you

The constant wetness of clothes and bodies, an occupational dampness, continues as a theme:

soaked knee-pads rubbing into the bones

wet straps cutting into skin

he used to come home soaking wet

this is before the baths were built

and we were always drying clothes in front of the

fire soaking wet they’d be

as if he’d been out in the rain

And, presumably in Durham idiolect again:

Yell watta

day watta

red cankery poison watta

And a distinctly wet funeral for one deceased miner:

Geordie used to hate wet workin.

And the day of his funeral, it was during the Strike. It was chuckin

it down. We were at the gates of the cemetery, all wor badges on.

And an aad couple came along. ‘Huh. They’re picketin the

cimitiry noo, yer knaa. We cannot bury wor dead’.

And we followed the hearse up and Geordie’s coffin was. Water

actually came awer the top. It’s a wonder he didn’t wake up and

yell. He hated water. He wouldn’t get a wet note off Wilfy A.

There’s some deft alliteration and build up of images in the following poem:

In the Buddle Pit when the rope

broke or the cage left the conductors

all hands in the pit had to

seek their way to bank by an

old pit near Broomside we had to

travel and crawl through abandoned workings

broken-down roads blocked with old timber

falls of stone pools of water

puddles ankle deep and then ascend

on chain ladders amidst a stinking

stifling atmosphere of black damp

reaching Rainton bare-headed bruised and cut

The constant breathing in of coal dust inescapably produced black mucus:

We used to always have a saying

the lads at the end of the shift

you used to give a bit of a cough

and they used to say

gan on

get the blackuns up

mind it used to

be black phlegm it was

just dust man

One George Taylor relays:

I learnt a lot off old miners

these old miners

they were old men

at forty-two years old

aa’ve had to gan with the owd bugger

and they were the nicest fellas in the world

and that’s where I learnt the pit work

Seed serves up oral history as anecdote-cum-prose poem impeccably:

It’s a terrible thing, emphysema. When they give him stuff all

coal dust came up.

Well he died of it, and my father died of that as well and he was

first Bevin Boy in South Shields to say I’ll not go down the

pits. And they put him in Durham prison for six solid weeks

for being defiant. It was in the Gazette. He was just eighteen

years old.

And on the headlines it said ‘YOUTH. I WILL NOT GO

DOWN THE PITS’. Even his doctor who he was under, for

bronchial, he wouldn’t sign the certificate to give him to the

man – what do you know, the judge or whatever.

All me mother knew – the policeman knocked at the door and

he said: ‘Can I have a toothbrush and a change of clothing’.

She says: ‘What for?’

He says: ‘Ralph’s going straight up’.

He went to prison rather than go down the pit and when he’d

finished his six weeks he was a changed young lad. And the

day that he came out the feller knocked at me mother’s door

and said: ‘Your Ralph has to report to Whitburn Colliery and

start on Monday’. He made him go.

And again the Durham vernacular: ‘Ah man but aa was bad aa/ nearly smelt brimstone that time’. There’s a prose passage which details the horrendous physical scars on so many miners’ bodies, particularly their hands and ankles, areas exposed to the toxicity of coal dust for long periods of time, or symptoms of bacterial infections peculiar to mining:

History the history of bodies in pain impossible to button his

clothes lace his boots use a knife and fork hands are often

knocked skin abraded local throbbing or ‘beating’ pus will

track along the tendon sheaths most often to the back of the

hand inflammation considerable swelling in the centre of the

hand the skin will be hot and glazed inflammation of the

synovial membrane of the wrist joint and of the tendon sheaths

swelling and thickening around the affected wrist-joint

stiffness of the joint pain on movement and crepitations the

lesion may be erythematous or may consist of boils the lower

part of the legs and the forearms round the ankles at the upper

level of the clog or boot and also round the waist at the level of

the waist-belt coal dust is infected with staphylococci

We come upon a six line poem-vignette spoken by one Tom Lamb mid-sentence:

and me back was catching the roof

making scabs down yer back

called pitman’s buttons

it would heal over the weekend

and you would go in and

knock them off on the Monday

The term ‘pitman’s buttons’ shows how poetry crops up in the most unlikely of places. The defiant wit of the miners is everywhere in evidence as in a prose anecdote in Durham dialect from the Sixties in which some of them are discussing the closures of pits, which leads onto a punning punchline:

We were in the top deck. Well the top deck has a bar runs across

it, and you can sort of lean on it, well S. was leaning on it. And

our Len says: ‘Aye, aa knaa two bliddy mair they should shut’.

S says: ‘Aye what’s that?’

‘Thy bliddy ARM pits.’

Miner Dennis Fisher recounts through one of Seed’s poem forms how ‘each colliery was allotted a target/ for tonnage/ a tonnage target/ and we were all patriotic’ and how the miners always met their targets and looked ‘up at the pulley wheels/ to see if the flag was flying’ and how ‘we’d reach the target/ we reached the target every week/ till that flag/ was flying in tatters’. Then there is a particularly poignant trope:

and then we got a new flag

in 1947 when the collieries was nationalised

and at last the pits belonged to us

so we thought

And:

New Year’s Day was Vesting Day

miners paraded the streets behind the lodge banner and colliery

band

to Brandon ‘C’ pit head

before a large crowd the blue flag was hoisted

N.C.B. in white in the centre

and a board fixed to the winding engine house:

‘This colliery is now managed

by the National Coal Board

on behalf of the people.’

Some miners are less than nostalgic for their lifelong service to keep the nation heated:

Geordie Ord

if this pit were to close

I’d accept me redundancy tomorrow

nearly 44 years down the pit

it’s a fair good length of time

I haven’t got the figures but

I know the people in Craghead

I would think about two or

three years after they’re finished

retired at 65

nine out of every ten dies

simple reason is

their engine’s finished

they’ve worked

that hard

all their lives

There are many miners understandably embittered after lifetimes of hard graft:

just fancy

a man working 50 years down the mine

and he gets a piece of paper

a certificate (from the National Coal Board)

I’d have given ’em all a hundred pound

in fact some chaps doesn’t come and even accept it

& I’m damn sure I wouldn’t

and some hangs it up and put them in a frame

and some just throws it in the fire

and that’s where mine would go

Another verbal contribution by Geordie Ord is particularly poignant in its prophesying future unemployment and lack of comradeship for redundant miners and is beautifully sculpted into a poem by Seed:

Geordie Ord

everybody’s brothers when they’re down the pit

and that’s the sort of thing I many a time sit

what’s going to happen when the pits is finished

redundant

you haven’t got that sort of comradeship

you just sort of

automatic drift apart

Another anecdote relays something of the machismo of mining culture, not only at work but in leisure:

I saw a woman in there one day in the bar

at Kelloe Club it was Robert Shutt’s mother

and Harold Wilson jumps up straight on his feet

he shouts Mr. Secretary

there’s a woman in the bar here mind

It’s difficult to imagine the erudite and rather cat-like Harold Wilson expressing such manly proprietorship in a pub but then he was from a fairly lower-middle-class Yorkshire background prior to his grammar school scholarship and Oxford. Another anecdote gives a fascinating insight into social attitudes and one-upmanship among the mining class:

There’s too many working people think they’re middle class noo.

I can remember Jacky H. Can you remember Jacky H? At Westa.

I remember him. He used to flee all awer.

I used to say to him: ‘Jacky why do you flee all awer? You’re no

better thought of, man’.

He says: ‘I’m going to be colliery overman at this colliery and’,

he says, ‘I don’t care whose toes I stand on till I get there’.

Once he got the colliery overman’s job that was a joke gan’ round

the pit. His lass went to the shop and asked for a pair of

colliery overman’s pit socks.

One Bill McKie recounts how miners collected their wages in coins and how they ‘just put the money in the pocket/ when they got down the pit/ they hung their coat up/ and I never heard of anybody losing one penny’. 

For me, perhaps the most striking example of Seed’s technique in sculpting poems from transcripts is the following –just look at how the poet makes music with the names of various medical conditions and symptoms by cramming them together for rhythmic effect in the second and third stanzas:

black crepe

hung on the pit banner at Durham Big Meeting

pitman’s stoop

making your way in‐bye on foot

breathing through dust

coming off like a black fog

driving the drift from the low seam

cutting coal with a windy pick

pneumoconiosis dermatitis nystagmus

bronchitis and emphysema

breathless wheezing and coughing

beat knee beat elbow torn or damaged knee cartilage

rheumatism hernias arthritis crutches empty jacket sleeves

his twisted frame in old age

The rhythm of the line ‘rheumatism hernias arthritis crutches empty jacket sleeves’ is particularly effective. Then in the fourth stanza there is great use of colour, image and alliteration:

black circles of coal dust round his eyes

small blue veins and blue-black

scars of coal dust cuts on his face

The crippling neurological degenerations engendered by the body-eroding onus of decades down the pits is graphically rendered:

You’d see them

in the village struggling to

walk they

lost weight quickly

gaunt and thin

the club I drank in

used to call it ‘Death Row’

ten miners sitting in a line

you saw it go from ten to nine

to eight to seven you can see

who were lucky

to be alive mind

but they can’t get the words out

can’t breathe properly

bent at right angles

Another retired emphysema-ridden miner relays how his wheeze is so loud it can heard from upstairs. Back in the early 19^th century we hear of one winter when the pits were stopped:

Winter of 1810

every pit was stopped

without organisation or halls to meet in or strike pay or

savings

suffering from cold and hunger

delegates’ meetings were hunted out by the owners and

magistrates

mass meetings on the moors dispersed by troops

many arrests the Old Gaol and House of Correction at Durham

were so overcrowded some were held under armed guard in the

stables of the Bishop of Durham a Christian gentleman

families were evicted from their cottages and turned adrift in the

snow after seven weeks the terrible and savage pitmen starved

into submission

One poem-vignette details how the pitmen signed their names:

signing the bond

indicating their assent and signature

by stretching their hands

over the shoulder of the agent

touching the top of his pen

while he was affixing the cross to their names

In the following passage Seed brilliantly puts in some of God’s words to Adam post-Fall from Genesis as biblical interlocution punctuating a covetous voice in Durham dialect admitting to having broken in to the home of an official at the colliery, possibly his employer as hinted in the first interlocutory line which is possibly the opening of a sermon framed to keep miners in their place:

I was at your hoose last neet

You are resisting not the oppression of your employers

And myed meself very comfortable

but the Will of your Maker

Ye hey nee family and yor just one man on the colliery I see ye’ve

a great lot of rooms and big cellars and plenty wine and beer in

them which I got me share on

the ordinance of that God who has said

Noo I naw some at wor colliery that has three or fower lads and

lasses and they live in one room not half as good as your cellar

that in the sweat of his face shall man eat bread

I don’t pretend to naw very much but I naw there shudn’t be that

much difference

But the miner is of course right about his personal judgement of such disparities, even if his act of breaking in is more questionable. The rhyming of ‘said’ and ‘bread’ makes for a cadence to the last two italicised interlocutions which contrasts nicely against the more sinuous tongue of the miner. 

Seed is rightly damning in his depiction of the oppression of miners and their families after pit closures, in the 19^th century:

workhouse closed to miners the terrible and savage pitmen village

after pit village thousands of families evicted their dwellings taken

by strangers families and furniture handed to their door

camped out on the moors on the roadside in ditches beneath

hedges and in fields under the open sky of the wet fag-end of

summer 1844 children the bedridden at Pelton Fell a blind

woman of 88 evicted out into the rain

throwing their household goods out into the road colliery carts

loaded with furniture moved away into the lanes formed the walls

of new dwellings tops covered with canvas or bedclothes

dozens prosecuted for trespass bound hand and foot forced onto

treadmills to work off their fines

everywhere yeomanry militia dragoons regiments of foot troops

of cavalry marines a strong force of London police

bright glitter of the huzzar’s sabre point of the fusilier’s bayonet

Such utterly merciless militaristic suppression of the oppressed classes has uncanny echoes of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 –famously commemorated in Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy– yet this is over twenty years later! I confess to finding the marked absence of commas particularly in the last line here puzzling; perhaps Seed has again here sculpted a poem out of a verbatim source, yet even so, one would think it would still be punctuated in parts –but it doesn’t really matter, it just means a lot of caesuras. Seed puts the local class divide in graphic perspective in the following slab of prose:

1st August 1844. Two days ago the foundation stone of a

monument was laid on Pensher Hill to the late Earl of Durham

in the presence of 30,000 persons the cost exclusive of the stone

which was given by the Marquis of Londonderry being £3,000.

If the Marquis thought this noble deed should be recorded in

history let it also be recorded that Henry Barrass was a working

man and had worked in his pits for 30 years and that he is in his

80th year with his wife in her 75th and they have been turned

out of their house.

Or were what I assumed the repercussions of pit closures actually those of strikes? It’s not entirely clear, but the following slab of prose suggest a strike has happened:

RESOLUTION: ‘Seeing the present state of things and being

compelled to retreat from the field through the overbearing

cruelty of our employers, the suffering and misery of our

families, and the treachery of those who have been their tools

during the strike, we, at the present time, deem it advisable

to make the best terms with our employers we can.’

There is a stark warning of the poverties and resentments that inevitably foment into violent revolution from the transcript of the Durham Coal Trade Arbitration, 1876:

‘If the workman is to be ‘rudely handled’ by natural laws, and

stripped naked by the laws of political economy, he may some day

be forced to seek for his protection outside of law altogether, and

this is what all thoughtful men should seek to prevent. And let not

the Owners forget themselves, history can repeat itself. Not hungry,

but hungered men know no law, or are amenable to no reason,

seeing that their famished state proclaims they have already past

the boundary, where neither reason or humanity govern the affairs

of life.’

Hunger, indeed, though a sapper of energies, can often, in a very primal sense, energise great aggression; after all, revolutions are normally fought on empty stomachs, at least, by the insurgents. The revolutionary sentiment continues:

Everybody followed Billy he used to call himself

a militant moderate

and to Billy it was a test of endurance

something we had to see through

like the Blitz

he wasn’t going to go back

nobody was going back as far as Billy was concerned

we’re gonna beat the bastards we’ll

endure

Seed intersperses much social document with shards of lyricism:

after dark Dawdon women

crept near their pitheap

when your children are

cold they swarmed over the

coal even the bairns’

sand-buckets were filled

We get a triptych of numbered prose poems recounting how the striking miners were intimidated by police and tempted with bribes by blacklegs and colliery officials:

1

The miner demanded to know what law gave anybody the right

to stop him going home he pointed at his blue uniform and

said this law there were no photographers present

2

I used to have a drawing pin in my glove and I used to poke

them in the chest

that’s enough from you you’d better behave

and the drawing pin used to stick in their chests and

they used to wonder what it was we can do all sorts of things

legality can be sorted out later

3

As you were driving past the pickets were shown fivers

and tenners at the windows brochures were waved at them there

were no photographers present

yeah there were them that waved fivers and tenners through the

window

Many police went undercover, pretending to be miners, possibly as agents provocateur:

I never thought I’d see scenes like this in Britain I never thought I’d

see what I’ve seen on the streets of Easington

we’re occupied we’ve been occupied by the police

police some of them

wearing black

uniforms with no markings

Seed includes this slightly ambiguous, beautifully phrased testament to what one assumes is the accumulative production of the coal pits over generations by prolific novelist, playwright and social commentator J.B. Priestley, writing in 1934:

‘I stared at the monster, my head tilted back, and thought of all

the fine things that had been conjured out of it in its time: the

country houses and town houses, the drawing rooms and dining

rooms, the carriages and pairs, the trips to Paris, the silks and the

jewels, the peaches and iced puddings, the cigars and old brandies,

I thought I saw them all tumbling and streaming out…’

Next we get some cold hard facts and figures in terms of those who profited from the sweat of the coal miners:

Annual royalties accruing to landlords in the Northern Coal –

fields:

Ecclesiastical Commissioners £370,000

Marquis of Bute (6 years average) £155,772

Duke of Hamilton (10 years average) £133,793

Lord Tredegar (6 years average) £83,827

Duke of Northumberland (6 years average) £82,450

Lord Dunravin (for 1918) £64,370

Earl Ellesmere £43,497

Earl Durham £40,522

Evidence to the Coal Industry Commission, 1919.

This is social document writ large. Then there is a fine lyrical miniature in Durham dialect which closes with something of a Balekian trope:

from Thornley Pit

low main best went to all the big houses in

London to the Palace

and Sandringham

I’ve seen tickets for the Palace

A’ the hardship toils and tears

it gies to warm the shins o’ London

Seed brings us almost up to date with the post-Thatcherite hinterlands that are what remains of the collieries and their associated communities:

When Ellington closed in 1994 the world’s press turned out to

witness four ponies brought to bank for the last time and put

out to pasture. Cameras and crews came from everywhere to

present the event for television. Colin P., one of the pony

handlers, was interviewed leading the last pony from the cage.

The day before five hundred men were made redundant in one

of Europe’s worst unemployment black spots and nobody else

noticed.

Seed gifts us an intriguing and touching vignette in succinct prose which is worth excerpting in full:

I have a copy of Proletarian Literature of the United States,

published by Martin Lawrence in London in 1935. It was given

to me by an old Communist in Durham in January or February

1972. I think we met in the back seat of a car on the way to

deliver hot soup and propaganda to a miner’s picket line at a

power station somewhere in the Team Valley. I think it was

snowing. I’m sad and guilty that I no longer remember his name

but I remember his strong lined face under his cap. He must

have been over 70 years old. (I was 21 years old, an unemployed

recent graduate). And I remember the story he told. Of waiting

in the fields at night by the London to Edinburgh railway line

during the 1926 General Strike. Bundles of the Daily Worker

were thrown out of a passing express and spirited away by him

and his comrades to be distributed among the striking lockedout

pitmen in the area. I knew the spot: a triangle of ground

between Low Flatts Road, the main railway line and another line

that crossed over taking Swedish iron ore from Tyne Dock up

to the steel works at Consett. I’d sometimes played there as a

child when there were still pitmen on the windy fells west of

Chester-le-Street. There are none now. But I don’t know how the

book came into my hands. I’m not sure I ever met him again. I

think it got to me via somebody else, with a message. There is

nothing written inside the book. But I think I still know what

the message was. I don’t know the words, though I imagine I do,

across those gaps of time. Forty years; and eighty-seven years,

since the great lock-out of 1926. The book’s cover is faded green,

the spine is frayed and hanging off. Its 384 pages include the

writing of none of the leftist American poets active in the 1930s

whose work was then inspiring me – George Oppen, Charles

Reznikoff, Lorine Neidecker, Louis Zukofsky. And looking again

through its yellowing pages on a grey autumn afternoon in 2013,

there are few of its contributors I have ever read with any great

interest –Kenneth Fearing yes, and perhaps Kenneth Patchen

and Muriel Rukeyser. But I have taken this book with me to

every place I have lived since 1972 – seven addresses, which

doesn’t seem very many, and the last three in London, a long

way from the Lambton Worm and Low Flatts Road and the little

bridge over the railway line that still heads from King’s Cross

This chillingly clinical memo to, presumably, property speculators (there is, incidentally, a compendious bibliography and Notes at the back of the book which will elucidate sources):

Category D: Those from which a considerable loss of population

may be expected. In these cases it is felt that there should be no

further investment of capital on any considerable scale, and that

any proposal to invest capital should be carefully examined. This

generally means that when the existing houses become

uninhabitable they should be replaced elsewhere, and that any

expenditure on facilities and services in these communities which

would involve public money should be limited to conform to what

appears to be the possible future life of existing property in the

community.

The following vignette is clearly a verbatim transcript as its broken grammar indicates –it’s fascinating but distressing to see that dispossessed mining communities characterised their dispossession by compulsory purchase orders and subsequent decanting to other areas to live as being moved out to ‘the reservation’:

the house where I was born

number 21 Lower King Street

early 60’s we realised

something was going to happen

which was the

knocking down of the Lower Street houses

so we decided to

look for higher ground

we found a house up in High Thompson Street

not only had it the luxury of gas it also

had the luxury of electricity

which we’d never ever had

chance to get a television

in 1969

we got the compulsory purchase order

that we had to go the inevitable

to ‘the reservation’

had happened

Seed evidently trawled through old photographs in his research as well as having some shown to him from private albums of interviewees, as the following piece illustrates: 

Ivy Gardner’s photographs

All these things

are my life

this one

was when they took the colliery down

that was me gran’s street

that’s the school

that was when me gran’s house was knocked down

The pit villages are depicted as ancient settlements: ‘This little village here/ it was a thriving Roman village when London was a/ grazing ground for Roman donkeys’. Yet there is a change of tack with the following quote from Sid Chaplin:

‘The villages were built overnight – the Americans are much

more realistic about mining than we are. They know it’s a

short-lived thing, relatively speaking. Even if there is fifty years

of coal – what’s fifty years? So they talk about mining camps,

we talk about villages, which is one of the oldest words in the

language. It means a permanent settlement. But most of the

Durham villages were, in fact, camps, and they were put down

as camps.’

This verbatim description of pit-village ruins: ‘Very strange seeing the remaining walls wall-paper sometimes/ peeling off to be able to see the allotments through the gaps all/ the rubble lying about it looked like a scene from the war’. Seed deals in fragments like a literary archaeologist: ‘Men would put their lamps face down in the dust and say, ‘I mind once …’/

And you’d get a story’. This fascinating, mildly hilarious extract from a middle-class visitor to the Durham pit-town, possibly a social historian or Mass Observation scout (?):

If they had little time, they had less inclination to be examined,

and still less to answer the questions of a total stranger; and

even when their attention was obtained, the barriers to our

intercourse were formidable. In fact, their numerous mining

technicalities, northern provincialisms, peculiar intonations

and accents, and rapid and indistinct utterances, rendered it

essential for me, an interpreter being inadmissible, to devote

myself to the study of these peculiarities ere I could translate

and write … Even where evidence could at last be elicited from

them, it was so intermingled with extraneous remarks,

explanatory of their opinions upon politics and public and

private affairs, foreign to the question addressed to them, that

it was essential that a large portion of it should be ‘laid out’ by

a process analogous to their own ‘separation’.

Here someone suggests a collating and organising of the recollections of still-living coal miners in the area for recording an oral history, something to last for posterity; possibly the prompt for Seed’s project:

Get those miners who can tell the brilliant stories and sit them

down and get them to tell the stories from the stories you make

something to house the stories something that’s right now that

will be able to be listened to and appreciated well beyond their

lifetime something like a vocal archive that could be listened to

people and appreciated time after might be another way to do a

commemoration plenty of miners still live here

Or, put another way, as an elliptical poem:

To record them and make a record

as a monument

is more of a monument

instead of a sculpture

the stories themselves

all those stories you heard

when you were young

go there’s no record

The following is a profound epitaph to the countless miners who perished in the pits:

In Durham Cathedral a miner’s lamp is kept lit each day a page

is turned in the book of remembrance colliery by colliery the

names of men and boys who died underground with their ages

and dates of their death marks of identity about which no man

had any say and each man has no say.

Next we have an imagistic lyrical poem by Seed:

From Ric Caddel’s Back Kitchen Window

Mile after mile the wet roads the weak light

Empty streets

In plenitude of nature

Windswept

In freezing rain in silence that

Familiar place

Dark hills huge clouds blank

Stone on these slopes the same

End from any source

A thousand stratagems

Vanishing into the air

Ego

Scriptor

[1981]

This is, unusually, followed by the poet’s contextualisation of the poem: 

Ric was uneasy about the title of this poem I remember. He

wouldn’t come out and say so directly, of course. But I could

sense some reserve. The fact was, that from the back of Cross

View Terrace you could see a mile or so across to Langley Moor,

a pit village where my grandfather was a pitman for most of his

life and where I spent a good deal of time as a child. Ric and I

walked down that long steep hill a couple of times but we never

got as far as Langley Moor. A pub always intervened. By 1981,

when I drafted this poem, Ralph Seed had been dead for a

decade. And the world of my childhood seemed long gone. So

it was a poem about death and about the disappearance of the

past (and of the poet). And it was evoked by that particular

wintry landscape on an actual January day when I looked out of

that particular window. I also liked the several connotations of

the name ‘Cross View’. Now the death of Ric, who I knew for 30

years, forces me to read this poem in a different way. The words

on the page are the same. But it is now a different poem.

London 23 April 2003

Seed inter-textually introduces his next short poem:

This is to remember Ric Caddel – and now Bill Griffiths too:

Byker Hill and Walker shore

Collier lads for evermore!

Pit-laddie keel-laddie

Cold salt

Waters of the Tyne

Autumn waters of the

Tyne golden

Shadows in the last rays smoking

Till howdy-maw

What is particularly noticeable about the Seed has shaped these transcripts into verses on the page are the numerous enjambments that are all the more marked by the absence of punctuation/commas and the implicit caesuras where sentence clauses stop and start; Seed’s technique gives a –presumably deliberate– disjointedness to the lines:

forgotten spaces organized amnesia the activity of coal mining

erased beneath the surface of the visible rising mine-waters

entrail acidic salts they saturate voids

Romans left more traces in Durham County than the collieries

by the end of the twentieth century few traces of their

existence nothing commemorates places where several

generations thousands worked

and dozens sometimes hundreds died the sense of emptiness

experienced in a place which is losing its memory how to

know a place or represent something you can’t see that isn’t

there everything I don’t remember

we treat what is

as inevitable      we stand on the ground of accomplished fact

everything that is but

how did the accomplished fact become one become ‘is’

Following this rather fragmentary poem is this plaintive aside: ‘That’s all over County Durham though, isn’t it./ There’s not many winding gears left./ They’re all planted into little hills all over Durham’. Seed is accomplished at such spare and haunting lyrics: 

coal dust it

settled on everything

between the smallest cracks

wedges that 

pried apart the world

One of Seed’s most evocative and beautiful poetic flourishes is the following:

Place rather than dates events rolling upland low ridges valleys

with a strong east-west grain. Memories of others ancestral

beings gently rounded ridges occasional steeper bluffs. Frozen

for ever at a particular moment they sat down and became a

part of the place for ever they turned into the place.

Not for ever for as long as

as anyone remembers then

drift off without leaving

any residue

‘We’ like smoke over the fields like rain

Fragments of heathland survive on infertile acidic soils.

In the beginning they went onto the spoil heaps picking out

the coal until there was no coal left then down in Bloemfontein

woods they cleared the soil away and they started working this

seam so we had fires during the 1926 lockout.

Ancient oak woods in steep-sided denes on the banks of rivers

and streams an asymmetry the landscape a waxing gibbous

moon high in the east at sunset the owl of Minerva

takes flight only as night falls

Seed continues in this wistful lyrical mode:

Everything that was lived

experience has

moved away

into

heritage reclamation landscape

blocked drift-mouths ramps collapsed tunnels disused railway

lines viaducts old coke

ovens spoil heaps slurry lagoons

new grassy fields smooth green slopes not quite

real among rolling upland ridges and valleys

dry stone walls thorn hedge

straight enclosure roads

immediacies of an ordinary afternoon where

something happened

times of the southern dynasties where strikes and closures it

was

always ganna gan

The alliterations and assonances in the following lines works extremely well making the lines almost tangible:

oscillate on a semi-tone hear both notes at once a chord

unresolved or archaeology the notion of strata lines edges

blurring edges discontinuity where/when one layer becomes

another each residual layer containing information

fragments left from human occupation left in a midden

sludge dregs the lees

That Seed can excavate poetic turns of phrase from geological data is something to commend:

The true coal formation consists principally of extensive parallel

strata of coal, covered by strata of shale, containing impressions

of vegetables, and not unfrequently remains of freshwater shell

fish and animals.

The strata are frequently intersected by cracks or breaks, which

are filled with gravel or sandstone, and sometimes with a sink

or bending, locally denominated troubles.

There’s a verse made entirely of place names, presumably pits, which is arranged in an almost sing-song manner (I’m unable to format the text as it appears on the page):

Kimblesworth Waterhouses Witton Wham

Pelaw Pelton Stargate Plain

Toronto Hobson Phoenix Drift

Lambton Waldridge Tudhoe Mill

Quaking Houses Langley Moor

Randolph Hutton Tanfield Lea

Brancepeth Cragheed Clara Vale

Lumley Harraton Chester Moor

Chopwell Cornsay No.1

Wingate Ushaw Herrington Esh

Shildon Beamish Sacriston Lintz

Blackhall Edmondsley Framwellgate

Handen Hold Trimdon Grange Wheatley Hill

Dragonville Hamsteels Dean and Chapter

Eden Brandon Pity Me

The final poetic flourish of this long and amorphous work, which is difficult to categorise, closes on a hauntingly nostalgic note:

‘Nana and grandad’s at Langley Moor’

the place was called

from Chester the 42 for Crook

off at the Boyne up Front Street

on the left past Brandon Lane

can’t remember the number

listening you

cannot see how it was

pictures photographs shadows

changing on the wall

tangle of time frames unpainted

sunlight and it’s still there yes

a Saturday morning

a few thousand Saturdays ago

Seed’s polished and succinctly written Postscript serves in itself as a slice of social document and is a fascinating read. Here he contextualises his own familial and ancestral associations with mining in Durham:

I’ve never been down the pit. My grandfather Ralph Seed –

pronounced Rarf – worked down the pit around Brandon and

Langley Moor for most of his life. So did his eldest son, uncle

Jim. I remember him telling me how he left school on the Friday

afternoon and some pit manager said to his dad, ‘your lad’ll be

starting on Monday?’ And he did. My father was marched off to

Germany at the end of the war and avoided the pit. His mother,

my grandmother, Evelyn Nolan, was from several generations

of mining stock too. I found her brother, Cornelius (Con) Nolan,

listed as an accident victim at Bowburn colliery in 1940. I think

I remember Uncle Con’s amazing curly eyebrows and his wiry

frame and deep voice (some 20 years later) – or was that Uncle

Henry? My other grandfather, my mother’s father, was too

damaged by his experiences in the First World War trenches,

which got him the Military Medal and chronic bronchitis, to

work down the pit. But his father John Carroll was a pitman. So

was his father in turn, also called John Carroll, who had escaped

from Ireland as a child in the 1840s. He was a pitman around

Wigan in the 1860s and 1870s and later around Durham. My

last sighting of him is in the 1901 census, listed as a retired hewer

and widower, living with his daughter Margaret (Moore) and

her husband in the little pit village of Kimblesworth. I do not

remember his son, my great-grandfather John Carroll. I was two

when he died, in his early 90s, but my mother told me several

times how he’d held my hands to help me to walk as a stubborn

impatient toddler. I think it was through him that I was called

John.

So for what it’s worth, I can claim several generations of

Durham coal-mining stock on both my father’s and my mother’s

side, as of course can hundreds of thousands of others today,

scattered around the globe. And coalmining was a major part of

the environment in which I was brought up in the 1950s and 60s

around Chester-le-Street. Fathers of school-friends were pitmen,

including Jock Purdon and Joe Donnelly. And my wife’s father,

John McTaff, was a Durham pitman too. But all this is by-theby.

You don’t need to be of coal-mining stock or to have worked

down the pit or live in Durham County to write about Durham

and coalmining. These do not necessarily qualify you; nor does

their absence necessarily disqualify you.

We then get Seed’s own description of the conscious architecture of Brandon Pithouse, which reveals the painstaking process:

And this isn’t biography, auto- or otherwise. What I have done

in this piece of writing is to trawl through hundreds and maybe

thousands of pages of printed sources – books, parliamentary

reports, newspapers, magazines. I’ve also worked on source

materials via many websites. I’ve been particularly keen to listen

to the voices of miners – and their families – and so I’ve

transcribed bits of recorded interviews for radio and television,

some going back as far as the 1960s. From all this material, a

tiny fraction of what is available about the Durham coalfield and

its workforce, I have selected bits and pieces that attracted my

attention. I had no plan, no idea of what I was looking for,

though obviously my selections were partly determined by

preconceptions – some conscious, some unconscious. I then cut,

rewrote and spliced this material together in various forms –

prose, verse of various kinds, with punctuation, without

punctuation, arranged on the page in various ways. And with

no outline or narrative or theme in my mind I shuffled and

reshuffled this material: ellipsis, juxtaposition, disjunction,

parataxis, fragmentation…

Seed then explains how he added his own poetic interpretations and interpolations throughout the text:

I was conscious that my pursuit of material here was not the

same as a historian’s. I was reading in a more haphazard (and

un-disciplined) manner. My focus was wider. My attention was

different. A more striking difference was that I sometimes

rewrote my sources and interjected material of my own. This is

a mortal sin for the disciplined historian who has to treat sources

as sacrosanct. It’s like doctoring evidence in a court of law or

lying in the witness box. In my case, I was not revising my

sources to fit a thesis since I had no thesis. I was merely

interested in making the writing sharper, crisper, more precise,

or at least more interesting. Or perhaps I was just enjoying

cutting and pasting, like a child sitting on the floor brandishing

shiny scissors surrounded by scraps of bright paper. Having said

that, I did treat my sources with respect and I have invented

nothing. (Note to librarian: please do not shelve in the ‘Fiction’

section.) I was particularly keen to respect the language of my

oral sources and in places the writing follows exactly, or as

exactly as I can hear, the pauses and incoherence of the speaking

voice –though sometimes it doesn’t. And where I could I have

usually identified the speaker, as found in the source I’d used.

Serious works of history provide a bibliography precisely so that

other historians can examine these sources, check for misuse or

selective use of evidence. There was no scholarly rationale for

doing this here, but I have listed below a few sources I have used.

Oral history, or history altogether, and its presentations, are things that Seed has thought a great deal about:

It is almost half a century since Hayden White criticised

historians for turning their backs on the literary innovations of

modernism.

‘There have been no significant attempts at surrealistic,

expressionistic, or existentialist historiography in this century

(except by novelists and poets themselves) … It is almost as if

historians believed that the sole possible form of historical

narration was that used in the English novel as it had developed

by the late nineteenth century.’ (‘The Burden of History’ (1966),

in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural

Criticism, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978),

pp. 43-4.)

Despite one or two exceptions in recent decades, the charge is

still probably fair. One major exception is provided by Walter

Benjamin and if there is one historical work that Brandon

Pithouse has some elective affinity to, it is his Arcades Project,

his massive unfinished historical assemblage of materials from

nineteenth-century Paris.

‘The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry the principle

of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale

constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut

components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small

individual moment the crystal of the total event.’ (Walter

Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K.

McLaughlin, (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p.931.)

Had I world enough and time I would write at greater length

about Benjamin’s work, about its resistance to the conventional

historian’s strategy of scholarly inventory and interpretation,

about its use of montage – and about the powerful creative

matrix out of which it emerged in the 1920s, a matrix that

included Cubism and Surrealism, the film theory and practice

of Eisenstein and Vertov, Kafka and Proust, James Joyce’s Ulysses,

and Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness.

The modernist influence in Seed’s experimental montage approach to social document is palpable throughout Brandon Pithouse. Though Seed’s description of his book-length work is loose and ambiguous he seems more definite about what it is not:

Brandon Pithouse doesn’t claim the status of ‘History’. But nor,

on the other hand, does it aspire to ‘Poetry’ – the territory of

other great and jealous powers. It is not a long poem nor is it a

collection of poems. It is an investigation of what can be done

with source materials. It asks questions of the reader. Some

sections have punctuation, some don’t. Some are clear and

straightforward pieces of prose broken up into lines or fairly

conventional free-verse forms. There is much use of oral

testimony which is represented in lines. Others are different in

style. I wanted to keep moving, challenging myself and the

reader to ask — what are these patterns on this white surface,

how do I make sense of them? And yet the content is generally

clear and made up of contemporary eye-witness accounts and

real events. The formal presentation is meant to draw attention

to itself as words on paper – but at the same time it is not trying

to ‘aestheticise’ painful realities, nor distort for trivial literary

purposes the voices and the experiences of real people.

Something of the cold light of the real, of specificity and

contingency, of the pain of physical labour and the suffering of

real people, – ‘the cruel radiance of what is’, James Agee called it

– filters through these texts I hope. When I trim down some

testimony and then break it up into lines I see (and hear) things

I hadn’t seen (or heard) before. Maybe an open-minded reader

can too? I discussed some of these questions in the ‘Afterword’

to John Seed, Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819, (Inter –

capillary Editions, London 2013).

So perhaps we might say in some senses Brandon Pithouse is a work of ‘found poetry’ –that is, poetry found in, and formed from the various voices and written sources painstakingly pieced together and then fragmented to make the work as a whole. Seed seems to say as much here: 

Despite exalted notions of the author, writers work with the

materials they find around them and try to hammer out some

kind of new thing with bits of discursive wood lying around and

rusty nails and old string and glue. …

As for the filmic quality to the text, Seed does indeed use the analogy of the visual documentary:

What I am doing here might even be compared to a film-maker 

creating a documentary out of other people’s bits of film and 

sound recordings, interspersed with some slight commentary. 

Editing as creative act! And this makes me think of another 

great unfinished project: Eisenstein’s film of Marx’s Capital, 

a project stimulated by his reading of Joyce’s Ulysses at the end 

of the 1920s. See also Alexander Kluge’s monumental 9-hour 

film: News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital 

(2008). So perhaps Brandon Pithouse is really a set of notes 

for a film that can never be made – and a footnote to Chapter 

10 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital.

That’s certainly a very compelling way of putting this book into some kind of broader literary and polemical framework –though if just the equivalent of a footnote, it is a very finely fashioned and poetically expressive footnote. Seed continues to speculate to the close of his accomplishedly composed prose Postscript:

History? Poetry? Film script even? In the end these questions

don’t matter very much, though they could take us along

interesting detours on a dull afternoon. Perhaps I could just say

that when Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams’

Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and Charles

Reznikoff ’s Testimony collided with Walter Benjamin’s 

Arcades Project and the first volume of Marx’s Capital and 

the newly published History and Class Consciousness of Georg 

Lukacs, in pubs and CIU clubs around Durham in the early 1970s 

this was what resulted – though it took another forty years to 

gather up some of the pieces and try to put them together.

Those forty years have been worth the wait for this fascinating poetic social document-cum-oral history to finally hit daylight. It certainly deserves its place in the modernist canon of mixed-genre poetics alongside the recently critically-disinterred works of, for example, Marxist poet and broadcaster Joseph Macleod (1903-84), particularly his film script-cum-long poem, Script from Norway (1953). 

But Brandon Pithouse also belongs to the canon of British proletarian literature and in that and other senses discussed bears comparisons with the works of Ewan MacColl. I think that this book would work even more effectively on audio with different voices –ideally authentic Durham ones– threading throughout, like a play for voices or oral poem-cum-documentary, again, in the MacColl tradition of the radio ballad. But it is, as touched on, also a very visual work, and so its many and varied techniques are to be appreciated on the page; a complementary recording of the book would aurally seal the already evident importance and accomplishment of Brandon Pithouse. 

Alan Morrison © 2017

A Pelican More Frequent

As if to take part in this Thirties Redux today, but blessedly from a far more promising and hopeful point of view, is the re-launch of the Pelican imprint –started in 1937 by Allen Lane, as a non-fiction didactic offshoot of Penguin, displayed aplenty in cheap stores like Woolworths for only threepenny or 6D, bringing culture to the hoi polloi. I’ve been fortunate over the past few years to have lived near several excellent second-hand bookshops with prolific quantities of those much-prized pale blue spines, and now have a pretty massive collection of Pelicans (see below for The Recusant’s top recommendations from this classic species of titles).

A wonderful spread on the re-launch of Pelican was included in The Guardian of Saturday 26 April 2014, which I excerpt below –images of some of the iconic Pelican book covers are also reproduced from the photo montage of this piece:

“The really amazing thing, the extraordinary eye-opener that surprised the most optimistic of us, was the immediate and overwhelming success of the Pelicans.” So wrote Allen Lane, founder of Penguin and architect of the paperback revolution, who had transformed the publishing world by selling quality books for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Millions of orange Penguins had already been bought when they were joined in 1937 by the pale blue non-fiction Pelicans. “Who would have imagined,” he continued, “that, even at 6d, there was a thirsty public anxious to buy thousands of copies of books on science, sociology, economics, archaeology, astronomy and other equally serious subjects?”

His instinct was not only commercially astute but democratic. The launching of the Penguins and Pelicans (“Good books cheap”) caused a huge fuss, and not simply among staid publishers: the masses were now able to buy not just pulp, but “improving”, high-calibre books – whatever next! Lane and his defenders argued that owning such books should not be the preserve of the privileged class. He had no truck with those people “who despair at what they regard as the low level of people’s intelligence”.

Lane came up with the name – so the story goes – when he heard someone who wanted to buy a Penguin at a King’s Cross station bookstall mistakenly ask for “one of those Pelican books”. He acted fast to create a new imprint. The first Pelican was George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. “A sixpenny edition” of the book, the author modestly suggested, “would be the salvation of mankind.” Such was the demand that booksellers had to travel to the Penguin stockroom in taxis and fill them up with copies before rushing back to their shops. It helped of course that this was a decade of national and world crisis. For Lane, the public “wanted a solid background to give some coherence to the newspaper’s scintillating confusion of day-to-day events”.

Shaw wasn’t a one-off. The other books from the first months – written by, to name four of dozens, HG Wells, RH Tawney, Beatrice Webb, Eileen Power – were successful too. (This despite, or because of, the fact that the co-founding editor of the series, VK Krishna Menon, was a staunch socialist and teetotal vegetarian who drank 100 cups of tea a day and slept for only two hours a night.) The whole print order of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Pelican No 24, sold out in the first week.

These books were like an education in paperback form – for pennies. The title of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, another early bird, was apposite (though it has since been misinterpreted as snooty): in the essays, Woolf attempted to see literature from the point of view of the non-expert, as part of what Hermione Lee has called her “life-long identification with the self-educated reader”. It flew off the shelves.

It was the beginning of an illustrious era. Nearly 3,000 Pelicans took flight during the following five decades, covering a huge range of subjects: many were specially commissioned, most were paperback versions of already published titles. They were crisply and brilliantly designed and fitted in a back pocket. And they sold, in total, an astonishing 250m copies. Editions of 50,000, even for not obvious bestsellers, were standard: a 1952 study of the Hittites – the ancient Anatolian people – quickly sold out and continued in print for many years. (These days a publisher would be delighted if such a book made it to 2,000.) The Greeks by HDF Kitto sold 1.3m copies; Facts from Figures, “a layman’s introduction to statistics”, sold 600,000. Many got to the few hundred thousand mark.

“The Pelican books bid fair,” Lane wrote in 1938, “to become the true everyman’s library of the 20th century … bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people.” They pretty much succeeded. Some were, as their publisher admitted, “heavy going” and a few were rather esoteric (Hydroponics, anyone?). But in their heyday Pelicans hugely influenced the nation’s intellectual culture: they comprised a kind of home university for an army of autodidacts, aspirant culture-vultures and social radicals.

In retrospect, the whole venture seems linked to a perception of social improvement and political possibility. Pelicans helped bring Labour to power in 1945, cornered the market in the new cultural studies, introduced millions to the ideas of anthropology and sociology, and provided much of the reading matter for the sexual and political upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s.

The film writer David Thomson, who worked as an editor at Penguin in the 60s, has recalled that as an employee “you could honestly believe you were doing the work of God … we were bringing education to the nation; we were the cool colours on the shelves of a generation.” It was all to do “with that excited sense that the country might be changing”.

Similarly, in Ian Dury’s classic song, one of his “Reasons to be Cheerful” is “something nice to study”, and his friend Humphrey Ocean has said the lyrics sum up “where he was at … The earnest young Dury – Pelican books, intelligent aunties, the welfare state, grammar school. It’s nothing to do with rock’n’roll really, it’s all to do with postwar England at a certain, incredibly positive, moment.”

The leftish association with improvement – self and social – had always been part of the Pelicans. The wartime years were good ones for autodidacts. Orwell wrote that a “phenomenon of the war has been the enormous sale of Penguin Books, Pelican Books and other cheap editions, most of which would have been regarded by the general public as impossibly highbrow a few years back.” One of the driving forces behind Pelican was the amiable, crumpled but well-connected WE Williams – “Pelican Bill” – an inspiring evangelist for the democratisation of British culture, who not only had ties to adult education (the WEA) but became director of the influential Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and during the war ensured the imprint thrived among servicemen. (Koestler called these self-improvers the “anxious corporals”.) A 1940 book on town planning went through a quarter of a million copies. Richard Hoggart later wrote of his time in the forces that “We had a kind of code that if there was a Penguin or Pelican sticking out of the back trouser pocket of a battledress, you had a word with him because it meant he was one of the different ones … every week taught us something about what might happen in Britain.”

After the war, as Penguin collector Steve Hare has recognised, the idea of a Pelican home university became more explicit; the number of “Pelican originals” increased, and the commissioning editors were astute in often choosing young scholars on the rise. (The books were also expertly edited, notably by the tattoo-covered Buddhist ASB Glover, a former prisoner with a photographic memory who had memorised the Encyclopedia Britannica behind bars.)

So if you wanted to find out about ethics or evolution or sailing or yoga or badgers or fish lore or Soviet Marxism, it was often a blue-spined paperback you cracked. The volumes came thick and fast, and were classy. In the 10 months between August 1958 and May 1959, for instance, Pelican titles included Kenneth Clark’s study of Leonardo, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, The Exploration of Space by Arthur C Clarke, one of the studies in Boris Ford’s highly influential and bestselling Pelican Guide to English Literature, A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes (described by Robert Macfarlane as “one of the defining British non-fiction books of the postwar decade”) and A Shortened History of England by GM Trevelyan. And this selection is fairly typical.

Hoggart’s book, one of the founding texts of cultural studies, which taught, among other things, that popular culture was to be taken seriously, was a good seller for Pelican: 33,000 in the first six months and then 20,000 copies a year through the 1960s. It has been suggested that one of the impulses behind Hoggart’s criticism of commercialised mass culture was his sense that the opportunity to build on the autodidactic legacy of 1939-45 – the Pelican-style legacy, as it were – was at risk. But the imprint itself thrived, and published other books that were to become cultural studies classics: Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (No 485, September 1961), later misunderstood by Tony Blair, who didn’t grasp that it was an argument against meritocracy – “education has put its seal of approval on a minority”. Young, with Peter Willmott, also wrote the seminal Family and Kinship in East London, another Pelican, and at one time known affectionately by sociologists as “Fakinel”, pronounced with a cockney accent. Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (No 520, March 1961) was another of the countless Pelicans at the centre of a revolution in thinking.

The books were also an important conduit of American intellectual life and progressive thought into Britain. The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, who had yet to write Silent Spring, had been an acclaimed bestseller in the US, and was published as a Pelican in 1956. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society was published in 1962; Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities came out in Britain three years later. Vance Packard’s The Naked Society and The Hidden Persuaders questioned the American dream. Erving Goffman and Lewis Mumford appeared under the imprint, as did Studs Terkel’s report from Chicago, Division Street: America.

The fashionability of Pelicans, which lasted at least into the 70s, was connected to this breaking open of radical new ideas to public understanding – not in academic jargon but in clearly expressed prose. But it was also because they looked so good. The first Pelicans were, like the Penguins, beneficiaries of the 30s passion for design. They had the iconic triband covers conceived by Edward Young – in Lane’s words, “a bright splash of fat colour” with a white band running horizontally across the centre for displaying author and title in Gill Sans. A pelican appeared flying on the cover and standing on the spine. After the war, Lane employed as a designer the incomparable Jan Tschichold, a one-time associate of the Bauhaus and known for his Weimar film posters. His Pelicans had a central white panel framed by a blue border containing the name of the imprint on each side.

In the 60s the books changed again, to the illustrative covers designed by Germano Facetti, art director from 1961 to 72. Facetti, a survivor of Mauthausen labour camp who had worked in Milan as a typographer and in Paris as an interior designer, transformed the Penguin image, as John Walsh has written, “from linear severity and puritanical simplicity into a series of pictorial coups”. The 60s covers by Facetti (eg The Stagnant Society by Michael Shanks), and by the designers he took on – Jock Kennier (eg Alex Comfort’s Sex in Society), Derek Birdsall (eg The Naked Society) – are ingenious, arresting invitations to a world of new thinking.

Jenny Diski has written of subscribing in the 60s to “the unofficial University of Pelican Books course”, which was all about “gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, JK Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the floor of the bedsit increased.”

“If you weren’t at university studying a particular discipline (and even if you were),” she goes on, “Pelican books were the way to get the gist of things, and education seemed like a capacious bag into which all manner of information was thrown, without the slightest concern about where it belonged in the taxonomy of knowledge. Anti-psychiatry, social welfare, economics, politics, the sexual behaviour of young Melanesians, the history of science, the anatomy of this, that and the other, the affluent, naked and stagnant society in which we found ourselves.”

Pelicans reflected and fed the countercultural and politically radical 60s. Two books by Che Guevara were published; Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power came out in 1969. Noam Chomsky and Frantz Fanon were both published in 1969-70. Martin Luther King’s Chaos or Community? came out in 1969, as did Peter Laurie’s Drugs. Peter Mayer’s The Pacifist Conscience was published as LBJ escalated the Vietnam war. AS Neill wrote about his lawless progressive school Summerhill while Roger Lewis published a volume on the underground press.

In terms of history there was Christopher Hill on the English revolution and, to mark the 1,000th Pelican in 1968, EP Thompson’s The Making of English Working Class, a book admirably suited to a left-leaning imprint flavoured by Nonconformist self-improvement. (The Guardian published a special supplement to celebrate the landmark.) In less than a decade it had gone through a further five reprints.

Owen Hatherley has described the Pelicans of the late 60s as “human emancipation through mass production … hot-off-the-press accounts of the ‘new French revolution’ would go alongside texts on scientific management, with Herbert Marcuse next to Fanon, next to AJP Taylor, and all of this conflicting and intoxicating information in a pocket-sized form, on cheap paper and with impeccably elegant modernist covers.”

But then decline. The Pelican identity seems to have become diluted in the late 70s and 80s, and 25 years ago the last book appeared (The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Sheridan Allen, 1989, No 2,878). As an imprint it was officially discontinued in 1990. The reasons are murky. The Sunday Times suggested it was “for the most pedestrian of reasons: the name was already copyright in America and was not so well known in foreign markets”. A Penguin spokesman also mentioned at the time that the Pelican logo gave the message: “this book is a bit worthy”.

They were, perhaps, out of sync with the times. But they remained in second-hand shops. A splurge of Pelican blue on your shelves or in your pocket could still define the person you were, or wanted to be. I remember myself in my late teens, posing around with a copy of The Contemporary Cinema by Penelope Houston I had picked up on a stall for small change (it came out in 1963). I knew absolutely nothing about Antonioni and Bergman, Resnais and Truffaut, but I knew I should know about them, and I liked the imaginary version of me in a polo-neck, very fluent in such matters. Plus the cover was cool. I was a bit late to the party, but I was definitely a Pelican sort of person.

And now they are back, in a new series of originally commissioned books. The first volumes come out in May, and the opener (No 1) seems very Pelicanish: Economics: A User’s Guide by the heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang (whose 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism was a bestseller); it is a “myth-busting introduction” written “for the general reader”.

Also forthcoming are The Domesticated Brain by the psychologist Bruce Hood, Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes and Human Evolution by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar (who caused a splash in our Facebook age with How Many Friends Does One Person Need?). Non-fiction sales have been falling in recent years, and no doubt Penguin’s aim is to capitalise on the now-fetishised Pelican brand. The new books will be turned out in a shade of the famous pale-blue livery and the Pelican logo itself has been updated for the relaunch. Given the lucrative nostalgia market in Penguin mugs, postcards and tea-towels – not to mention a roaring collectors’ trade and art-world homages such as Harland Miller’s beaten-up paintings – the publishers can hardly be unconscious of the importance of design.

And, as with Allen Lane in the 1930s, there is more to the relaunch than financial opportunism. Penguin seems sure that the self-education urge is still strong. Hood has himself pointed out that while university education is, unlike in Lane’s day, open to many (at least for the time being), it has become more utilitarian: a more rounded education has, more often than ever, to happen around the edges. Wikipedia, however excellent, isn’t enough.

According to Penguin the hope is that readers will once again “turn to Pelicans for whatever subjects they are interested in, yet feel ignorant about – Pelicans can be their guides”. It’s the latest incarnation of the unofficial university, and of the optimistic belief in the appeal and influence – and profitability – of “Good books cheap”.

A fitting time then for Pelican’s auspices to wing back in. The Recusant wishes further that Gollancz might also relaunch the Left Book Club. Here, for what it’s worth, are The Recusant’s recommendations from the prolific crop of the first few generations of Pelicans (1937-1989) –put in chronological order, as with The Guardian’s own ten highlights, and though there’s at least two crossovers, our choices are in the main very different:

1. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957)

A definitive social document-cum-polemic on the social and political functions of language in the era of mass media, specifically its controlling and limiting effects on the working classes. Richly written by a working-class autodidact from the vantage-point of an established academic, it also includes some fascinating autobiographical chapters on the author’s impoverished upbringing in Leeds during the late 1920s and 1930s. This book in many ways is the ultimate scholarly backwash of the Pelican redistribution of knowledge: written by a working-class autodidact, himself helped in his self-education by such auspices as Pelican, returns the favour by educating the middle classes on the nuts and bolts of growing up in poverty and with limited opportunities for self-betterment. This writer read this book the most recently of those listed here, which is probably why, memory working the way it does (taking time to assimilate and process, thus recalling things further back in the past more clearly), he can only at this juncture recall the broad aspects to it. But it is a hugely important and inspiring piece of work. 

2. The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young (1958)

A proleptic polemic composed in retrospect from the future vantage-point of 2034 in a post-meritocratic society where the elites have long been selected not on the basis of hereditary backgrounds but individual intellect and aptitudes –a kind of macro-scholarship. Defined as a ‘satirical essay’, though more a monograph, Young’s first-person narrator and much post-1960 he critically reflects on, are of course largely fictional, but based on sociological projections deemed probable during the more progressive period of the ‘post-war consensus’. Young’s thrust is actually quite meritocracy-sceptic, not from a social point of view –he was himself a socialist and Labour MP, and helped draft the party’s 1945 manifesto Let Us Face the Future– but from an anti-elitism standpoint: that is, an elitism based on purely, as he predicts will be the case, on a narrow scientific definition of ‘aptitude’ (i.e. IQs), without equal consideration of more creative and/or humanistic qualities. Young certainly wasn’t anti-social meritocracy, and, in the implicit spirit of Pelican itself, was an evangelist for redistribution of knowledge, particularly to the working classes, as evidenced in his co-founding, among other organisations, the Open University. This book, then, is more a warning against any future societal systems that inadvertently create a new class-hierarchy of practical intellect as a replacement for the old one of social stratification, which might in turn further mutate into another form of Social Darwinism or Malthusianism as is encountered in capitalist and fascist societies; his emphasis is more on a humanistic meritocracy.   

3. The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (1963; 68)

A formidable bible-thick tome that is essential reading for all scholars of English proletarian social history, and the development of the Labour Movement –partly in response to the rapidity of the Industrial Revolution of the period 1780-1832– through Luddism, Chartism, Owenism and Unionism, including such autodidactic auspices as the London Corresponding Society (almost the forerunner of Pelican itself). It also includes a fascinating insight into the first clandestine revolutionary working-class group, ‘The Black Lamp’ –a real life collective proletarian alternative to the fictional aristocrat-rescuing Scarlet Pimpernel– which Thompson pinpoints as a pivotal movement in the development of an incipient ‘working-class consciousness’. Given the vast amount and detail of social history and document the book covers, 900 pages plus small overspill (inclusive of Postscript) is still pretty compendious given the subject –even if it is exclusively on the English rather than British working classes. Fittingly, this was Pelican’s thousandth title. Apart from Richard Hoggart’s classic text, this is, I think, the only other crossover in selected highlights of the Pelican list between The Recusant and The Guardian. 

4. Marxism and Christianity by Alasdair MacIntyre (1968)

Aptly published in a year of radical political upheaval in Europe, MacIntyre’s monograph is an absolutely fascinating comparison of the precepts of Christianity with the often almost indistinguishable principles of Marxist socialism, arguing that the two ideologies, though ostensibly spiritualistic and material, numinous and pragmatic, respectively, share common values such as community, equality and compassion. The main thrust of MacIntyre’s thesis is that Marxism, or dialectical materialism –via Hegelian dialectics– became the secular replacement for Christianity in modern agnostic thought and practice, and certainly the character of original Christianity, which was implicitly communitarian and anti-materialist, was, in its worldly manifestation, a proto-Communism; and the gradual mutation of that authentic Christianity centuries later through the Reformation in turn influenced the Christian-Communist experiments of the 17th century English True Levellers and Diggers, eventually evolving into the ostensibly non-religious form of Socialism, and the, ironically, anti-religious ideology of Communism. But here MacIntyre appositely picks up on the ironic ‘religiosity’ ritualistic and iconic aspects to systematised forms of Marxism, such as the Soviet Union, where the baroque high Catholic onion domes and minarets of the Russian Orthodox Church were outlawed and replaced by the glass mausoleum of a posthumous Lenin embalmed and perpetuated like a mediaeval Saint (or even much later, like the seemingly incorruptible corpse of Bernadette of Lourdes), and the monolithic statues of the Stalin Cult, which depicted the atheist leader of the nation not so much as a new form of un-anointed Tsar than a living god. 

5. Anxiety and Neurosis by Charles Rycfort (1968; 1970)

This is a slim and compendious study of the causes, symptoms and effects of the neuroses, perhaps the cloudiest spectrum of mental illness, since its sufferers, in spite of sometimes near-crippling debilitation, still retain a conscious objectivity as to the seeming irrationality of their afflictions. For this writer, the section on obsessional neurosis is an invaluable primer –and repeat-primer– for reminding himself of the complex workings of the exhausting mindset from which he himself has been a sufferer all his life. But such personal associations with this book do not pose a conflict of interest in selecting it here: it is an invaluable and accessibly written guide book to the various nuances of neurosis, and, like many Pelican books, was way ahead of its time in pinpointing the sub-divisions of anxiety towards a future more detailed delineation in psychiatric diagnostics of the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders. At times of peaking anxiety I have often returned to this immensely reassuring as well as instructive book.  

6. The Death of the Past by Prof. J. H. Plumb (1969; 73)

This is a slim gem of a monograph which differentiates ‘the past’ as a common general or ancestral memory-bank from ‘history’ which is more specifically the appropriation of the past for political motives by hegemonies of various periods by which an ideologically interpretative ‘narrative’ is superimposed over the bare facts of the past –echoing that old axiom: ‘history is written by the winning side’. The trans-cultural bereavement of the title of Plumb’s polemic alludes to this legacy of ancestral vicissitudes reconfigured to religious, and later, political teleological narratives, which have in many respects mythologised the past for contemporary social purposes (the most grotesque example of course being cultic Nazism), or, more innocuously, pickled it in the aspic of ‘rose-tinted’ nostalgia (e.g. the ‘myth’ of the Anglo-Saxon Golden Age popular among radicals in mid-seventeenth century England). Here Plumb also compares the Salvationist impetuses of both Christianity and Marxism, spiritual and secular respectively, but the latter as metaphorically chiliastic as the former is literally: both, in Plumb’s view, are eschatological ideologies: they inexorably lead to certain dialectically predicted ends –Christianity, to the end of ‘Time’ as proleptically depicted in the Book of Revelation, Armageddon and the Last Judgement; and Marxism, to the overthrow of capitalism and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ through which ‘class conflict will end’ and ‘the state wither away’ –on this latter depiction, Plumb argues: ‘Marxist dialectic itself supposes an ultimate end for the practical use of the past’, which echoes, by way of the most brutal examples, the ‘historical cleansing’ of Stalinism, and, not least, the ‘Year One’ of the French Revolutionary Calendar and the ‘Year Zero’ of the Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Plumb also takes in the historically sporadic cults of ‘ancestor worship’, up to the modern day, where the nouveau riche seek to lift themselves above the hoi polloi from which they sprang by acquiring their own personal Bluemantles to chart their genealogies in the hope of finding some blue blood somewhere in the family tree, and to concoct their own heraldic coats of arms. As with most of the polemicists of the post-war consensus decades (50s to 70s), Plumb’s prose style is also impeccable.  

7. Poverty: The Forgotten Englishman by Ken Coates and Richard Silburn (1970)

Considering it was researched and written around 1969, at the tail-end of a still reasonably left-wing (relative to today) Labour Government and Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” revolution (perhaps in some ways a proto-manifestation of Michael Young’s polemical concerns), this monograph on poverty, and the punitive perceptions of and provisions for it, demonstrates how British society has ever dished out the dole with more a clenched fist than an open palm. In these respects it prefigures by thirteen years the classic polemical text Images of Welfare by Peter Golding and Sue Middleton Martin (1983); but Coates and Silburn’s book, based almost entirely on surveys of impoverished districts in Nottingham, is a blistering indictment of social inequality in capitalist society, and has some schematic aspects to it reminiscent of the Mass Observation Movement of the 1930s-1950s. Coates and Silburn’s exposé on a welfare state calculatedly architected to only at best damage-limit the effects of contemporary poverty but never comprehensively alleviate or even end it, is particularly illuminating, and this writer drew much on quotes from this book in his polemical Afterword to Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State. 

8. Superman and Common Man – Freedom, Anarchy and the Revolution by Benjamin R. Barber (1971)

Perhaps not an obvious monograph for this writer to recommend, it being, at least on the surface, something of a countervailing argument to the more socialistic intellectual trends –as richly represented in the plethora of Pelican’s own list– of the progressive period in which it was written; but this book provides an instructive insight, from a point of view which seems to be a mixture of individualistic self-determinism and creative existentialism, into some of the disputable contradictions inherent in the apparently antithetical spectrums of democracy (both liberal and social) and anarchism, pretty much turning both systems on their heads. Anarchism is deconstructed to be much less about mass liberation and much more about non-conformist individualism which Barber argues has historically most appealed to recalcitrant aristocratic thinkers and writers, and is often expressed as a kind of evangelical noblesse oblige, or even, oxymoronically, ‘egalitarian élitism’; while democracy is criticised for amounting in the end to a kind of ‘majoritarianism’ (rule by majority –or ‘the mob’?), as intransigent, and even tyrannical in some respects, as autocracy (rule by ‘a leader’/dictatorship), oligarchy (rule by a few) or plutocracy (rule by the rich) [and few socialists today would deny that our contemporary ‘liberal democracy’ is effectively a covert plutocracy/oligarchy]. The Chapter ‘Poetry and Revolution: The Anarchist as Reactionary’, is particularly fascinating, and culminates in a diagnosis of anarchism as essentially a philosophy of mind, a trans-material ‘movement’ of the imagination, and, in such aspects, not completely dissimilar to religion, while Marxism is seen as in some ways just as materially acquisitive –though towards entirely different aims– as the capitalist system it seeks to usurp.  

9. The World Turned Upside Down –Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill (1972)

An exceptionally informative and compendious overview of the many varied radical religious and political groups of the 1640s and 1650s, such as the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Millenarians, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians etc. Succinctly written but richly didactic –a classic sourcebook for scholars of the English Civil War and Commonwealth. Hill excerpts from some fascinating tracts of the period written by such radical luminaries as Gerard Winstanley, John Lilburne, Joseph Salmon, Jacob Bauthumley, Lawrence Clarkson et al. The interface of faith and politics is extensively explored –for in the 17th century, politics was almost implicitly the practical application of biblical hermeneutics, and revolutionary ideas were often a social expression of chiliasm. There is also a particularly illuminating chapter on ‘Radical Madness’, which examines how many social radicals, particularly Ranters, pragmatically feigned ‘religious mania’ or ‘insanity’ as a protection against persecution for their sometimes extreme, or perceived-to-be-‘blasphemous’ opinions; but more importantly, this incidental ‘brown study’ as it were, which also incorporates focus on Robert Burton’s seminal psychiatric work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, anticipates future anti-psychiatry theories, such as those conjectured by R.D. Laing: that mental illness is more a socio-political-cultural construct, a partly rational response to or personal replication of the irrationality and contradictions of capitalist society. 

10. The Language of Madness by David Cooper (1978; 80)

A poetically composed polemic which attempts, from a broadly Laingian perspective, to re-appropriate language and nomenclature for those tagged with the diagnostic labels of ‘mad’, ‘schizophrenic’, ‘psychotic’, ‘mentally ill’, etc. An extremely idiosyncratic work –reminiscent in its distinctive literary conceptualism of R.D. Laing’s Knots– but it is also a compendious guide to the history of psychiatric diagnostics, taking in more recent progressive ideas of the anti-psychiatry movement, such as the theories of Kraeplin, Szasz and Laing et al. In a sense, it’s a kind of epistemological monograph on psychology and the uses and abuses of psychiatry. It also focuses much on similar themes to those of Hill’s ‘Radical Madness’ chapter in his The World Turned Upside Down: that there is and always has been a deeply political component to both the nature and classification of ‘madness’ throughout the centuries, and that many manifestations of mental illness might be sublimations of ideological antagonisms with the dogmas of particular societies. As with much anti-psychiatry dialectics, Cooper places particular emphasis on the Social Darwinism and hyper-competitiveness of capitalist society as a prime germinal for much ‘mental illness’. He also charts the latter day initiatives of ex-psychiatric patient collectives to appropriate psychiatric nomenclature themselves in order to empower their minority voice and challenge hegemonies by asserting their own ‘narrative’ from the perspective of experiential treatment. 

Another two Pelican titles which The Recusant recommends, but this writer hasn’t time to detail at this juncture, are:

11. The Spanish Civil War by Hugo Thomas (1961)

The definitive in-depth account, replete with full analysis of the ideological complexities and nuances of both sides in the conflict, and of the widespread appeal of the voluntary International Brigades to the young Left intelligentsia and literati of the period. 

12. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman (1963)

As its title stipulates, a thorough monograph on the perennial social and political purposes of applying ‘stigmas’ to certain physical, mental, behavioural, social or racial ‘deviations’ from the perceived ‘human norm’ of particular societies; in some respects, a compendious complement to Carl Jung’s On Scapegoating. In today’s climate of rampant ‘Scroungerology’, this book should be required reading by way of antidote. 

It just remains for me to say that I’ve drawn on the Pelican library for much invaluable information and inspiriting tilt of thought over the years, the aggregate of which has seeped into much of my poetry and polemics, most particularly the titles I’ve selected above. More broadly, the very polemical fabric of The Recusant might have been markedly different without the transfusion of knowledge through the social documenting of so many Pelican authors; and, indeed, The Recusant (and, indeed, Caparison) was set up precisely to pursue –in however relatively modest a form– the same type of aims that were behind Allen Lane’s launching of Pelican back in the 1930s (a decade so uncannily echoed today): the mass-circulation of socially progressive literature, poetry, polemic and (counter)-cultural comment, as well as the promotion of the writings of neglected and under-promoted past and contemporary voices from socially and/or psychologically marginalised backgrounds. May the pale blue spines of progressive scholarship do their best to provide vital alternative narratives to the philistine and materialistic dogmas of plutocratic capitalism.

Alan Morrison © 2014

Alan Morrison on
Ian Parks
Citizens
Smokestack Books, 2017
75pp

Soul Mining

In Citizens veteran ‘love’ poet Ian Parks focuses on English social and political proletarian history, and being the son of a Mexborough miner, these are themes no doubt wired into his DNA. Such influential socialist movements as the 17th century Levellers and the 19th century Chartists jostle for our attention and admiration while emotive place names such as Cable Street and Wootton Bassett strike chords of our collective consciousness in a commemoration of the nostalgic radical.

In the consummate and assured composition of Parks’ poems I’m reminded of among other poets the late and highly gifted Gordon Hodgeon (who was also a Smokestack poet). Parks has formidable acknowledgements for this slim volume, to many of the leading journals, and looking through this collection it’s not difficult to see why, since many of the poems are not only accomplishedly composed but also tend to be short to medium in length so eminently suitable as supplemental poems.

Parks skilfully employs many stylistic effects and techniques of contemporary mainstream poetry but, refreshingly here, at least, to tackle more specialised polemical themes. This combination of fashionable poetic style and unfashionable poetic topic marks Parks out among most other poet-frequenters of high profile supplements.

Calling to mind the work of other regular journal poets such as Nick Burbridge and Dan Wyke, Parks’ short poem ‘Towpath’ is a perfect example of mainstream poetry at its best, at least, that strand of it that inherits much from the Fifties Movement poets, particularly a clipped phrasing and tendency to prose –albeit a rhythmic, musical prose– that might be called Larkinesque, and the late Fifties/early Sixties ‘Group’ poets such as Peter Porter. I excerpt the poem in full:

Another time I’ll take you to the pub

where old men spend all day over one pint.

For now we have the towpath laced with frost –

the things I won’t admit to in my heart,

the ritual dying of the winter sun.

You’d never think the hill across the way

was once a slagheap – useless, overgrown

where three untethered horses graze,

cropping the shallow-rooted grass –

just as I’d never venture to explain

the wide canal that cuts under it all,

the things it once displaced.

So claim this morning as your own.

Choose your moment. Time it well.

Unleash the dogs and watch them run.

The clipped sentences, the direct descriptions, the cropped metaphors, the anticipated almost-grasped epiphany of its end, all shaped in unrhymed tercets in sentence case (as opposed to more classical capitalised first letters to each line): these are fairly typical stylistic and prosodic aspects to much contemporary mainstream poetry. And while ‘Towpath’ is a pleasant enough poem, it takes a more polemical theme to give the same rather safe form a little bit more edge, as in ‘Wootton Bassett’:

There are no theories to explain

what happens when a country goes to war.

Poppies hide behind their crimson screen –

hedgerows falter, disappear,

horses stir, turned out to grass

and everything that England means

or might mean to a stranger standing here

is contained and diminished

to a row of shining cars,

streets lined and silent, flowers thrown;

the flag-draped coffins as they pass

through Wootton Basset in the rain.

Still the impression of the poem feels quite muted and pastel in spite of the weightiness of the theme. Nevertheless, the automobile metaphor in the middle of the poem is its lodestone and touches by association on the petrol and oil spoils of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘The Thread’ is a deft poem meditation, wistful and touching:

I sit beside the fire and watch you knit –

the click of needles as the embers burn,

the silent counting underneath the breath –

and find myself absorbed in it.

More than anything that might be done or said

between the acts of going and return

to this old building that I’ve come to love

the ravelling of purple, black, and red

as you pause and slip and purl inside the loop.

So weave a hair from your inclining head

into the fabric where you sit

to bind me closer to where I go.

Through the long months of rain and ice

and floods and falling snow

the narrative of us and what we did:

all your lost generations in the thread.

For me the aural sense-impression in its second line really stands out. The first line of the third verse is a lovely example of alliteration and assonance. ‘Oracle’ is a more penetrating poem and contains more descriptive language and some wonderful assonance throughout:

I had a question for her so I went

through convoluted alleys to the place:

no sacred grove of olives but a mill

abandoned when the textiles died.

…

Each city has an underside –

A burnt-out region to avoid

where streets are unlit and no one goes.

And there I found her,

cold and drugged and shivering

on the mattress where she dozed.

Not as old as you’d expect

for someone so acquainted with the world,

when she reached her hand out

and the moonlight fell on it

there were no wrinkles puckering the skin…

‘Registry of Births and Deaths’ is another effective and affecting poem about the high mortality rate among Mexborough miners; it gathers some evocative images such as ‘women in grey shawls’ and ‘ink and scraping pen’ and has an almost mythological gravity in how it describes local children ‘born to coal and dust’. The poem closes in a resonant, rather haunting tone:

At night I blink back darkness from my bed,

lie sleepless listening to the timeless air.

The town itself is riddled and subsides,

the barefoot shuffling of their feet

a tremor running through the downstairs rooms.

The figurative ‘The Bowl’ is an almost Buddhist poem-meditation, and closes on a sublime aphorism: ‘If the cradling hands/ are the will to life/ the bruised fruit is the soul’. I’m normally completely put off by sports-related poems but ‘Snooker’ does contain some nice images and sense-impressions: ‘the gentle thud of ivory on green baize/ the blue chalk powdering our clothes’. ‘Allotments’ is nicely descriptive with its ‘tarpaulin flaps’, ‘faded rugs’, ‘horsehair chairs’, ‘tang of paraffin’, ‘yellow pile of The South Yorkshire Times’ and ‘white enamel mug’ –it includes some poignant images: ‘And so the men who used to work the pits/ take on these narrow strips’. It closes on a trope which perhaps typifies the working class, at least, of Parks’ generation:

…Sunset is their hour:

it’s then you’ll find them on the far side of the hill,

talking sports and politics, scanning the rooftops, whistling

and waiting for their pigeons to come home.

The curious poem ‘Gladstone’s Axe’ is the first time in this collection that we glimpse political anger:

On rain-dark mornings such as these

when all I hear are misused words

like freedom, trust, austerity

I want to break the intervening glass…

It’s unclear from the first and eponymous poem in this collection, ‘Citizens’, how Parks stands on the EU Referendum, but my impression is that he is probably Euro-sceptic from the socialist point of view:

Night found us parked up on some empty beach

to watch the moon come clear and fade.

The European flag was everywhere – twelve stars

encircling nothing on a ground of midnight blue.

The cities had no feature and the landscape had no soul.

The rather curious ordering of the poems in this volume produces some strange juxtapositions: for example, the anecdotal poem ‘Spa’ is followed on the adjacent page by the historically evocative ‘The Levellers’, which is also one of the stronger poems in the book:

More radical than Cromwell, more extreme,

he had them lined against the wall and shot

in Burford where he tracked them down.

If there were any final words

those words have not survived.

Silence commemorates a state of mind,

an instinct born sharp-edged in civil war.

Once started, where does revolution stop?

You kill the king but who picks up the crown?

They wanted a changed world

where everything was equalled, levelled out –

debated what it meant and died for it.

Although this is a rather sketchy and uncomplicated summation of a deeply complicated movement and period, Parks’ questions are well put, the first perhaps in part answered by Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ while the second is historically rhetorical in that we know Cromwell effectively ended up a surrogate ‘king’ of a new familial dynasty under the euphemism of ‘Lord Protector’. The Levellers acquired their name by association with earlier radical groups who ‘levelled’ the hedges of the new patchwork landscape during the enclosure riots of the 16th and early 17th centuries. The Levellers did indeed campaign and petition for male suffrage and greater equality; however, they were not as radical as the Diggers who argued for the outright abolition of private property and therefore a true levelling; and, indeed, those under Gerard Winstanley’s leadership called themselves “True’ Levellers’. These minor gripes aside, Parks nicely evokes the period in his descriptions and there are some nice alliterative and assonantal touches:

The axe is at the root of everything,

the articles are nailed upon the door.

In cramped, oak-panelled rooms

down tangled alleys, up twisting stairs

they spread their map of freedom out,

hung lamps from beams and leaned into

their dangerous words, their hushed conspiracies.

Each year, around the churchyard

where they fell, we come to celebrate:

beer-tents, loud music, four-by-fours,

the trappings of our new-found affluence;

the clamouring of children wanting more.

That final ironic juxtaposition is particularly effective. The serendipitous chiming of ‘tents’ with ‘affluence’ is worthy of note.

Parks’ coal mining heritage looms large, as in ‘Strike Breakers’:

Look at them now. Who’d think that once

they braved the picket line?

Sitting at the far end of the bar,

ignored by those who went on strike

they spend all afternoon over one pint

or stare down at the carpet’s threadbare swirls.

in this pit village memory is long –

as long as shadows that extend

the full length of the valley

from the miner’s welfare to the cenotaph.

Memory is long indeed and Parks is something of a curator of collective reflection on the vicissitudes of a mining village:

While others scraped the slag-heap

for a bucket full of coal

or held the line at Orgreave

when the mounted men broke through…

Parks permits unforced half-rhymes to fall by happenstance:

They weren’t there when the brass bands played

and banners were unfurled,

when the men marched to the pit gate

as if they’d won the day.

They weren’t there when the promise were made.

The closing stanza is particularly resonant and makes perfect use of a coal mining metaphor to emphasise the sense of betrayal felt by this community towards those once called ‘blacklegs’ and ‘scabs’:

Remembered for one thing they pass the time.

They want to be forgiven but we can’t forgive.

The seam runs deep and deeper than you’d think.

These are the cards that are dealt to us

and this is the life we live.

‘Paragon’ is another seamlessly composed poem with some subtle alliteration, difficult to fault:

The longest platform in the world.

We walked its length together in the rain

impervious to the masses gathered there.

Each plate-glass window trapped a thin-lipped ghost

suspended high above us where we stood

among the rafters open to the night.

Their warnings went unheard.

We brushed the scarves and overcoats

of huddled immigrants, their eyes

fixed on the promise of a distant continent.

All the generations, everything they owned

strapped tight inside a worn suitcase.

Not the silent waiting but the journey back:

the steam-flanked train accelerating,

your lips a flash of scarlet and your face

reflected in the glass. The estuary exuding milky light.

The relative plainness of much of the diction here, the clipped prose, makes the final image ‘milky light’ all the more striking, as if everything before is leading up to that poetic ‘hit’. There is plenty of imagery in the poem but as with many others in this book it’s metaphor-light and, apart from alliterative and rhythmic devices, Parks’ tendency towards straight descriptions and narratives is arguably more characteristic of prose than poetry.

It’s perhaps not entirely surprising then that there is a substantial prose piece marking a kind of halfway point in the middle of this collection; a beautifully written vignette, incidentally, which in terms of themes calls to mind Dennis Potter’s Stand-Up, Nigel Barton. This mixed-medium approach is becoming more common in contemporary poetry books; David Swann’s accomplished The Privilege of Rain springs to mind as one such more implicit poetry-prose collection of recent years, as well as Colin Hambrook’s Knitting Time (both under the Waterloo Press imprint which also published Parks’ The Exile’s House).

To try and illustrate my points about prose and poetry, I’ve taken a passage from Parks’ prose piece ‘Ella’, a nice descriptive passage, and dissembled it by enjambments and line breaks to visibly resemble a poem:

I’m the youngest person in the room.

The smoke encloses me and closes in.

There’s a murmur, a ripple, then a hush.

Even my dad’s cigarettes stand out:

he smokes Capstain’s Full Strength

while the others are puffing on Camels,

making a gesture out of every draw and blow.

Nothing passes between my dad and me

although I feel him there more powerfully

than ever before, an acute awareness

of his otherness as he plays with his

wedding ring and taps the table top.

Personally, I think it makes a strong poem. Now I do the reverse, taking a stanza from Parks’ poem ‘Harlech and Beyond’ and present it as prose:

And so I took a risk, trusting to luck and circumstance to guide me to the place where I should be. Of course I took the right one as if the future and the past had entered into some unwritten bond, leaving on the platform a life lived differently as the train with all the unsaid words rattled through the night between the mountains and the sea to Harlech and beyond.

Is there that much difference in terms of composition and use of language between these two pieces of writing? Are their forms, then, interchangeable? There are prosodic purists out there who would argue that it shouldn’t be possible to ask of a poem ‘Why is it a poem –as opposed to prose…?’

It’s for these reasons that I remain personally suspicious of the sentence case (i.e. the dropping of capitalised first letters) presentation of most contemporary poetry: it seems to me that chipping away at the appearance of poems on the page so that the lines more visibly resemble prose sentences can lead to an actual compositional seeping-in of prose –and isn’t a common criticism of contemporary poetry that it often resembles ‘columned prose’?

None of this detracts from the fundamental fact that Parks is a highly accomplished writer; only that in terms of composition –and this is not just about Parks’ poetry but contemporary poetry in general– it’s sometimes not completely clear whether or not some of the poetry is really prose in disguise. But this preference for prose-inflected poems –after all, the mainstream style of our time– is just that, a preference: Parks is perfectly capable of producing more figurative poetry, as evidenced in ‘The Land of Green Ginger’:

And only through this green

and stamp-sized frame

that didn’t shatter in the blitz

can you expect to see

things as they really are…

…

Put your eye to the window,

see how England goes;

its coalitions and its wars

the steady consolation

of the rain, the failure

to respond to change

its constitutions or its laws.

Once I drank bitter

from a clouded glass

among the city’s dissident

and peered out later

on the green-tinged street…

There’s something of the English strangeness of Harold Monro about this poem. Given Monro-favourite ‘Milk for the Cat’, it’s slightly ironic that the next poem is called ‘Cat and Man’: it tells the curious tale of a knight returning from the Crusades who is ambushed by a wildcat which claws him to death as he crushes it, and they’re buried together. The poem has some interesting moments:

I edged in from the sunlight as a child.

Scaffolding was holding up the spire.

Six hundred years had passed and still

The bloodstains deepened on the flags.

‘The Stormbringer’ is a deft lyric which closes on a trope striking for its alliteration and assonance: ‘the wide-eyed dead sprawled awkward in its wake’. ‘Burne-Jones Window’ is an elegiac piece of ekphrasis which links back nicely to window as time portal in ‘Land of Green Ginger’. Windows seem to be a leitmotiv: the next poem, ‘A Bricked-Up Window on the Great North Road’, is an eight line epigram:

She drives too fast but always slows to see

a bricked up window on the Great North Road.

She says it used to make her think of me

and now it makes her think of politics –

of how a government can stretch its arm

as far as air and sunlight which are free.

I think it has no meaning: except that bricks

and mortar fill a space where choices used to be.

Most of Parks’ poems have their moments: of a policeman on a roadblock during the Miners’ Strike: ‘Rain drips from his helmet as he waits for our reply’; the ‘purple smudge’ of the ‘Mainland’ and news ‘fast as a gasping horse’.

The window theme returns with ‘A Tree Grows Through the Ruins of a House’ which contains some arresting tropes: ‘its roots disrupt foundations,/ bring them down; its branches/ intersect the summer sky’, ‘completely overtaken by the green’, and ‘The tree puts out its shoots./ Invisible, unseen,/ the will to life persisting/ in among the fallen stone’. The next poem is about another type of aperture: ‘The Arrow Slit’, which appears to depict the poet partaking in archery:

Our movements are identical:

we wipe our foreheads, blink back sweat,

take in the birdsong

and the fleshed-out trees

which sudden death failed to displace

then duck back swiftly in the shade.

A view from a window-seat features in ‘Chantry Bridge’. ‘Harlech and Beyond’ is a Larkinesque rural outing. ‘The Tango’ is a nice figurative piece, slightly tongue-in-cheek but leads up to an unexpectedly dark close:

I’ll march you up and down the parquet floor,

the band blindfolded in a room of potted palms.

Surrender to a passion you know can’t be denied

and dance the tango – it takes two –

the dance of love, the dance of suicide.

In ‘Shakespeare’s Lover’s’ the dawn sun ‘takes purchase on the windowsills/ and throws a woven pattern on the bed./ His villains linger in the shade –// the dark recesses of the mind/ where nothing is the way it seems’. It’s a tale of two nations in ‘New Year’: ‘in small encampments everywhere/ people reclaim and occupy./ Downstairs the unwashed glassed cloud/ while bankers… // …toast the new year in with chilled champagne’.

‘Metro’ is another accomplishedly composed poem containing some nice descriptions and sense-impressions:

Hungry in Paris at eighteen

I searched my pockets, scrounged the fare

and took the Metro to Montmartre.

My first time on the underground:

a rush of hot escaping air,

posters peeling from the green-tiled walls,

the faces strained, anonymous,

a platform clock repeating its loud tick…

Parks then tilts into filmic mode:

into an open, floodlit square

where street girls selling roses danced,

the word republic whispered everywhere –

a tracking shot I moved through silently.

Last night I turned a corner, found

myself still waiting there

among the lovers and arcades

with empty pockets, empty hands…

‘Iron Hague’ is a tribute poem to a Mexborough boxer and First World War veteran who ‘found a pub in Mexborough’ and ‘grew soft and fat and in the windowseat/ watched trams and straw hats and parasols,/ an innocence that ended on the Somme:/

The killing fields of Ypres and Bapaume.’ There’s a familial link for Parks:

Collier’s kiss-curl, shaven head, bare knuckles

on a Friday night, fighting for coppers thrown.

His daughters knew my grandfather,

threw him out at closing time –

wore caps and braces, out-drank all the men.

We looked in through the glass to stare at them.

The town forgets its only claim to fame.

A green plaque fades against the whitewashed wall.

I walk down shuttered Main Street in the rain.

A last drunk shadow-boxes his way

from lamp-post to lamp-post to home.

‘Cable Street’ is a monologue of someone who helped defend the eponymous street which was populated by many Jewish shops from the antagonistic march of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts on Sunday 4th October 1936:

And this, my friend, is Cable Street.

Not much to look at I confess.

But this is where we took a final smoke

before we went to beat the Blackshirts down;

and this is where we drank a tepid pint

before we went to stop them in their tracks.

Why did I do it? I don’t know.

something to do with what the others did –

a thing to be lived not understood.

Parks has an acute historic sense of his native Yorkshire as notable in ‘Chantry Bridge’, ‘Queen’s Square’ which includes mention of the Black Prince, while the wonderfully titled ‘Bloody Meadows’ describes the site of a medieval battlefield.

The final poem in this collection is its longest, ‘Elegy for the Chartist Poets’ comprises six sections made up of non-rhyming couplets. It is not only the most thematically important but also the strongest poem in the book. Chartism was a working-class protest movement active in the Midlands, the North of England, and South Wales between 1838 and 1857, which campaigned for male suffrage, the abolition of rotten boroughs (corruptly bought-off constituencies), and more representative democracy.

The Chartists are rightly remembered and venerated as pioneering petitioners for progressive constitutional reform. But a lesser known fact about the movement is that it was populated perhaps more than any other by practicing poets, both already published and/or semi-established and those inspired to compose poems in response specifically to the Chartist cause, many of whom were subsequently published, though just as many of whom were forgotten.

Parks proudly pitches his long poem firmly in Yorkshire soil from the outset –this rousing commemoration from section 2:

This is the sharp edge of the north – the place

to which the quivering needle points, the root

And source of our resistance and dissent.

The wind has taken everything away:

the pamphlet and the broadsheet and the poem,

snatched them down from the windowsills and walls

and sent them in a spiral through the air –

charred fragments carried upwards to ignite

then come to rest under our waiting feet.

They flare there for a moment then subside.

I saw a vision on the Sabbath Day:

a huge avenging angel with red wings

alighted on the top of Blackstone Edge

and, like the sentinel he was, looked round

on towns and cities spread out on the plain,

the cursed, devoted landscape shuddering.

…

…great crowds gathered on the plains below.

They came barefooted and in need of bread;

They came under the banners arm in arm,

leaving the workshops empty in the dawn,

the rich mill owners turning on their beds.

They paid a penny for The Northern Star,

hunched round a single candle in the gloom

and read it to each other with wide eyes.

Indeed, never before or arguably since was poetry such an implicit part of political protest as in the case of the Chartists:

The poets printed liberty on each

and every page, on each and every eye.

Outside the world of commerce chimed and whirred,

the factories hummed and ticked, the coins fell ripe

and golden in the hands of guilty men

while children hauled the coal-tubs underground.

Parks then takes on a declamatory Shelleyean tone –and never more than now in early twenty-first century England do we need that past Chartist spirit:

I call them out of darkness with their words:

the incantations of the working poor –

the language of the lost and dispossessed:

the mill-hands, miners, labourers in the field,

the muffled voices straining to be heard.

the incremental stirrings in the dust.

In the third section Parks makes a poignant juxtaposition of the complementary pestilences of the 19th century labouring classes: ‘at Newport where the redcoats shot them down/ or Sheffield where the chimneys and the soot/ had crammed them into tenements to die’. The focus then shifts to radical Chartist and martyr to the cause, Samuel Holberry, who died of consumption shortly after being imprisoned:

Holberry picking hemp inside York gaol,

his fingers bleeding as he prised it free,

unravelling his past with every thread.

Ten thousand mourners when his funeral

twisted through the tangled alleyways

finding no resolution and no rest.

From Hull and Halifax and Hell good Lord

deliver me. The infant at the breast.

Section 4 is slightly phantasmagorical as Parks tilts into a trance of nostalgia, reverie, an industrial –almost Soviet– vision of yore:

I must have caught the dying breath of it

when I was still a child: the furnace doors

wide open and the sleek, bare-chested men

pouring the liquid metal into moulds.

I saw it from the window of a train;

heard loud insistent hammers beating out

a rhythm as they forged the man-made chains.

And there, over the dark horizon’s rim

the steel city’s furnaces puthering:

a column of tall dust throughout the day,

a pillar of fire glowing in the night.

Hymns swelling from the chapel on the hill,

torches, marches, gatherings, illicit

meetings under the beams of hidden pubs.

The descriptions and evocations here are very effective. The term ‘puthering’ is interesting, presumably from the same Yorkshire dialect from which Emily Brontë plucked ‘wuthering’ for her timeless novel. This is Parks’ Yorkshire industrial heritage, the remains and artefacts of which furnished the environment of his upbringing, and one senses his passion in each line:

It’s in the faded photograph I saw

of two old Chartists posing with their pikes,

their faces weathered and their wrinkled eyes

fixed on the future, resolute, despite

the years of trampling and the failing cries.

This part of the poem is punctuated with some biographical snippets from the lives of two prominent Chartist poets:

or go to Darfield churchyard in a mist

and find out where the Corn-Law Rhymer lies –

his gravestone overlooking fields of corn,

the railings round his tombstone flaking rust.

How Byron snubbed him, turned his lordly back

on Elliott and his kind, refused to speak

or recognise a man whose hands had toiled.

Ebenezer Elliott, the so-called ‘Corn-Law Rhymer’, was one of the most prolific and successful of the Chartist poets; he’d been born into poverty, the son of an ironmonger (who also had ten other children); an autodidact who read Milton, James Thomson, Barrow, Sowerby while working in his father’s iron foundry, Elliott later gained the patronages of Thomson and Southey, and published some poetry volumes, including Corn Law Rhymes (1831), which no doubt inspired his moniker. He famously quipped at Byron’s snobbery with the lines: ‘Go, and at Bloomfield, Nature’s Artist, sneer,/ Since chance, that makes a cobbler, makes a peer’, while the line, ‘Lordly Lara, haply, would have cried/ Matches and thread, from Holborn to Cheapside’ demonstrates Elliott’s figurative gifts.

Parks then turns his attention to the other most remembered Chartist poet:

Or Ernest Jones inside his threadbare cell,

scratching his poems in blood across the page

because the living ink had been denied.

I hold his fragile papers to the light,

feel his stained fingers on the nib

and hear the secret scratching of his pen.

Lift me up and put me down, set me free

on some high, open point where I can see

the whole of the broke past entire, the stunned

and ravaged landscape spread out under me.

Ernest Jones was every bit as remarkable a figure as Elliott: he hailed from perhaps the most auspicious and untypical background of all the Chartist poets, his father being equerry to the Duke of Cumberland, but Jones endured much strife and privation while imprisoned for political agitation and, denied ink, did actually compose some of an epic poem, The New World, with his own blood, though completed it by ‘secreting stolen ink inside a cake of soap’.

The reverie continues into section 5:

Mad Shelley dreamt it and the dream survived.

A flicker in the corner of his eye

burned through his death and went on to ignite

a hungry generation with its spark.

Parks then writes ‘The Chartist poets whisper in my ear’, and the rest of this section is in italics to indicate the whisperers:

The gagged and muted people found a voice;

it rose up from the cuttings and the seams

and gathered its momentum from the crowd.

What remains? The dignity of labour

is a lie. We sweated for our children

and they died. We met and marched together

on parliament, were turned away ignored –

our petitions, our grievances, unread.

Where can we turn to now for our redress?

Then Parks touches on the political doctoring of history to suppress the proletarian strain, and so the ghosts of Chartists are now agitating from the spirit-realm:

They want to keep you ignorant of us;

they want our voices buried underneath

a layer of history so we can’t be heard.

We rise up from our tombs and agitate.

We knock here now until you let us in.

Parks then intones that these Chartist spirits are those of our ‘lost progenitors’ and then closes the section on a ‘covert pastoral’ trope: ‘Smoke drifts across the furrows and the fields;/ the moon already has a reddish cast’.

Then the poem closes on its sixth section, which is descriptively one of its strongest, and, for me, is the point, appropriately, at which Parks’ poetic gifts reach their peak:

Snow falling from God’s heaven black with soot,

the Calder Valley thick with it, the ice

sheeting the hillsides where they pulled and climbed.

A few flakes dance and settle on my tongue.

In Manchester, in Sheffield, and in Leeds –

in all the places where their mark was left

the statues of the undeserving rich

gaze down impervious from their stone-hewn plinths.

The traffic slides and judders to a halt

where shopping centres interrupt the flow

of what we were or are or might still be.

Your songs preserve the bite and spleen of it

and when you sing them without compromise

the voices of the dead who sang before

join into swell the chorus of your song.

Now rain comes on, in huge successive waves.

It washed guiltless blood from cobblestones.

It rinses teardrops from the chiselled eye.

It runs unhindered down the workhouse walls.

The doors are barred, the candles have gone out,

the presses fallen silent. A cold ghost

repeats their spare, hard verses where they trod.

Out where the moors are brittle, blackened, burned

and silence levels everything with night;

out there under the grey indifferent sky

the Chartist poets lie in unmarked graves.

That resonant ending echoes George Elliot’s ‘unvisited tombs’ trope which closes her masterpiece Middlemarch. This is a fitting elegy –and, indeed, eulogy– to the mostly forgotten Chartist poets; its title is particularly fitting too, recalling Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ which is a ‘covert pastoral’ poem (see William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, in which said poem is deconstructed thus) in part touching on the wasted talents of those who lived and died unrecognised due to their humble origins and lack of connections, factors which of course hampered most of the Chartist poets:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air’…

(Gray)

This is a slim volume handsomely produced with a striking cover reproducing the colourful painting ‘A Chartist Meeting at Basin Stone’ by A.W. Bayes. But the slimness of the book belies the centuries of industrial working-class struggle represented within its thin bind. In many ways these economically composed poems serve as poetic postcards of events on the map of past peaks and impasses in the ongoing English class struggle. And Parks signposts these sempiternal places with some strikingly allusive titles –Bloody Meadows, Chantry Bridge, Stormbringer etc.– to whet the poetic appetite. This is another consummately composed collection from a poet who demonstrates humility to his subjects.

Alan Morrison © 2018

Reeling and Writhing

Barry Smith

Vole Books/ Dempsey & Windle

102pp, 2023

Dreams of Mock Turtles

The title Reeling and Writhing, taken from Lewis Caroll’s malapropism spoken by the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland, serves as an umbrella-metaphor for the running themes of much of the collection: the author’s formative autodidactic apprenticeship towards higher education and his subsequent life and career spent in educational, theatrical and literary settings (a more thorough contextualisation is provided in the book’s detailed Introduction and Acknowledgements). 

The book is divided up into three thematic sections. The first, ‘Waiting in the Wings’, comprises a mixture of autobiographical poems(or poem-memoirs), and literary character studies. The first poem, ‘Radioactive’, is a lively and nicely descriptive vignette depicting the author as a former ambitious amateur theatre director who overworked himself into an ulcer:

That guy will burn himself out before he’s thirty,

observed Professor Burkhardt, the bow-tied

consultant psychiatrist, in his best

clinical manner to his wife Brenda,

the strict English mistress who rarely gave

a student a grade higher than a C,

Smith describes his hospital treatment in a particularly imaginative way:

turned upside down for screening

with radioisotopes of barium meal

highlighting the stations of the tube-map,

‘Up the Ladder’ is a rather amusing anecdote about a young Smith’s time as a painter and decorator, ‘tarting up the paintwork on village/ council estates in Bedfordshire’. I’d interpreted ‘Warrior’ as being about First World War poet-soldier turned anti-war activist Siegfried Sassoon, but his horse was called ‘Cockbird’, and this poem is actually about General Jack Seely whose eponymous horse ‘Warrior’ was the inspiration for Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse (and its subsequent rather inauthentic and treacly film adaptation). This poem has some very fine descriptive language, evocative of time and place:

but when the autumn storms drive the brigantine

onto the splintering rocks at Brook Chine

and Henri et Leontine lies broken-backed,

rudder gone with all spars cast overboard

and when the lifeboat crew are driven back

by the lambasting waves and all looks lost,

Jack Seely grabs a last-ditch line of hope,

dives into the buckling, salt-sucking waves

and shepherds the battered men ashore

to shelter in the great barn at Mottistone;

now the symbiotic figurehead

of Henri et Leontine in close embrace

graces the charity bookshop wall in the manor

where you can browse and read of Jack’s heroics

There’s some deft alliteration in lines such as ‘defying the strafing machine gun fire’. The trope ‘leading the charge at Moreuil Wood/ demands a grudging kind of homage/ for a will that will not bend to circumstance’ is a well-judged one (and alludes to probably the most memorable and better-researched depictions in the aforementioned film).

‘Silencing’ is a fascinating lyrical piece set in the village of Eyam which between September 1665-December 1666 quarantined itself after being unwittingly infected with the bubonic plague via a piece of infected cloth brought by one of its residents from London. There is an equally fascinating play about this by Don Taylor, The Roses of Eyam (1970), which was adapted for television and broadcast on BBC2 on 12 June 1973 as a brilliantly scripted and haunting studio-bound chamber piece that focuses much on the thorny cooperation during the outbreak between Puritan Divine, Rev. Stanley, and his more cosmopolitan replacement, the High Anglican rector, Mompesson. Smith gives forensic descriptive detail to evoke the time through sense-impression:

where coins were placed

in vinegar to pay

for food and essentials

from the outside world

when the village turned

its back in self-isolation,

Smith writes hauntedly of his visit to the village: ‘it was the absences/ I found remarkable/ the absolute quiet/ the total stillness’. Smith cleverly uses the Eyam story as a ghostly backcloth for the self-isolations and lockdowns of the Covid pandemic during which he composed the poem:

I had taught the story

A Parcel of Patterns

to rapt students learning

how the latest London fashions,

the twirl or drape or bow,

had brought death to Eyam –

I had not expected to live it,

to find myself transported,

to walk the streets with masks,

(A Parcel of Patterns is a 1983 novel about the Eyam incident by Jill Paton Walsh). Towards the close of the poem Smith recounts a later historical mishap when the village’s church spire collapsed:

I think of the old press reports

of startled observers

leaning from leather-strapped

windows of nineteenth

century railway carriages

as the lofty spire gave way,

‘Spillage’ is another descriptive poem, this time commemorating the consumptive history of a long-dismantled National Chest Hospital that haunts the contrasting modern day Ventnor Botanic Gardens that has replaced it—Smith deftly juxtaposes botanical descriptions of the present with the ghoulish tubercular images of the past:

Around me rare specimens

are photographed and catalogued,

trophies for dusty albums,

as wisteria Alba tendrils drift

embracing a shady shelter.

…

…botanic beauties

abound, but the graces of the garden

are compromised by the past:

here is the site of surrender

wheredark red globules splattered

pressed white napkins and sheets,

consuming all who wasted and watched

the frothy fountains running dry.

‘Willows’ is a sing-song arboreal reverie:

sometimes

you can hear the voices in the woods

sighing by a sycamore tree

singing of a green willow

…

the gate between shadowed waters

…

the patterned willow boughs

gently curling grey-green leaves

flowing from olive-brown arcing stems

sometimes

you can see the music in the woods

‘Brook Churchyard’ continues the bucolic mood and there are echoes of Hardy, the Romantics (particularly Wordsworth), and the Graveyard School (particularly Thomas Gray).It begins with a strong descriptive line: ‘Scoured stone, moss-steeped cross and darkling yew’. It is often in his nature poems that Smith’s poetic craftsmanship is at its most heightened and striking, as in this beautifully wrought passage:

steadying hands shift the fretful weight,

with shuffling progress impel brass and oak

through whorling wind, sharp sun, slow-seeping rain

or indifferent cloud, grey piled upon ashen grey;

The ‘covert’ pastoral phrasings continue into ‘Time and Tide’ with the Keats-esque phrase ‘deep-green embrace’; then there comes more of a Shelleyan flourish: ‘lacing incalculable aery patterns/ amongst the drowsy, curtaining creepers’. It’s here that Smith is at his most specifically descriptive and painterly:

awash with purple waves of wiry heather,

threaded with carmine pink spikes, bright rosebay

willowherb and scented, scrambling yellow-white

honeysuckle tendrils intermingling

There’s also the imaginative phrase ‘abrasive sea’. ‘Supplicant’ is a touching and deeply empathetic portrait of a homeless man in picturesque Chichester. Here Smith works with contrasts and juxtapositions: ‘The crouching man kneels in convocation,/ vision fully engaged with grey pavement’, and:

sole immobility in this crush of busy shoppers

hustling beneath civic Roman colonnade

rising in fluted stonework above.

The poem closes poignantly:

no hasty handful of change clinks by his side,

only the pool of liquid spreads

slowly suppurating the patch

between recusant dog and man.

The choice of the term ‘recusant’ is interesting: it originally denoted Roman Catholics who refused to attend Protestant church services during the 16^th and 17^th centuries and practised their periodically proscribed faith secretly and sometimes at risk to their lives (Catholic priests often had to hide in priest holes within houses); but the term also means anyone who refuses to conform to an established authority.

‘Ducking and Diving’ resumes Smith’s poem-memoirs and is about his formative self-education through extensive reading:

They said work hard, keep your head down and you’ll get on,

so he did, kept his head down and his working neat,

always finishing first, turning with a sense of unrestraint

to the book, King Solomon’s Mines or Prester John, in his desk.

At the little school he was subdued, lost in lines of chairs,

but after he failed the eleven plus, they gave the remnants

a stiff Darwinian test, which he passed and rose

step by step each year to the top of the top class.

From what my father has often relayed to me, who also failed the eleven plus, it sounds as if it was a grossly unfair and ineffective measure of children’s intelligence. There’s almost something of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-babies about the final verse as it takes a plunge from youthful adversity into sudden underwater imagery:

keeping their heads down to work hard, be neat, get on,

ducking and diving round the snares strewn in their path,

like mallards upending to reconnoitre what lies beneath,

or frogmen negotiating jagged splines of rusty wrecks.

‘Theresa’s Tears’ is a more political piece:

no tears for those removed

discreetly from benefits

to helpfully die on the job

and no tears for those who

fled the Grenfell Tower inferno

‘Decline and Fall’ is Smith in more experimental mode with a scattered typographical layout, and some striking images: ‘broken stairways/ griffons/ and the/ tangled remains/ of sculpted/ 

marble monuments/ litter the ground/ in every direction/ with looping briar undergrowth’. 

‘Figures in a Sussex Landscape’ or ‘Figs from Thistles’ – Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ is dextrously composed (in tercets) depiction of the ageing lugubrious late Victorian poet laureate, and contains some striking descriptions: ‘on a damp and dirty November morning/

with the trees still dripping spools of moisture’, ‘the shoulder cape of his dark Inverness coat/

flapping in the coiling gusts and eddies’. Smith renders the picture of Tennyson pushing his ancient mother in her ‘Bath chair’ which keeps ‘sticking in the mud’ particularly vividly: 

She tugs at the ties of the neat white bonnet,

contrasting with the crammed opulence

of his wide-awake, broad brimmed hat cresting

dark locks…

The ancestral home Tennyson glares back at is itself a ‘louring house’; it is atmospherically akin to Poe’s crumbling and near-derelict House of Usher: ‘with the bedroom wall blown down, revealing/ the legacy of an old Roman Catholic chapel’. By complete contrast, ‘Barflies’ is a lively and ebullient depiction of a bustling pub of bygone days since it’s filled with ‘swirling blue smoke’:

Like insects each with distinctive carapace

flashing green, black and blue iridescence,

the barflies hover, darting gnomic glances

from gleaming brass hand pumps to diamond glasses.

Beetle-black with elbows angularly

possessing the time-smoothed bar, the old lag rests,

solemnly supping his elixir, Flowers best,

frothing in engraved cut-glass familiar mug,

while with seething energy, the wise acre

from Wichita, exotic migrant species,

The language is tangible, buoyed on alliteration and spilling over with sense-impression, all to great effect. 

For me, ‘Waiting in the Wings’ is the strongest section of this collection. 

Turning to the second section, ‘A Looking Glass World’, this is comprised of what are essentially song lyrics composed by Smith for his Wonderland-based musical Alice, and other theatrical-musical works based onThe Country of the Blind(H.G. Wells) and The Mysteries(Tony Harrison). 

Obvious oddities associated with Wonderland aside, it’s incredibly difficult for any writer to get close to that inimitable strangeness and edginess of Lewis Carroll, that almost uniquely eccentric (even hallucinogenic)late Victorian imagination so exquisitely and disturbingly illustrated by Tenniel. There is the odd quirky line that stands out, as in ‘The Cheshire Cat’s Mad Song’: ‘It’s when I’m angry that I wag my tail’. But these pieces no doubt serve their function as songs or choruses for stage performance when augmented by musical accompaniment.

‘Songs from The Country of the Blind’ is a gathering of narrative lyrics based around H.G. Wells’ disturbing and philosophical short story. There’s an affecting nursery rhyme quality to ‘The Spinning Song’: ‘In the dreaming house a young girl’s spinning/ Softest linen for her trothing day’. 

The lyrics toThe Mysteries are I think the most successful of the three song cycles, though there are only three of them here—‘Everything’ has a Blakean quality a la Songs of Innocence & Experience(particularly ‘London’):

Running down the palace walls,

Fields of mud and tainted gutters.

Hammer and nail,

Blood and white bone,

Someone’s lost child

Slowly dying.

While ‘The Wheel is Turning’ has an almost-religious allegorical feel to it:

And the heart of man

Feeds on gold and blood,

For the wheel is turning

And the days are burning

As the ways of man

Pierce the heart of God.

The third and final section ‘Ghost in the Machine’ returns to Smith’s more familiar themes of memoir and ekphrasis. ‘Route Sixty-Six Revisited’ depicts his ascent to higher education with a consciously self-mythologising grandiosity:

When I came down to Etruria

back in nineteen hundred and sixty-six

on my journey to university at Keele,

I did not find classical civilization,

just the smoking bottle kilns of the Potteries,

the sheds and stacks of Wedgewood and Spode

After the more prosaic songs, it’s good to get back to more tangible and heightened descriptive language again—and there’s also some further botanical flourishes, Smith being a keen observer of various plants and flowers, lepidoptera and other wildlife: ‘the floating pennywort, nettles and parsleys regrafted/ and the roach and carp, the voles and damselflies’. ‘Arlecchino in Aleppo: Down that Dusty Road’ has its moments: 

the hollow streets stretch

wasted

every gesture forensically examined

and only the fool laughs,

swings his body

chanting an old pilgrim lay.

‘Between Dream and Sweetheart’ is a poignant poem on some of the more lingering images to come out from war-torn Ukraine:

but I will not forget

the sand-bagged

statue of the poet

and the image of

the child in a grey anorak

and yellow bobble hat

staring wide-eyed

with his palm pressed

against the cold glass

of the carriage window

‘The Boatman’s Reel’, subtitled ‘After John Armstrong, Crossing the Styx’, is a beautifully phrased eulogy, one of the most accomplished poems in this collection:

Time stretches, the relentless Appian Way,

backcloth of dust, slate to write figures on;

agglomerate of atoms, speck of consciousness,

flickers and gasps, expostulates and is gone.

Sour seaway, path the prophet traverses,

links patriarch Paul blinded in Damascus

and exiled Dante brooding in Sienna;

the gentleman’s coat of arms, newly bought,

floats as driftwood on the storm-beaten shore,

while the wild air keens an ancient elegy

in the desert, precincts of Elsinore.

Hoisting the blades from the water, I incant

hollow dustwords to comfort and succour you,

for the stream that swells the ocean augurs a sea-change:

let the unfinished requiem begin

and the lacrimosa drift across the swirling waves.

‘Pins and Needles’ is another of Smith’s succinct and empathetic pieces about those on the margins of society:

but the addict counts the pricks

and points the finger straight at you

pricks and points and pins and angels

many sharp-pronged wounds incise

wield the scalpel doctor oh my brother

carve the flesh for the world to view

see the precise needle cicatrise

The consonantal chiming of ‘incise’, ‘precise’ and ‘cicatrise’ is particularly effective in pricking the conscience of the reader. 

‘The Ghost in the Machine’ is a candid sixteen-line portrait of French philosopher René Descartes—it starts off fairly prosaically in tone (not to say a bit judgementally: late risers aren’t necessarily ‘lethargic’, they might be nightbirds who go to bed much later than most and hence rise later—I know, I’m one of them myself!), but after that it gets more interesting:

Descartes was, one might say, somewhat eccentric,

lethargic too – he never rose before noon

except to perform for an exacting queen

who desired an elucidation of the cosmos.

Needless to say, he left the court in haste,

muttering oaths about the land of Gustavus,

retiring to the comfort of an old Dutch stove.

Very soon, he died; pleurisy and cold killed him.

A little later, the revolution was over,

his proof of God dismissed or ignored,

others came who pronounced the death of the spirit:

clocks in their hands and utopia in their hearts,

they chanted wild slogans of man supreme.

Later still a new barrenness settled on the land,

some began to murmur that it was all a mistake,

but the co-ordinates of the soul had long gone missing.

There seems in the second and concluding verse to be a veiled broadside against atheism, Communism, Nietzscheanism, and fascism, so essentially against all materialist and secular ideologies. It’s a thought-provoking poem. 

‘The Examination’ subtitled ‘After Kafka’, is a two-page dialogic poemdepicting some kind of interrogation—Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi German resistance is cited at one point: ‘You are breathing over the inspection glass/ and Bonhoeffer died many years ago’. This is a figurative poem navigable through symbolisms and imagery:

it is the hour glass of Holbein,

the cold touch of the unknown hand

when you are alone at midnight,

it is the pulse of the womb-tissue

The poem demonstrates Smith’s background in theatre:

now I ask you –

(and he peremptorily stretched

a metaphorical finger)

what do you mean by your question?

This is a mysterious poem which no doubt illuminates on further readings:

mine is the sawdust from the desecration of the tree,

is the individual stamen of the apple blossom

the pain is mine alone.

‘Conditional Tense’ isn’t necessarily the longest poem in the book but it covers the most pages (four) due to its scattered concrete layout—a philosophical poem, it contains some arresting phrases and tropes throughout: ‘catching teardrops/ and mandrakes’, ‘when/ the blacksmith or the courtier cavorted/ phantasmagorically’, ‘& commiserate/ with the cosmic flashes of the schizophrenic’, ‘stewed/ in the heat of epistemological beds/ with homilies and imprecations hurled from the highest spire’. 

‘The Beggar and the Bowl’ is a lament to advancing years:

The dead leaves sprawl in the gutter,

my seventieth summer has come

and it is autumn,

the tapping stick of the blind man

and the begging bowl of age and winter

await me.

The imagery is interesting: is the ageing figure a beggar because he begs for more time from an emptying bowl? The closing lines are particularly well-sculpted:

With age I see the contradictions

as the dry sticks beat

the wooden alms bowl

in a harsh tattoo

through these long-shadowed streets.

The similarly threnodic ‘Requiem’ begins with references to the poet’s theatrical past:

Go away, go away Satyr, Sylph, Dryad,

Cyclops; go Ariel, Minotaur, Orion, Caliban,

Back to the world you should never have left.

There’s something of Edgar Allen Poe in the morose imageries:

The wind scatters the dust and a yellow bone

Whiteness lies on greyness, crawls under the silkworm;

Nettles grow in vineyards

And a strange black shadow

Hangs black in the sky

Ancient historical and mythological figures are then banished back whence they came:

Go now, Hera, Nefertiti, Beatrice,

Aphrodite, Freya, Cleopatra, Helen –

Your visions are too bright,

They do not belong to this world,

Which is sunken deeper than material mire.

Something of the Greek chorus in these cadent incantations:

It dissolves you like acid – you cannot

Intervene, or even watch, bear witness.

See, even the spectre of Tiresias fades.

Poe spiced with some T.S. Eliot (Tiresias noted) in the following lines:

Concrete crumbles to sand, cement blows

On the desert wind, roads run nowhere

And the signposts shimmer with a turquoise hue;

Jewels that glowed in the statue’s eye

Burn brown with rust on the lake bed.

Tumultuous spirit-river,

Emblem of growth and of man,

The end and the beginning,

The beginning and the end

Are upon you, and you are gone.

There’s hints as to some of Smith’s artistic heroes in the following lines:

Music your own calls you and you must leave,

Cezanne, Sophocles, Dante and Keats,

Masaccio, Mahler, Blake and Messiaen.

This poem also contains my favourite of Smith’s phrases, ‘marble sublimity’—his choice of the slightly archaic version of the more common noun ‘sublimeness’ is significant as it rings more of Romantic diction and immediately reminded me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Defence of his own life)’:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour

Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:

Or rather he emancipates his eyes

From the black shapeless accidents of size—

In unctuous cones of kindling coal,

Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe’s trim bole,

His gifted ken can see

Phantoms of sublimity.

The final and longest poem in this volume is the satirical ‘The Masks of Anarchy’ subtitled ‘(With apologies to P.B. Shelley)’ and was, as its punning title suggests, composed during and about the pandemic. This sing-song poem isn’t, as I’d expected, a pastiche of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy; for one, it uses a different and more irregular rhyme scheme, and there’s no attempt to in any way replicate the aforementioned poem’s emblematic rabble-rousing and revolutionary call-to-arms. The ‘Row, boys, row!’ refrain deployed at the close of each of its 24 stanzas, indeed, is more sea shanty than rebel song, more Rogers and Hammerstein than “Red” Shelley, and reminds me of Henry Newbolt’s ‘VitaiLampada(“They Pass On The Torch of Life”)’ with its famous ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ refrain (in that case, meant as a patriotic call to certain death on the Western Front). It would seem, then, that the punning title is just that, a pun. Here is an excerpt to give a flavour of the verses:

So why is the death-count climbing

And numbers going out the roof?

We’re out in the streets hand-clapping,

What more can doctors and nurses ask?

Row, boys, row!

Now little Nattie climbs the podium

And explains our masks won’t fit,

We ordered the wrong specifications

The PPE is rubbish but it’s all we’ve got

So put it on and row, boys, row!

For me this sequence doesn’t quite work, in part because of the irregularity of the rhymes: the rhythm and structure demands fairly strict adherence to end-rhymes and for some reason Smith doesn’t always follow through with these, which is rather puzzling. 

Typograhically-speaking, the absence of any italics for lines of speech and titles of books within some of the poems is slightly strange, but these are minor gripes. 

In the main, it is clear from the accomplishment of so many of the poems that this handsomely produced sophomore volume—as with its well-received predecessor Performance Rites (Waterloo, 2021)—draws on material that has had considerable time to ferment, in some cases, over many decades. And, certainly in the examples I have highlighted in this review, particularly the first and third/final sections of the book, the fermenting has been well worth the wait. It will be interesting to see where Barry Smith takes his poetry next—wherever that is, it is sure to be as enthusiasticand enchanted as this rich and colourful collection. 

Alan Morrison © 2024

The Selected Poems of Clive Branson

edited by Richard Knott

Smokestack Books, 2023

122pp

The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater

edited by Ben Harker

Smokestack Books, 2023

159pp

Poems on Campaign

These two fine posthumous volumes represent comprehensive finds of literary archaeologies curated compendiously and painstakingly by two committed academic editors and published together by Smokestack Books by way of mutual complement. The two poets exhumed for our contemporary appreciation are quite different and distinct from one another in style and form but are very much fellow travellers of their times in terms of their Communist political convictions and application of such principles in the medium of poetry.

The lesser known of the two, Clive Branson (1907-1944), son of a major in the Indian Army, and privately educated, undoubtedly owes his hitherto fainter posterity to the fact that he died much younger, killed in action in Burma in 1944. A selection of his poems composed while on active service some years earlier in Spain was included posthumously in the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (1980 ed. Valentine Cunningham); even earlier, as far back as 1932, Branson had privately published a poetry collection; while in the year of his death, the Communist Party brought out a book of his letters under the title British Soldier in India (introduced by Harry Pollitt).

It was however as an artist of considerable gifts that Branson was mostly known during his lifetime, as the exceptional Self-Portrait on the cover of this volume testifies—he had studied at the Slade School of Art in London. On converting (along with his wife Noreen) to Communism in the 1930s (after a brief time with Battersea Independent Labour Party) following his encounter with the abject slum poverty of London, he started up a weekly paper, Revolt, which he sold himself, and then went on to sell the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) at Clapham Junction, deciding to devote his life to political activism. Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, dissuading Branson from volunteering to fight for the Spanish Republic in 1936, instead put him ‘in charge of guiding volunteers from all over the United Kingdom through the capital and onwards to the Spanish war, the would-be fighters leaving by the ‘Red Train’ from Victoria Station’. But by 1938 ‘the Party leadership agreed that Branson should be free to volunteer.

He left for Spain at the beginning ofJanuary that year, evading the attentions of Special Branch by

only a matter of days. He underwent training at a camp inAlbacete over a five-week period before going to the front, incharge of a group of twenty men, all of them poorly equippedand many without rifles. In March he was captured during thebattle of Calaceite, paraded in front of the world’s press inSaragossa and then taken to the prison at San Pedro de Cardeñawhere he was incarcerated for three months. Nine miles fromBurgos, it was a forbidding monastery: overcrowded, gloomy,primitive, rat-infested and cold.

In this grim captivity, Branson’s salvation was his poetry. Hewrote about the durability and courage of his fellow prisoners; theweather, the ‘grip of prison’, the loss of freedom, the enforced idleness

(‘men die/while we sit and in the hot sun lie’), and the enemy(‘this Fascist’s bloody name’). In the summer of 1938 Branson wasmoved to a prison camp in Palencia, 55 miles south-west ofBurgos. The Italian-run regime was less brutal than San Pedro andhere Branson could write and was encouraged to draw, producingamong other things more than fifty portraits of his fellow prisoners.

At one point he was commissioned by the camp commandantto paint a set of pictures of the camp.

Branson was eventually released from captivity in the autumnof 1938.

[From the Introduction by Richard Knott]

Branson then returned to England, and to his work as an artist, but only the following year the Second World War broke out, and soon he found himself enlisting for foreign service again, this time on the ‘official’ footing of a European conflict, in the Royal Armoured Corps, and by 1942 was posted to Burma where two years later he would be killed while looking out from the turret of his tank. It is perhaps unsurprising then to note that there is a broadly unfinished quality to much of Branson’s verse, since it is in the main, after all, a kind of verse on active service, or poems on campaign: inescapably poetry often sketched out in inauspicious and hostile circumstances doesn’t have the luxury of being easily redrafted several times until it reaches a point of complete poetic satisfaction on the poet’s part. Or perhaps it takes a poet of exceptional ability and self-discipline to be able to turn out near-immaculate poems while on campaign—the highly accomplished poets Keith Douglas (1920-44) and Alun Lewis (1915-44), both spring to mind in this respect, as do Oxford graduates Drummond Allison (1921-43) and Sidney Keyes (1922-43)—but they were arguably exceptions to the rule.

Montagu Slater(1902–56) is today perhaps mostly remembered for having written the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945)—otherwise, as Ben Harker puts it in his voluminous Introduction (which is more a potted biography), this‘quietly prolific communist

man of letters has disappeared almost without trace’. Harker puts much of this posthumous obscurity down to the fact that, unlike most of his contemporaries, Slater did not write an autobiography; moreover, around 1950, he apparently ‘burned a tranche of papers’ thought to include correspondence, diaries and photographs—a curious act of documentary self-erasure reminiscent, in some respects, of T.E. Lawrence or Viktor Tausk. 

Slater’s background was markedly different to that of the more privileged Branson—as Harker details, he was

born into a family of Wesleyan Methodists on 23 September 1902 in Millom, a Cumbrian port-town shaped and scarred by the mining and working of iron.6 His mother, Rosa Annie Thora Lugsdon, ran the family – there were five children – and his father, Seth Slater, a lay preacher, was a master clothier and sub-postmaster (Seth’s tailor’s shop doubled as the town’s only post office).

Charles, always known by his middle name, was educated at Millom secondary school.

Slater was clearly something of a working-class autodidact: ‘he won a rare scholarshipto Oxford and went up to read Philosophy, Politics andEconomics, as a non-collegiate student, in 1920, the year thatthe Communist Party of Great Britain was formed’. Two of his Oxford contemporaries, both CPGB members, were Ralph Fox, and the later International Brigadier (who commanded the British Battalion in Spain) and accomplished poet, Tom Wintringham (1898-1949). Harker provides a vividly detailed account of Slater’s metamorphosis into a young novelist and poet, accomplished through candle-burning application and sweated commitment: 

After graduation, Slater took a job as reporter for the Liverpool Post. He lived in a dockside dormitory, and became active in the city’s labour movement, joining the Communist Party, probably in 1927. These experiences informed a long, never completed cycle of poems provisionally entitled ‘The Venereal Hypothesis’, whose heroic couplets struggled to integrateclassical erudition and the seamier details of dock-side life. In 1928 he married photographer Enid Mace, with whom he would have three daughters, and the couple moved to London. Slater worked on Fleet Street for the Morning Post – the preferred broadsheet of Britain’s officer-class – but channelled energies into grassroots activism for the National Union of Journalists and his Communist Party branch. Rising long before work to write, he completed two novels, both published by the small, prestigious Wishart Press in the early 1930s. The Second City (1931) looked back to Liverpool and went largely unreviewed. The critically-acclaimed, Berlin-set Haunting Europe (1934) looked forward, grappling with the spread of international fascism and the challenge of creating a ‘new and emancipated society’ from within ‘the very body of a tyrannical and reactionary State.’

Slater went on to co-edit the Left Review, new organ of the British Section of the Writers’ International started in 1934, alongside Tom Wintringham andAmabel Williams-Ellis, for which Salter wrote many polemical articles under the nom de plume ‘Ajax’. Much in the spirit of his contemporary, the Marxist critic, theorist, polemicist and sometime-poet Christopher Caudwell (1907-37) who, unlike Slater, and Wintringham, his commander (since he was in the British Battalion of the International Brigade), did not survive the Spanish Civil War (as nor did John Cornford 1915-36), Slater ‘rejected the idea that cultural work could be bracketed offfrom politics’ (Harker)—such views, growing wider currency in the 1930s, had been given distinct expression in Caudwell’s posthumously published works, in particular, Illusion and Reality: A Study in the Sources of Poetry (1937) and Studies in a Dying Culture (1938). Harker:

The process of defining and transmitting national culture, he insisted, was always political (itdecided what, and who, counted, and did not); the custodians of culture naturally defined it in their own image. In particular, the gate-keeping elite had undervalued and sidelined a powerfulcurrent of demotic folk poetry: John Skelton, Piers Ploughman, William Blake, music hall, penny dreadfuls, popular theatre, folksong, psalmbooks, proverbs and jokes. Countering the myth that ‘folk poetry’ ended with the Renaissance would be a central concern of Slater and his networks. He had already begun this work by seeking out, editing and republishing the scripts of Victorian barnstormers, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A Traditional Acting Version (1928), Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn (1928) and Two Classic Melodramas (1933). 

Slater rightly believed that capitalism was a system based on deception, and so ‘To ‘describe things as they are’ was therefore‘a revolutionary act’, especially economic exploitation livedbeneath the radar of the dominant culture. Outlined in Left Review, this theory was practised in Coal Face (1935), a shortdocumentary film for which Slater wrote the narration, producedby General Post Office Film Unit’ (Harker). Slater then 

reworked his day-job coverage of the occupation by miners facing redundancy of the Nine Mile Point Colliery in Monmouthshire, 1935, as a book of eye-witness reportage, published as Stay Down Miner (1936). A forgotten classic in the tradition of JB Priestley’s English Journey (1934)and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), the book detailed not only the strike but a tight-knit way of life defined by ‘the bearing of dignity and stiff chapel-going independence’reminiscent for Slater of Millom. Drama, however, was Slater’s primary form in the mid to late 1930s. Two plays sounding a caution against Anglicized forms of fascism – Domesday(1933) and Cock Robin (1934) – were written but not formally staged. His experiments soon found a receptive network in Left Theatre (1934–37), a professionally-based organization convinced that ‘the very class which plays the chief part in contemporary history’ was ‘debarred from expression in the present-day theatre.’ Slater went on to win the inaugural Left Theatre playwriting competition in 1935 with his Easter 1916, which was published by the CPGB’s imprint Lawrence & Wishart in 1936. 

During the early years of WWII, Slater was almost impossibly employed in what sound like three very demanding posts: ‘(theatre critic and sub-editor at the Co-op’s Sundayweekly, Reynold’s News); Head of Scripts at the Film Unit of theMinistry of Information; and the Army Bureau of CurrentAffairs, where he worked first on films, then on living newspapers

performed to the troops’. Apparently Britten’s preferred librettist after Christopher Isherwood, Slater was recruited by the composer to work on an opera to be based on The Borough (1824) by poet and Aldeburgh curate, George Crabbe,(1754–1832)’, more specifically, on the ‘Peter Grimes’ section of the poem, which Slater ‘re-worked … as a three-act versedrama, set ‘towards 1830’, to be performed by a cast of fourteen,plus chorus. He replaced Crabbe’s five-beat line – ‘out of key

with contemporary modes of thought and speech’ – with a moreidiomatic four-beat line, and Crabbe’s ringing couplets with a‘rough rhyme’ – ‘assonance and consonantal rhyme’ – by way of

‘striking the balance between structure and naturalness’. Harker makes a point of emphasizing Britten’s very particular take on the story: ‘Britten identified strongly with the socially alienated

central figure, around whom rumour clung, and would laterdraw parallels between Grimes the outsider and his own life asa homosexual and conscientious objector in a world hostile toboth groups’. Slater’s approach favoured more the ambiguity and enigma of Grimes. Due to artistic differences this collaboration grew strained and ultimately mutually alienating. The director of the first production of Peter Grimes at Sadler’s in 1945, Eric Crozier, ‘remembered the librettist as ‘a silent, ratherrecalcitrant figure’ during some tense meetings’. Tensions increased when Britten brought in poet Robert Duncan to make some revisions to the poetic text (the more obvious exponent of poetic drama of the time, Auden, had apparently been unavailable). But much to Britten’s consternation, ‘Slaterthen published his original libretto – ‘the one to which themusic was composed’ – in his first and only verse collection,Peter Grimesand other Poems (1946)’. 

Harker makes note: ‘The framework for much of Slater’s work in the late and immediatepost-war years was the conviction that the so-called‘cultural upsurge’ of wartime Britain, in which access to the artshad begun to be broadened – in part through state-funded initiatives(CEMA, ENSA, ABCA) – must be sustained anddeveloped in the image of a better, socialist, future’. One of the main organs for promulgating such ‘upsurge’ was the Communist magazine Our Time which had a readership in the tens of thousands. There was also, of course, Victor Gollancz’ emphatically antifascist Left Book Club and its prolific crop of subscription-only red hardbacks and orange paperbacks famously NOT FOR THE SALE TO THE PUBLIC. As to Slater’s other, later works:

While working on Peter Grimes, he had written the commercially-oriented, Once a JollySwagman (1944), a novel that keyed into the popularity of speedway racing, a sport Slater enjoyed. The novel became a feature film in 1948, starring Dirk Bogarde, scripted by WilliamRose and directed by Jack Lee. He wrote Who Rides a Tiger (1947), an espionage novel tracking an MI5 agent as the hot war gave way to the cold, and The Inhabitants (1948), partly set in aversion of Millom, that contrasted the empty lives of a languid, upper-class London elite and the bustling vitality of a northern working-class community in which ‘friendliness was the single key. 

The most tantalising work, from this writer’s viewpoint, is recounted by Harker next:

His most ambitious work of the late 1940s was Englishmen with Swords: A Narrative of the Years 1647–1648 and 1649 (1949). A radical historical documentary, this novel took theform of a journal supposedly written by journalist Gilbert Mabbot, official licensor of the press between 1647 and 1649 and secretary of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Animated by the ideas thrown up during these revolutionary years – rulers’ rights to rule, the ethics and implications of property ownership, the possibility of social levelling, the radical extension of the franchise – the novel atmospherically recreates the period of the Putney Debates, the second Civil War and Charles I’s execution.

Slater became something of a champion for the posthumously trounced reputation of Christopher Caudwell: ‘Mediating diplomatically,he challenged the tone, if not the logic, of a party increasinglybent on ideological conformity during the so-called ‘CaudwellControversy’, in which the ‘idealist’ deviations of ChristopherCaudwell’s posthumously published theoretical work were ritualisticallydenounced’. And as cultural enterprises as the LBC and the Workers’ Music Association began to wane in reach and influence, Slater ‘renewed the collaboration

with his old GPO Film Unit associate, director JohnGrierson, writing the critically-acclaimed documentary-stylefeature film, The Brave Don’t Cry (1952), which dramatized thestruggle of miners trapped by a landslide at the KnockshinnochCastle Colliery in September 1950’. Slater was, too, ‘equallyprominent in the writers’ union, PEN, co-editing with non-communistsRoy Fuller and Clifford DymentNew Poems 1952: A PEN Anthology (1952), the first of a series of books to showcasenew work in a form seldom commercially viable, and nowstruggling with the closure of key periodicals (Horizon, New Writing)’. 

Slater‘scripted Out of True (1951),a short documentary drama film stressing the treatability of

mental breakdown, sponsored by the National Health Service(a version of his script was published as Cure of Minds (1952))’, and ‘While other communists in his circle visitedthe so-called ‘People’s Democracies’, and produced romanticizedaccounts, Slater drew inspiration from visits to Africa inthe early 1950s’. In his final years, Harker details,like his work ethic, his communism remained intact, redefinedin 1954 as the ‘full community of all minds and

possessions’ necessary for ‘complete freedom.’ Harker speculates on where Slater’s deeply culturally-inclined Communism might have taken him had he lived to see the 1950s out, by remarking on the directions his closest contemporaries took post-1956: ‘his closestassociates – Edgell Rickword, Randall Swingler, BernardStevens, Arnold Rattenbury – were drawn to the New Left, amovement that credibly claimed Slater’s long career – nondogmatic,open to a wide range of cultural influences andforms, committed to cultural democracy’. 

The Selected Poems of Clive Branson

Now to the poetry. First up, Clive Branson, most of whose poems were fortuitously dated, giving them specific historic contexts and adding to the sense of event-verse which recalls the oeuvre of another contemporary of his and Slater’s, Australian-born poet, novelist, playwright and CPGB member, Jack Lindsay (1900-1990) (who, among a jaw-droppingly prolific output of almost 200 titles throughout his extensive career, wrote a social-realist novel set after the execution of Charles I, 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), eleven years before Slater published Englishmen with Swords: A Narrative of the Years 1647–1648 and 1649 (1949)). 

‘Spain’s Civil War’

Indeed, the first section of Branson’s Selected is titled Spain’s Civil War. Apt opener ‘The International’ is a simple but skilful piece of verse which makes fine use of half-rhyme endings:

We’d left our training base

And by the time night fell

Stood facing the Universe

Singing The International.

I remember it so well

Waiting in the station yard

The darkness stood around still

And the stars, masses, stared.

This poem is dated January 1940. It echoes the work of other poet contemporaries of Branson’s such as John Cornford and Jack Lindsay. ‘December 1936, Spain’, is curiously dated June 1939, which means either it was written in retrospect or was redrafted at the latter date, since it is a hortatory poem much in the polemical vein of fellow Communist poet (and eventual Poet Laureate) C. Day Lewis’s Left Review intervention, ‘We’re Not Going To Do Nothing: A Reply to Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Pamphlet, ”What Are You Going to Do About It?”’ 

You! English working men!

Can’t you hear the barrage creeping

that levels the Pyrenees?

Is time intangible

that bears so audible

and visible a thing?

Can’t you hear the children and women cry

where the Fascist bomb

makes the people’s home

a tomb for you and me?

Can’t you see the gashes in the street

where our people stumble

when the city trembles?

Can’t you smell the rose held in the teeth

tighter than death?

They who lie so still

with no Cross,

only this, their courage, their faith

manures the barren earth

for new trees

to spring up the hill-side to the very sky.

That we should be insensible at such a time

Makes deafness kill and peace the bloodier crime.

A rousing piece with an exceptional neo-Shakespearean end couplet. A little subtler is ‘On Being Questioned After Capture: Alcañiz’, which takes a lyrical scalpel to a traumatic personal experience with a sharp use of assonantal and half-rhyme: 

On him the bigger lie – a conscript

‘volunteer’ to rape Spain where she slept

to save his own skin…

…

I could imitate the victor, cringe

till I and the world beyond

take our revenge.

‘Lines Written in a Book of Drawings’ is ominously subtitled ‘done by the order of the Commandant of the Italian Camp’—it is a rudimentary and probably spur-of-the-moment epigram:

These drawings needed a little freedom,

The eye and hand of man enjoying life.

Great Art demands fulfilment of a dream

Of human peace and friendship, no more strife.

Far more powerful and accomplished however is the following epigram, ‘On being ordered to copy a large signature ofMUSSOLINI’ subtitled ‘under a slogan written on the camp wall’:

For years I’ve trained, burnt out my sight, not spared

my health, my strength, my life’s too tender flame

I strove to heights no former vision dared –

to scrawl in black this Fascist’s bloody name.

The first stanza ‘The Aeroplane’, subtitled ‘San Pedro, 1938’, is particularly striking:

This winged machine that cancels distance out.

New steel Icarus senseless to the sun.

Would have Da Vinci end what he’d begun

knowing his dream materialised? – the rout

of innocents from field and home – the shout

of joy to spot an aeroplane. Tis done

The metal bird now sings and man has won

Power to touch the stars or turn about.

The use of assonance, sibilance and consonance are extremely effective: ‘cancels distance’/ ‘Icarus senseless … sun’ etc. This is almost a Miltonic sonnet but for a slightly altered rhyme scheme in the second verse—it is unclear if that was intentional. Aeroplanes appear in the following shorter poem ‘The Red Airforce’, depicted as ‘gigantic eagles jealous of no one’. 

‘The 1930s’

The next section is titled ‘The 1930s’. ‘Zero Hour’ is one of the longer lyrical pieces and contains some beautiful tropes: ‘The little child lingering/ On the precincts of sleep/ Presses her face in the pillow again’, ‘Children understand the screams of intrusion’, and the Audenesque ‘Latest events litter the pavements/ Along with the tickets to yesterday’. Indeed, there is definitely anAudenic influence throughout this poem:

Light fades out before the end of vision.

Turn on the artificial planets

That swarm about the corners of our streets.

Turn on the headlights and the neon-signs.

The peaks of life aren’t gained by blind obedience.

To the shortcomings of the sun. Now mountains

Whose high purpose only the eagles know.

In spite of its officious-sounding title ‘Tasks Before the XIII Party Congress’ is lyrical and aphorismic:

When the sky is like the inverted lake

and gripped by inert trees, tentacled earth.

This is the archway we walk through for years

leisurely picking up new thoughts like friends

…

…only the parallel of a railway line

leading the will along its safe known track

to another station, or terminus, or back

again…

Another fourteen-liner, ‘Paris, 1929’, is a rather vague lyrical meditation which disappointingly contains nothing specific to the title, its natural descriptions are general and could refer to anywhere. ‘Forward’ is another hortatory poem, a direct Shelleyan call for revolution, its simplicity is well-expressed:

He is no better than the millionaire

Who clears the ground of trees, shrubs, weeds

To make his lawns monotonously green

Forbidden to all except the mowing machine.

Don’t insult the bugger on the dole.

He loves the taste and smell of a good meal –

Sure! – but he loves as well

Fresh air, a salty breeze and brown earth still.

It is for these, the joy of being in a man

That the factory hand is ready to risk all,

Can take what’s coming to him, and rebel.

Let every Englishman fight for this cause –

Communism is English! Freedom is Ours!

Note again the assonantal half-rhymes. ‘A Song: Lenin to Gorky’ is an eight-line epigram:

We will drink deep of the white wine of Capri

Gorky, you and I, when the day-long finger

Will have cleaned from the earth all tyranny we

Now mean to be ended with rapid anger.

Gone, gone will the time of our fighting be when

The hymn of the wine we’ll ring together

With the thunder of clapping and the laughter of men

With whom we worked hard in the day long over.

‘To C Day Lewis’, dated 3 July 1935, is a little cryptic in its tone and meaning:

You labour through wastes of depression.

An oasis, a palm tree, a well

you kick for a tombstone. The lesson?

On the beach there’s only one pebble,

only one among all.

At the foot of new waves you were jilted.

Think! Shall you think like the sea?

Or would you the white cliffs were lifted

yet higher before they’re to be

flat as eternity?

The next section is titled ‘I Stay With You’. It starts with the distinctly Shelleyan-Keatsian lyric, ‘The Sun’:

The Sun when it begins to climb

Lingers on the crest of time,

Even the sensate butterfly

Flutters ere it die.

The early mist lies on the hills

Until the air with light fill

And so in life I stay for you

Waiting to die too.

‘Tulips’ is a sublime, Lorcaesque lyric:

You strain for the light, for new life,

And lift. your supplicating mouths

For pure air,

Your feeble wings lie

Down the vase folded;

And red petals die.

‘Dwindle into Moors’ is a curious poem which seems to show some Modernist influence in unusual rhythms and seemingly dislocated syntax:

Where is the victory if the soldier dies?

Smooth movement screens by addition tumult.

Turmoil, pain, doubt, anger, surprises

Stop a revolution; no peace is the result,

No sitting sunning in the park but crises

Yawning factories vomit men and women…

‘Where the Summer Follows’ skilfully replicates the same rhyme scheme and meter as Wordsworth’s iconic ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (aka ‘Daffodils’). The Modernistic lyric ‘To Noreen’ (1931) is arguably one of the most accomplished of Branson’s poems—it’s first verse is particularly well-sculpted and cadent with some beautiful turns of phrase:

I have seen you bear the cup and drink

Sipping the warm minutes of evening

And winnow the grey hairs of day

From pretended darkness, smoking.

You counted the uneatable ‘beggarman’

And watched the taxis move up in their rank

Heard the footsteps of the people

Heard the clock register each new blank.

So whiled away an age have you and I

Sitting and listening to the stars

Caring not how many filled the sky

Nor was that music written which has faded.

And will you drink black coffee till the moon

Lights the round bottom of the cup you hold

Or hearing the clouds no more, get bored soon

And leave me on the pavement thirsting?

Curiously, there’s an abandonment of the rhyme scheme in the last lines of the third and fourth stanzas which perhaps enhance the poem by giving it an edginess, a sense of unpredictability. ‘Have They Told You?’ is a nice Blakean lyric. ‘Dawn’ is another nice lyric with some unusual images, such as ‘juvenile light’, while it closes on a nicely assonantal flourish:

And accumulated voices hum

Accelerating and ascending

In the day’s crescendo.

‘Beyond the Speed of Light’ is another sonnet of sorts, it again has an epigrammatic quality to it:

How often time hangs heavy on our hands

When every minute is a lifetime gone;

It seems as though a mighty barrier stands

Between our deeds and what needs to be done.

In thought too often we are miles away

Performing acts of utmost urgency

When just so often we are forced to stay

Inactive, equal to complacency.

Yet time is no screen-picture overflowing

Another performance, a second showing.

‘Crumbling City’

The next section is titled ‘Crumbling City’. Branson’s ‘London’ in many senses serves as a kind of 1930s/40s updating of Blake’s ‘London’ (Songs of Experience,1794):

Crumbling city! Once mirror of the star-lit heaven

And brilliant in your own splendour too. Now

Streetlights are turned down, blinds drawn and neon-signs even

Torn from the cinema front. Everywhere shadow.

In people’s eyes look fear, no sleep, and despair.

Children must feed on hunger, read the pavement

While mother labours to quicken dad’s massacre

In this mad-house of profit, interest and rent.

This shadow’s magnitude is entirely yours.

But not the depth of night, the sense of darkness.

The will to feel belongs to us and ours;

No, not to armed police, business men and bankers.

Out from the back streets, factories, dark men and women –

A furnace charged to white heat threatens the horizon.

The second verse in particular recalls Blake’s poem which might have served as a template for Branson’s—the parallels between the two poems are clear in tone and image, the second verses of each in particular:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls, 

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

‘The Thames’ is more vers libre and is faintly reminiscent of John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’:

A large white rat dri.ed up the river on its back

Past HMS PRESIDENT

That gently swayed

But kept her moorings strained

And taut.

…

The ALAIN tug

With five low-laden barges

Smoked its course

Toward Charing Cross

And the river police dashed past.

‘The Doors of the Tube’ is a wonderful curiosity, a poetic take on the London Underground which really should be included in Poems on the Underground—with great descriptive lines such as ‘Ghostly doors! Handless slide impassionate’ and ‘Into these carriages smooth moving through modern catacombs’, it reminded this writer of Christopher Caudwell’s contemporaneous poem ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ (1937), part of which I excerpt below:

I walked down a long, tiled corridor.

There were notices on the walls.

WHITE TIES PLEASE. …

DO NOT SPIT.

THIS WAS TO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

I went down the long tiled corridor

And at the end someone clattered lift gates.

GOING UP!

…

I walked back down the stairs, down the corridor.

There are offices it seems across the way.

He may be in there.

PLEASE USE THE SUBWAY.

I used the subway. I am still walking…

Although it’s unclear whether Caudwell’s ‘subway’ alludes to the underground or merely an underpass. ‘In The Park’ is a strong Eliotic piece:

Men take off their hats to mop their old heads

while everybody’s walking slowly

along the pavements through the shade.

The chocolate-man has covered up his wares.

The horses are hot and trot wearily in the Row.

The sheep bleat by the Serpentine, new sheared and thin

in bare continuous monotone.

Bobbing, the ducks waddle through the grass to avoid

inebriated steps of a full-fledged Cygnet.

A tattered ‘Scrap of Paper’

fixed to the points of the iron rails

is sensitive to air.

‘Night (1)’ is similarly Eliotic:

Silence can be found

Only where the roads pass through

From thoroughfare to thoroughfare;

Tis true and yet untrue

For women sitting in saloons

Laugh and irritate the air

Appreciating humour over beer.

Here I am again

Among chattering lamps

To Covent Garden bound

Where the few that are found

Speak, walk and look

(described in a book)

And drunk they steer

Down the difficult pavements.

How pale and wearied with forbidden love

The men and women seem!

A van, like a cage drove past the market

Carrying new flowers for the morrow’s sale.

There’s also something of the spectral quality of Harold Monro’s poetry. ‘Night (2)’ is another fine lyrical piece:

I shall endeavour

To lose myself in the lonely streets

(though packed with people and the traffic’s stir)

To follow my shadow down dark retreats

Further and further.

I’ll strive to leave the world alone

Or else in some cheap cinema

Watch fabulous love’s desires fulfilled

And dread what might have been

Or what may come.

‘I Thought England Safe’

The next section is titled ominously ‘I Thought England Safe’. ‘Thaelmann’ is a eulogy to Ernst Thälmann, leader of the German Communist Party 1925 to 1933, who was assassinated (on Hitler’s orders) in 1944. Here Branson’s lyrical is peaking, this poem is more assured and confident in style and tone than much that has preceded it:

Barred, the inflexible day – cell walls

stone-flat concrete and bricks, sky out of reach,

and in chains – Thaelmann. The man built,

like the fugitive in the hay stack, the would-be clerk,

a world against oppression, war on each

past year that spreads its avalanche of dark

over the new trees, the beginning, the green success.

Only the light of invincible early morning.

Only the distinct rattle of the world

dragging fetters. Only the prison bell rings.

And keys, voices of men and warders, unlocked doors

shut like an empty plate, and the grey old

evening twilight. Night brings a poverty of stars

window bound. And the whisper of all moving.

There are some arresting images here: ‘avalanche of dark’, ‘green success’, ‘grey old evening twilight’, ‘poverty of stars window bound’ etc. There’s also an Audenic touch with the use of definite instead of indefinite articles for ‘the fugitive’ and ‘the would-be clerk’. ‘The Asturian Miners’ (Asturias is a region in Green Spain) is a superb descriptive poem awash with striking imagery:

Suddenly risen a.er years of quiet digging

No more like coal they’ve raised from the dug shaft.

No more do they submit

To the pick, the wage-cut, and the easy talk

The hunger that eats away their so. guts.

Not gods. Nor great men. …

Once again, the Audenic register: ‘To the pick, the wage-cut, and the easy talk’. This poem has a Soviet sense of the nobility in hard manual labour in its depictions of the miners at work:

Not heavy headed 

Men. Not sons of Thor or Samson who might wield

Weapons of immense size. Nor brutes. These

Are wrought of hunger, are sons of women,

Sons of quarrels shouted down the street

Sons of laughter piercing from a basement…

Branson’s descriptions of the miners become ever more vivid and evocative in the second verse:

Their lips pressed white for lack of food

And the black dust hollows out their white eyes

A bitter hatred nursed

In a deep sadness to which only they know

How to respond with life itself fighting

And at other times with sensitive deeds

With tenderness, fatiguing patience, able

Are the horny knuckles, scarred hands, capable.

Out there beyond the latest crest – over –

Huge thunder clouds ride slowly warning black.

Our work-mates’ bodies lie bleeding at the mouth,

And dull red patches saturate their clothes

Recently cleaned by the hands of their girls.

There’s much use of colour as symbol, white, black and red. From Green Spain to greener ‘England’, which begins with a line in direct reference to Blake’s ‘green & pleasant land’ in ‘Jerusalem’:‘I thought England green with pleasant valleys’. In many senses this poem is ‘covert pastoral’—that is, in William Empson’s definition that ‘good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral’ (‘Proletarian Literature’,Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935), that is to say, art which camouflages a socio-political message under symbolic pastoral imagery. The poem takes us from a Monroesque urban decay crackling with alliteration:

From doors of dark and grimy alleys

in huge spreading cities, breathing smoke,

through black cracks in curtained windows

pale houses queer.

To countryside imagery:

I thought England safe where the brook

broke silence over the pebbles, where the rows

of houses parallel to the sky over the hill

where the white clouds, smoke, look

to see what we’re doing, asking

‘Help the people of Spain.’

Though admittedly the poem becomes much less ‘covert’ the more it goes on, ending in a direct Shelleyan address:

by the scum who fight against us

by the rich who starve the people

from ragged clothes and dirty pockets

sewn and cleaned a thousand times

comes the will to pay the price

comes the penny’s mighty sacrifice

comes the warmth of friendliness.

Personally I’d have removed that last line which feels somewhat twee and unnecessary—ending on the ‘sacrifice’ would have had more impact. However, the poem isn’t finished—there remains a rallying call summoning green England’s lesser-known radical history:

England’s subdued voices tell

how Freedom strode inside the closed forest of Sherwood.

The poem closes on the triumphant:

How they would mould it all

and name it after them

England.

‘Abyssinia’ is a poetically effective poem-polemic against Mussolini’s audacious invasion of the eponymous African country:

All foreign powers gather for her blood.

Black Africa, primeval Africa! And Nile –

along whose banks luxurious Egypt went

in search of Rome, of youthful Rome –

here looks a man down on the ugly gnome

of ‘black’ Italy. Great Caesar, too great! Now

all the hideous opposite of Caesar,

murdered by a nightmare in the Capitol,

stalks the ruins lit by a hollow moon,

a cheap forgery and imitation.

Egypt died long ago, and with her, Rome

lies in the bed of the continuous Nile

pouring out of Africa.

The stream turns?

Will Africa now conquer all her past?

‘Wherever Green Wheat Flows’ is a more wistful lyrical poem:

…Wherever light fill

Breaks in woods, windows in prison walls.

…

Whenever some old peasant woman sleeps

And workmen have wiped their greasy hands

After a hard day…

It is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet with a ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme. ‘People Draw Their Curtains Close’ is as a fine painterly lyric:

People draw their curtains close

To keep the light within

And the night

Without.

The trees appear a silver-grey

Green-tinted

Under the evening’s sensitive brush.

Two young men with a mandolin

In the less frequented parts

Sing

Valencia

And only stop when coins drop

Or cease to fall.

The lamps throw out their radiating beams

To take dominion of the shadowed roads.

The wireless utters varied sounds

Into closely lighted rooms.

The Continental Restaurant’s empty now.

The line ‘To take dominion of the shadowed roads’ is wonderfully assonantal. ‘Today My Eyes’ is another fourteen-liner, but its first verse of eight lines all have the same end-rhyme, which feels strained. But from halfway through the seventh line—which serves as a volta of sorts— onwards, the poem picks up in quality as the end-rhymes also begin to alternate:

…But to remain

Seeing and sightless is a deeper shame.

Blind are the windows of an empty home

Although they stare into the face of heaven.

They too are blind who travel far and roam

The world while they don’t know their own street even.

The dead deserve no eyes who from their birth

Neglect to learn the beauty of the earth.

‘A Handkerchief Waved from a Parting Train’ is a two-paged poem which seems to gain momentum and interest in its second half:

Unemployed shuffling into the labour exchange.

Patience rising into demonstration, food queue into riot.

An audience waiting for the play to begin.

A mass meeting, listening, some shouting, at a factory gate.

Massed like a mountain range along the edge of the world.

There is a passage which is particularly poignant in 2023:

But once there were no clouds

Where the moon shone

To light the golden corn

In the Ukraine

Helping the peasants

Gather in the harvest

From the flames of war

And the enemy’s hunger…

‘Evening’ is another Shakespearean sonnet—it contains some beautiful images, such as ‘in the shallows where the green weeds sway’.

‘Prisoner’ is the ominously titled next section. ‘San Pedro’ demonstrates Branson’s command of the sonnet form and in particular of iambic pentameter:

Ill-clad rabble of a lost dreaded might.

Look longer, deeper, the accustomed eyes

Know more than quick appearances can tell.

These fools, this shoddy crowd, this dirt, are lies

Their idiot captors wantonly compel.

These men are giants chained down from the skies

To congregate an old and empty hell.

‘The Nightingale’ is another Shakespearean sonnet in a distinctly Keatsian vein:

Each tedious darkness with the deaf-mute moon.

…

…We too cower

Awake under the dead blanket thinking

Of that illusive freedom you echo each hour.

And even through the shouting of the guard,

Their chain of noise, we hear you secret bird,

Their strength, their arrogance, though bayonet proud,

Can’t still the voice humanity has heard.

Your silence is articulate when you

Must be obedient, sing when ordered to.

The lyrical ‘To the German Anti-Fascists in San Pedro’ continues with this imagery but in vers libre:

I have lain in my blanket at night

kept awake by lice and a dry itching skin

looked at the blue window panes broken

with a star up in one corner.

Outside a night-bird intensely sings

unseen and to no-one.

Only to memories of friends did he sing?

Only to the deaf ears of these ghosts?

Was there meaning in his song, or meaningless

Like that of the nightingale?

It closes on the thoughtful internationalist note:

This German sang to us of home

Our heritage in one another

Comrade, Brother – no foreigner.

‘On the Statue of Christ, Palencia (1)’ is a deft epigrammatic lyric:

Still symmetry! Is this our human aim?

Knowing conceit! Should child of woman born

live perfect death to reach a deathless fame?

Her child still-born! Spain’s body mangled, torn.

Historic judgement no confusion mars.

Perhaps this statue climbs upon the hill

better to win the plenitude of stars:

Ride with the sun beyond earth’s window sill.

Perhaps it cheats the sight its splendour bars,

Its high pretence to life lives on to kill.

While we return to the Shakespearean sonnet with ‘On the Statue of Christ, Palencia (2)’, a poem which once again demonstrates Branson’s exceptional command of iambic pentameter:

When I first saw this venerable stone

Statue standing up against the sunrise

I learnt how vast it was to be alone

To pause in solitude before men’s eyes,

Not to move while the day’s wide motion threw

.e sun above all else, whose blazing heat

Parched tongues to flame, white-powdered roads; and drew

the cool of evening past the statue’s feet.

At night dogs howl, the firmament spins round,

Dark is the noise of unseen insects’ wings,

And yet I know you are on your high mound

Straight, upright, fixed, immune to living things.

Dead as a rock memento of the past

Life’s immortality in death held fast.

By contrast, ‘By the Canal Castilla’ is a Lorcan lyric, and one wonders whether Branson would have been aware of the work of said contemporary Spanish poet (who was of course assassinated by the fascists in August 1936):

The guard’s bayonet splinters the sun.

A gilded iris shrivels up.

A poppy’s crimson cup

breaks petal by petal to the wind.

…

An unseen shadow sings.

Everything waits what the next journey brings –

Even the authorities.

‘Sunset’, subtitled ‘Palencia, 1938’, is a short and exquisite Symbolist miniature:

Like a new cut on a young girl’s shoulder

the sun le. a crimson scar.

Through barbed wire

we can feel the day’s passing

and evening

warns us of night, the complete end.

‘A Sunday Afternoon’ is a focused lyric:

A delicate breeze sufficient to stir

Light dust, a little leaf, by an insect’s wing

Dance music on the wireless; between prisoner

And a girl dressed like a rose, a smile.

A leaf, a frog, a shadow, a piece of paper

A trickle of water, reading, writing

These things on a stillness deeper than all

Took a whole afternoon to drift with the canal.

‘The Prisoner’s Outlook’, composed in captivity as the rest of this sequence, has a demoralised and understandably pessimistic tone:

After eternity of search and travel

Millions of times died in an eye’s pupil

Mutinous water, tides, tropic rain, attend

Monotonous as clouds and wind with no end.

A long white road bending back against itself –

War not to end wars. Sentence for life

No chance to repeat, no hope for reprieve.

In ‘In the Camp’ Branson reimagines his captivity as being inside a painting:

The storm has cleared the air

but not barbed wire.

Here we can bask in the sun,

should our eyes have forgotten,

pointed at by the guard’s bayonet.

We’re like young trees set

on a wide landscape and mountain

in a picture for ever certain…

With ‘Death Sentence Commuted to Thirty Years’ we’re back in Lorcan poetic territory, but also, with the language more figurative, the closer focus on imagery and symbolism, there is something of the poetry of Keith Douglas, and also Alun Lewis here:

When this sunrise put the question, ‘why

should birds sing?’ Even the machine-gun

kills in rhythm. For the ordinary eye

enjoys the redness in blood, the purple of wine,

Death’s proud carnation

a murdered man twists at the corner of his mouth.

The Douglas influence is also reinforced with a clear Modernistic influence in terms of unusual turns of phrase and curious syntax:

The homeward rail imagination ran

outdistanced time with modern mockery.

Slow passed each day, compiled a week,

our patient waiting streamed by the prison bars…

‘On Dreaming of Home’ is more Audenesque: ‘Where is the lettering of your name,/ That spells the safe hangar, aerodrome and home?’ The poem closes with an expression of Branson’s implacable idealism undaunted even in imprisonment:

But we are pioneers, we who dream and think.

Dream of wide spaces that sever man from man.

Think out the journey and in detailed plan

Of the end. Even though we crash soon and near,

Our thought’s beginning is our dream’s conqueror.

‘We Are The People…’

The penultimate section is titled ‘We Are The People…’. and starts off with ‘The General Didn’t Know’, a poem-polemic which makes very effective use of rhetorical repetition:

We are the soldiers. We are the bombed.

We are the routed, the wounded, the dead…

…

We are the people those bombs hit again –

and again – there’s always printer’s ink

for tomorrow’s press – and again –

there’s always plenty of drink

for the General Staff – and again

until we realise WE are the men, the women,

the children killed in the press

by the generals for the rich

who have no feelings, cannot feel our pain.

‘Blackout’, dated April 1939, is an eight-line lyric which packs a punch: ‘We can’t stop the gangsters’ machine-gun/ through the blackout that’s shut us in’. ‘May First’ is one of Branson’s longer poems—it is openly polemical in purpose but the polemic is couched in rhyming couplets and is presumably influenced much by Shelley:

Over the peoples of Europe dying and dead

the barbed wire of the concentration camp has spread

to new territories – Spain, now France –

and will take England too unless we advance

like the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army that came in the nick of time

to rescue half Poland, to hurl Baron Mannheim

back from the gates of Leningrad. We can….

…

We are organised in mine, workshop and factory,

and huge town. Think of the difficulty the peasant had

to collect an army. We as quick as the word,

can turn out in millions, possess the streets,

bring industry to a standstill, are disciplined; such feats

even the Chartists could not emulate, yet they

were never slow in rising to make the rich pay

for all their degradation. That movement died,

with victory following after, but it supplied

with France and Germany the component parts

to make up modern communism. .at spectre which haunts

today the whole world…

The poem is almost like a tub-thumping speech in couplets, a flourish of rhetoric, even agitprop, and, with the luxury of historical hindsight, can be seen in some respects as somewhat naïve:

Have you forgotten

How Karl Marx and Frederick Engels lived in London,

worked in London, led from London the Paris Commune,

American Labour, Germans against Bismarck. How Lenin

here, in our London, raised high the torch of progress,

printed Iskra, the spark that glowed in the darkness

of Imperialism and Tsardom, and from the debris of war

burst into the splendour of the USSR.

But like all good rhetoric Branson knows the power of repetition to get a point across:

…Peace and Freedom

and Bread. And someone explains ‘that’s Communism’.

The wireless warns against Communism. The gutter press

screams against Communism. The Labour Leaders

shriek against Communism. All the time mankind

longs for Freedom, Peace and Bread. That’s why we must find

the path to their understanding, the same path

shown to us in the Manifesto, the birth-

certificate of the new man, the free man.

Those last two lines are particularly effective as they hone in on a metaphor. A little further on we have the potent trope, ‘Pity and Charity are the hand-rags of Slavery’, which seems to come as much out of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as it does Karl Marx. There’s then a diatribe against patriotism, pomp and the propping-up of monarchy, which is tragically just as relevant in twenty-first century England:

…Our men and women

are the same that Tom Mann led. The same as when

our dockers stopped the Jolly George. The same as those

who in nine short days in nineteen-twenty-six rose

almost to power. The same who marched on May First

challenging with Red Banners (our flags) the cursed

Union Jack and pomp of coronation. Bone of their bone

with the five hundred men of the British Battalion

who died in Spain.

It’s notable that the piece gathers momentum just as a more poetic form is employed—in this case rhyming couplets of a distinctly Shelleyan vein. What Branson attempts in this polemical piece is to reconfigure the shadow-lineage of left-wing radicalism into the English identity:

…the banner of liberty, the banner of Englishmen.

Though the Red Flag may now be down under,

in our hands we’ll lift it to flutter and thunder

in the storm of our movement, to head the assault

against the world’s tyrants who rule through our fault…

The poem closes on the triumphant rallying cry: ‘Let every Englishman fight for this cause –/

Communism is English! Freedom is ours!’ This is perhaps Branson’s attempt at an updating of Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy and considering it was probably composed while on campaign, it is a commendable effort. By contrast, the next much shorter poem, ‘The Soviet People Speak’, shows much more a Modernist influence, particularly in its curious phrasing which is almost cryptic, as in its riddling opening: ‘Revenge vengeance since against us risen/ Refused to meet our request to resist’. 

‘To Rupert Brooke’ is an unforgivingly critical poem on the much-celebrated First World War poet who famously died before reaching the Front, and appears to be in the form of pastiche of Brooke’s most well-known poem ‘The Soldier’:

What good is it that you should understand

And feel the beauty of our English tongue

When from life’s orchestra you’ve only wrung

Some trivial notes, an echo of the grand

Tradition of poets that belong to England

And ended when the sightless Milton flung

His vision against night, when Shelley sung

To lend humanity a poet’s hand.

They did not mean to take the place of strife

Who wrote the dreams and actions of mankind,

They fought in their own way. They knew the need

To stop the will of man from going blind,

They led the sick from suicide to life,

They strained their art to mingle word and deed.

It’s a compelling piece but perhaps a little too vituperative in parts, especially the phrase ‘trivial notes’, which is an especially vicious aspersion to make of another poet, though Branson’s point is the superficiality and naivety of Brooke’s poeticised patriotism. ‘Bombed Again’ is an interesting free verse on the apparent compassion fatigue or sanitised mindset of ordinary people remarking on the recent catastrophic news of wars:

I spoke to a bus conductor,

an old soldier

about Norway – the bloody massacre there –

who said coldly,

the first lot’s bound to be wiped out.

And a man back from Spain

from the war, the wounds, and prison

made a long speech about it

without feeling, without emotion; exactly

like a tram running along lines;

exactly

like girls who go to the factory of a morning

as day must follow night

leaving yesterday forgotten, not caring.

Then comes a serendipitous aphorism which sums up the present-mindedness of a lotus-eating newspaper-populace: ‘Who bothers to read yesterday’s paper again?’ And the lack of a sense of consequences, duty of care, and social responsibility in the ensuing two-lined verse which brings to mind the holistic ‘knock-on effects’ sentiments of social writers like Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and J.B. Priestley: ‘The manager put off a hundred men/ without thinking of the kids, the women’. 

‘Where Does Death Begin?’

The final section is gnomically titled ‘Where Does Death Begin?’ The first poem is a short lyric presumably to the poet’s wife:

When the edge of day’s flag is tattered

Long before hours terminate day’s end

In bitter wind,

And birds’ wings lag,

And smoke crawls softly from the power-station chimney.

When at the end of a long day’s labour

Night scrapes the clodded blade of day

Metallic clean, and engines tire,

Before this fire sleeps,

thoughts of you drift from the still smouldering embers.

The alliterative line ‘And smoke crawls softly from the power-station chimney’ is particularly beautiful even if it is evoking an industrial landscape. ‘Bombay’, dated‘Ahmednagar, April 1943’, is another short poem which gets its point across effectively and powerfully:

Come with me and I will show you,

Almost hidden in the shadow

Of an Indian night,

Pavements strewn with human bodies

That with all the other shit

The authorities forget

Even to worry about.

Here’s one

Still lives, though all his flesh has gone.

The vulture remains invisible

Till the meal is insensible,

But Life is not so patient as the vulture,

In India, not so poetical.

That first line of the second and final verse seems incomplete—perhaps it was supposed to read: ‘Here’s one of those’…? There’s something of Masefield again in ‘Ship’:

Free from the chains that weigh the bows down,

Loose from the refuse that drags a blunted keel.

Clear decks for action! With steam and sail

Escape the dockside grasp.

Then we shall climb among the cliffs and breathe

Fresh winds fanned by the passing stars

And chart new courses for the ships we’ve dreamed

To ride the sky-deep seas.

‘I Can Hear the Sea-Waves’ shows how towards the end of his all-too-brief life Branson was coming to master verse forms, it is composed in beautifully judged rhyming iambic pentameter:

My candle burns the wick of time low down,

While in night-silence, history turns the pages.

Wars and religion, imperial Gods are gone.

The pavement where they trod winds through the ages.

…

To end all strife by elemental force.

Even the slightest touch will leave its mark.

In endless stream the traffic flows its course,

And bit by bit recedes into the dark.

‘Men Condemned’ is a resonant condemnation of so-called democratic ‘freedom’:

… Men condemned for years on end

To suffer freedom to do nothing.

The white-washed sky is their cell walls

And earth the floor they walk along

To nowhere. Everything is theirs

Trees, fields, birds, wealth, tanks, gems,

So long as they don’t do, don’t think, don’t

Want to buy with their wages,

Build with their hands and enjoy

Life that is living. They’ve been warned

‘Who wants to take the storm up in both hands

And break this calm to smithereens

Shall go to prison.’ .is dungeon echoes

The song of birds, people’s voices

With the depths of fruitless nothingness,

Emptiness, limitless space,

Where to do nothing by compulsion –

‘a wolf clothed in a lamb’s white skin’ –

Is Freedom which compels men to do nothing.

That final ironic line is particularly impactful. ‘When I Come Back’ is a wonderful posthumous meditation and anticipation of future haunting, which, in light of the poet’s imminent death, reads all the more poignantly:

When I come back after this long journey

(Some have claimed to return from the dead,

Hence the great temples built beside slums)

And I meet you, stranger, on the platform…

There’s a nicely figurative trope: ‘Shy because I wouldn’t tread too hard/ On the rare mosaic of our comradeship’. This poem has many breathtaking moments of lyricism:

Then we will talk of all kinds of things.

But neither will take note of the words nor meaning

Only listen for the loved music of the voice

That is familiar even after so much silence.

It is very much a poetic imagining of the afterlife. The spectral and haunted poetry of Harold Monro comes to mind again: ‘When I am sure that you are you and no dream./How often my longing was peopled with hollow ghosts!’ Branson’s lyricism is at a peak: ‘Caressing and fervent holding of body/ To body. To close our eyes and sleep completely’. But it remains unclear, ambiguous, as to whether this is really an anticipation of post-life spiritual existence or a figurative tilt on the material and earthly salvation of a future Communism (though surely by any definition Heaven must be communist?):

Changes in outlook, new circumstances

The foundations on which with act upon thought

We build a new life. Put into practice

The schemes we visualised on a grey London evening

And under an Indian sun meet and change and merge –

And we’ll climb up the steps where hovels once levelled the world.

That last line is particularly effective and moving in its imagery.I’m reminded of these lines from Harold Monro’s ‘The Silent Pool’:

I am so glad that underneath our talk

Our minds together walk.

We argue all the while,

But down below our argument we smile,

We have our houses, but we understand

That our real property is common land.

III

At night we often go

With happy comrades to that real estate,

Where dreams in beauty grow,

And every man enjoys a common fate.

And of these lines from Monro’s ‘Real Property’:

A hedge is about it, very tall,

Hazy and cool, and breathing sweet.

Round paradise is such a wall,

And all the day, in such a way,

In paradise the wild birds call.

You only need to close your eyes

And go within your secret mind,

And you’ll be into paradise:

I’ve learnt quite easily to find

Some linden trees and drowsy bees,

A tall sweet hedge with the corn behind.

I will not have that harvest mown:

I’ll keep the corn and leave the bread.

I’ve bought that field; it’s now my own:

I’ve fifty acres in my head.

I take it as a dream to bed.

I carry it about all day….

Sometimes when I have found a friend

I give a blade of corn away.

‘Orders for Landing’, dated 5 December 1943, once more recalls Harold Monro):

Today we got our orders for tomorrow,

A few brief sentences as a title page

Preludes a book. Each one wonders how

The story will turn out. What’s over the edge?

…

It is I who move. I who will look again

To find the I that searched and could not see

Exactly the I that am. Had I but taken

I as the recurrent particle of continuous We!

There’s no unknown to him who reads the sea,

For whom the horizon predicts the certain land.

Like words we live, self-lost in history.

We sink like waves into the endless end.

Dated 25 December 1943, this is a poignant lyric with a sublime and lingering ending. The ghost of Harold Monro is still with us here as I’m reminded of these lines from his thanatophobic poem ‘Living’ (very much an poetic ancestor of Philip Larkin’s devastating ‘Aubade’):

Slow bleak awakening from the morning dream

Brings me in contact with the sudden day.

I am alive – this I.

I let my fingers move along my body.

Realization warns them, and my nerves

Prepare their rapid messages and signals.

While Memory begins recording, coding,

Repeating; all the time Imagination

Mutters: You’ll only die.

Here’s a new day. O Pendulum move slowly!

My usual clothes are waiting on their peg.

I am alive – this I.

And in a moment Habit, like a crane,

Will bow its neck and dip its pulleyed cable,

Gathering me, my body, and our garment,

And swing me forth, oblivious of my question,

Into the daylight – why?

‘Millions of Years Old’, dated Burma, 4 January 1944, has more of a Modernist timbre:

Star-spluttering and belching darkness.

Over the whole spread a silent vastness

So still, the silence recoiled on itself

And broke to pieces in a myriad whispers –

A mountain stream worming its way to the sea –

…

Branson’s strikes an Eliotic note: ‘Then through the night the howl of homeless dogs/ 

To hurl the stillness back into no noise’. It’s closing image is one of the poet’s more imaginative descriptions: ‘Morning, like a flock of flamingoes, wings/ To settle in the branches and spread across the fields’. ‘Without Time’ is another existential meditation:

I lay on my back on the deck looking up

At a star which swayed from side to side

In a sea of perpetual space.

Time was a secret to everything living

For fear that the dead might learn,

There lying among sea-weed and broken ships

Fish – haunted and watched

They’d been swindled

And take revenge

Turn all so that the star I see

Is a grain of sand in the depth of eternity

Or an eye looking at me.

Branson’s final poem, and inescapably among the most haunting, is ‘Where Light Breaks Up’, dated the Burma front, February 1944:

Where light breaks up obscurity for sunrise,

And peace accumulates the parts of storm.

Where death’s the sequence of the pregnant womb

An embryo contains the adult’s size.

Where mountain peaks hold up the moving skies

Their might is tunnelled by the invidious worm;

Where clouds pile up their cumbersome white form

The flat laborious plain of wheat-fields lies.

Women and children build up the only road

Where overhead the shells of death whine past

And cattle graze indifferent to the din.

I felt perhaps I’d understood at last

By close observance of all that nature showed

‘When life has gone, then where does death begin?’

That last line is sublime,all the more so given that it is quite possibly the last line of verse Clive Branson wrote before his abrupt death in battle. The following month, on the same Burma front, Welsh poet Alun Lewis was found lying near the latrines with a gunshot to the head while apparently shaving, a revolver pluming away in his hand—he died from his wound some hours later, apparently self-inflicted though the army tried to cover it up as death by misadventure. Smokestack has done a great service in bringing Branson’s valuable poetry back into wider public circulation.

The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater

Part I. Poems

Now to Montagu Slater. The first section of his Collected is simply titled ‘Poems’.The first poem is titled ‘An Elegy’ and subtitled ‘Written in the shadow of a mountain in a northern mining port

which, established in the Nineteenth Century, proves superfluous to the needs of the Twentieth’. This poem is fairly typical of Slater’s penchant for industrial lyricism and also demonstrates his prosodic dexterity and command of rhyme and iambic pentameter:

Mountain, whose rondure is determinate

by riches of your still unshamed mines,

chambers and galleries and caves intestate,

a various hoard which every twig divines:

the glimmering presence of your urgent Jove

your shoulder hummocking above the screes

where smoky clouds bend daylight as it moves

to closure in imperfect cadences

tells how an earthquake had once split the rock

and giant sparks leaping the centuries

found the dead shafts and mines of human thought

and legends of imaginary countries.

Our little lives, our chapels and our hymns,

mining and fishing – apostolic round –

a tidal river governed with its whims

neap tides renew but spring tides leap the bounds.

It also contains in an earlier stanza the curious phrase ‘menstrual sea’ which colouristically seems to evoke the Homeric ‘wine-dark sea’. A rather long, two-paged poem, this is quite an ambitious opening to a poetry collection which is normally served best with a pithier opener, but the cadence of the verses carries the eye well:

…screes at their feet and laminated shale,

on the north-west the Cumbrian mountains rise

and to the south the glimmering peaks of Wales.

This is a superlative piece of verse:

Now solemn the precedent shadow falls,

like disintoxication, like dismay

of clocks set going after drinking brawls

with unrelenting news of yesterday

We then seem to hit upon—as we did with Branson’s ‘London’—a stanza which echoes Blake’s ‘London’:

Slater: and down the dream-choked gullet of the street

crab-like on an ambiguous journey led

we read in all the faces that we meet

stale news, a preterite of the nearer dead.

And being mindful of the twilight mood

and the grave charm of the alternate note

the lyric burden of this solitude,

satyricon for any golden throat;

Blake: I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

This is a kind of imitation, but there is nothing at fault in that, it is part of a poet’s apprenticeship, and there can be few better templates for succinct lyrical rhymes than Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. What Slater achieves here, like Branson, is a brilliant updating of Blake for the twentieth century where his ‘dark Satanic mills’ have unfortunately proliferated and polluted the atmosphere. The word ‘preterite’ is an interesting choice, it means something completed in the past; while the second verse excerpted above is masterly in its scansion and Coleridgean imageryi.e. ‘satyricon for any golden throat’. If one was to be nitpicking, the last line of the final verse is one syllable too long for the scansion and rhythm—I indicate below what would have been the easy solution to this:

And touch, which is the lovers’ sense, implies

a membrane’s pleasure when a last bird sings

of night’s scarce-scented guesses, and the eyes

give up their kingdom over all visible things.

Next comes a short lyric, ‘Love, We Can Lie Back’, which grows more intriguing towards its close:

(For even a dog in rut has no place in the sun

But grey activity bare and unmetaphored)

Live on Lillith and do not be too sorry when he also departs.

‘Cock Crow’is a semi-rhyming curiosity reminiscent of Stevie Smith—here are the last two stanzas:

The world turns… am I afraid?

I can feel conscience multiplied

By chiding voices millionfold

Cock-crowing now, ‘Have you betrayed?’

The cock crew twice, crew twice. I know

One more summons is permitted

By tradition of the city.

Cock crow cock crow cock crow cock crow.

‘The Fear’ is a striking Modernistic poem with an unusual tilt on its subject, it reads almost like a Marxist astronomy, or should that be astronomical Marxism, the metaphor working at the forefront of the poem—I excerpt it in full:

Labourers and tradesmen are

The population of this star

And the solar system turns

On labouring and trading terms.

Gravitation’s mystic bonds

May be measured in foot-pounds

And fixed stars raise from ancient graves

Old light like capital reserves.

Attraction – ah! the lover’s debt –

Centrifugal curves offset

And the old dissatisfaction

Is moon-hidden by rotation.

Nebulae and Milky Way –

In between them wise men say,

In blank spaces of the sky

Lurks the fear of bankruptcy.

The juxtaposition of the cosmic and microcosmic as exemplified in the final line is highly imaginative and quite ingenious. Slater is much more into longform poems: the free verse fragmentary piece ‘In the Beginning: A Broken Narrative’ once more shows the Modernist influence—in this instance a distinctly Eliotic one:

Banged across Oxford Street to break a cordon

If taxi drew out of its rank

Swung out at the bottom of the Euston inclined plane

Where steam sizzles under the low-eaved glass

Sizzles through a Euston of Manchester smoke,

Rugby, Stafford, Wigan, Oldham, Preston, Carnforth smoke

And heard Red Front and a whistle shouting

Jim on the footplate fist up in the salute

And the Power House a double pitched bellow

Town lights twice-flickered as a Jock signal: If –

There’s definitely something of the dislocated syntax and figurative language of contemporary Marxist longform poet Joseph MacLeod here. Section II of this poem continues in this vein:

It’s no use just

swinging your

right: you’ve

got to connect.

Once was. General strike. ’26.

One stanza is reminiscent in its ‘vox pox’ approach to Clive Branson’s ‘Bombed Again’:

I ask the secretary (Bob said) how he thought it was going to

work out for the miners, & c.

But his mouth shut like a zip fastener.

The poem grows ever more discursive and almost tils into Joycean stream-of-consciousness: ‘Cut out the saint stuff, let’s get down to business –/ In the beginning was the deed’—and, in the third section:

Wood grain is tension which being released log splits. The boiler

with more accelerated molecule being red hot is splashed with cold

water and lo, a molecule opens its mouth like a ducked Hitler,

gasps with heart momentarily stopped, and a crack spreads.

A tension holding men together in this factory, over against a

field of fear, insulated by the indifferency of a larger field

procured that clear direction of electric strain that lighted the

Fifth Light…

…

Word became light in the machining shed.

…

It was understood. Sufficed that it was understood to induce

power. Split the men, said the boss. Turn direction into

indirection. Atomise. So here’s the scene.

‘Workmates, I’m not up here of free will. You’ve seen the Fifth

Light, the rag that’s sold to us at the gate by strangers. But it isn’t

written by strangers. And the proof is it shouts your private

thoughts back at you.

‘You’re a fair-minded lot. You know I’m Labour and proud of it.

This is profound stuff, it is the poetry of work, of manual work, and in that, and its rangy lines, tactile sense impressions and polemic on the punishing nature of employment, it is a clear ancestor of the poetry of Smokestack poets Fred Voss (who writes about his job as a machinist) and Martin Hayes (who writes about his thankless slog in the courier industry):

‘Yesterday I was fetched to the office and asked if I had to do

with the Fi.h Light. .ey said, “Either you get it stopped

or…we’ll be sorry to lose you.”

…

Canteen’s a rest, canteen’s a pause for working,

Colourful as a tank and as comfortable as a knifeboard,

And silent.

Has the deed become a word then,

And silence?

The final section is a compact Modernistic series of semi-rhyming quatrains with striking surrealistic images:

IV 

Come on the roof, dinner time’s 

nearly over.  Sky’s high to-day. 

Remember how the Soviet balloonists saw 

the blue go black in the stratosphere? 

The morning from the factory roof 

Is glossy as a circus mare 

And us like two weather-cocks 

Buffeted and as bare. 

Skies, violet in the early stage 

Purple by increment, 

Inaugurate the stratosphere 

Black as bedazzlement: 

Sun-bathing our defiances

Toughening skin to breed, 

Dimitrov physiognomies 

Like greyhounds are for speed. 

*** 

I cavilled: ‘If we’d spoken up…’ 

Ben’s answer was a grin, 

Twitching hid face, and a word like a rivet
Red hot, to be dropped in.

‘Where My Bones Rest’ is a more straightforward lyrical poem which seems to use the same  metrical rhythm and shorter fourth lines as John Keats’s‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’:

Slater: And ceiling-contemplative lie 

Draining away the sorry dust 

From brain and spinal fluid: so I 

And my bones rest.

Keats: And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

‘A Ballad from Korea’, subtitled ‘Based on two newspaper correspondents’ dispatches’, is almost like a Kipling pastiche albeit with very different sentiments:

They said to me, Bill Pongo,

These Chinese said to me

‘There’s your way home, Private Pongo

Go home and work for peace.’

The password is ‘Work for Peace.’

‘We have no war with working men,’

These Chinese said to me,

There’s your way home, Private Pongo

Go home and work for peace,

The password is ‘Work for Peace.’

The password Madison Square,

The password Work for Peace

If one of these is the right one

Which of them would you choose?

‘Character Equals Situation’ is a kind of Caudwellian dialectical materialist take on the nature of art, literature and culture:

Say to a playwright, ‘Find a plot.’

He picks his fancy from the index

But Romeo and Juliet

At a building estate window

Feel, feel it’s different

…

‘Colour comes home into the eyes’

And dreams invent mythology

A fabulous code made to deny

The plain man’s plain prosaic lie,

His treachery which is shame.

‘Exercise with a Broad Nib’ reads almost like a slightly more intellectual Stevie Smith poem with its philosophical meditation and witty rhyming:

Cudworth a Cambridge don

Made the discovery that man

Naturally knows good from evil

Though Eve had to be told by the devil.

…

The ear discerns sonata form

Not indecorum.

The gusto that will sauce your dinner

Makes you a sinner

Nor shall the sharpness of your nose

Rival that other sense which knows

As datum – given –

What’s what in heaven.

You have five sense? No there’s one

More to come

Which Cudworth in his innocence

Called Common Sense.

And thus the triangle is eternal:

This common knowledge, being paternal,

Is transferred to the weaker vessel

Only by intercourse with the devil.

But the nursery rhyme-styled ‘Helen Was Not Up Was She’ is even more obviously reminiscent of Stevie Smith:

Helen of Troy said to Priam

Helen of Troy (she said)

If Paris fashions were my only passion

There’d be little more to be said

But there’s sieges and wars and epics where I am

Wherever I show my head

Helen of Troy (she said)…

This Smithian naïf element, which also echoes some of the curios of Harold Monro (see ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’), is also apparent in ‘St Venus’s Eve’ with its occasional snippets of dialogue:

Says: ‘Flower of the quince

I let Lisa go and what good is life since?’

…

Says: ‘Flower of the peach

Death for us all and his own life for each.’

‘A Sentence of Judges’ has a more cryptic Modernistic tone, as in its closing stanza:

Unless in curious reversal,

And last minute bouleversement,

Essence ups and overturns

Existence heavy on the throne?

Similarly curious is the short epigrammatic poem ‘The Spirit Kills’:

Spirit kills thought: the letter is for meaning –

For thought, like a neurotic in his moaning

Desires sweet tea, and definite moorings –

Facts to get teeth into – anything boring.

The spirit kills, the letter giveth life:

Spirit kills love, putting on oath

A cumulus of perjured evidence.

The spirit kills: the letter is concupiscence.

This seems to be an atheistic or rationalist-humanist sentiment. I would take issue with the rather lame attributing of ‘moaning’ to the state of being ‘neurotic’: it seems a rather flippant and dismissive word to use in this context and one which grossly underplays the very real and sometimes crippling anguish of neurosis, and trying to fit a semi-end-rhyme isn’tsufficient justification.

‘Poems from an Ibo Sequence’ is a lengthy narrative sequence which in today’s postcolonial consciousness could be seen as ‘problematic’ in places, at the very least, in terms of the old ‘noble savage’ trope, but it is, contextually, a sincere account of an encounter with an African tribe whichSlater admires for its closeness to matriarchy and its values of equality. Nevertheless, descriptions such as the following, though evocative, might be seen as a little blunt: ‘This one was old. Her feet and breasts were leather.’ The following verse is particularly curious, intriguingly figurative, and seems to hint at the poet’s awareness as an Englishman of the colonial residues of his national mindset:

And knew that I was here in Iboland,

Here where the evil bush is sad

Because it mutters my own mind,

And Conscience, an albino, pads

Naked behind the others with his load.

That first section is simply titled ‘Iboland’. The second is titled ‘A Dark Place Under the Trees’. One particular description in this section borders on the bizarre:

A pale goat runs from the dark place,

Its flesh almost white, a hornless face –

As if a nightmare bred a giant mouse.

The third section, ‘This Is Our Love Child’, continues the unsparing descriptions:

She stretched a hand for each to hold

Displaying in the childish folds

Of her neck corals:

Her father a slim, naked youth

Jock-strapped and bearded: mother’s cloth

Was brown as her firm breasts above.

And:

While Daniel, fat interpreter

Behind me with my retinue

Lavished some pints of sweat into

His cotton vest.

But this makes for quite fascinating reading overall, and is eloquently written, even if much of the content is unpalatable, especially to modern sensibilities:

The love child waited: there we stood

In the deep Chuku-haunted wood

And money spread a solemn shade

The bride price was a wedding veil.

The love child too

Will soon be worth what she can fetch,

When puberty distends her breasts

Her legal father will collect

Her bride price too.

Section IV is titled ‘Men and Women Almost Equal’:

Men and women almost equal

In Iboland

Feel their way towards the inevitable

Indecision of the sequel.

The women are gentle, their so-called masters

Are husbandmen of the smaller harvest:

But change brings force and force brings menace.

Masculinity becomes

Acid in the ancient homes.

(Masculine is the imagination

Also in Iboland.)

Cruelty begets despair

Women’s gentleness disappears

And astonished children wail

Whipped with flexible stinging canes

In the tin-shack streets of Lagos –

New world, new ways, new dispensation.

It is the vain longing for the bush

The dark place under the trees and rest

On the millionfold black breasts

Of Iboland.

‘On a 17^th Century Painting’ is an effective ekphrastic epigram:

A daylight fire springs from a dying furze

A too obedient Abraham turns back

Eyeing his son as Phaedra shall eye hers

And the sky cringes to the thunder clap:

And then the deluge, if hysteria dare

Tempt the sky’s passion with a wanton show

Of exaltation in the womb of air.

Last, in a general promise, comes the bow.

Equally ekphrastic and is the considerably longer poem ‘Royal Academy: Special Exhibition’, which in many ways reads like a review in semi-rhyme:

Gala concert, Filarmonic, Venice (1782)

Painted at his easy best by clever Guardi (Francesco)

Sets the human problem squarely. Here the audience is sat down

Under the high-vaulted marble and the wine is passing round:

Violins, perched on a ledge, the musicians’ gallery:

Behind them stand the women singers in respectful symmetry

While the candelabras glitter, fashionable shoulders gleam—

Individuals merged in audience waiting the composer’s theme…

Many centuries are piled to make this velvet finery

Guardi’s highlights and his glazes now provide us with a key

To another kind of music. We owe a debt of gratitude

To Guardi for his architectural painting of 1782.

There are some striking images here, but those last two lines almost verge on the doggerel of McGonagall (how symbiotic that said notoriously talentless poet’s surname chimed with the term most often accorded to his poetry) and suggest that it was probably unwise for Slater to insist to himself on writing this particular poem in semi-rhyming couplets. Far better-crafted is the following verse:

Guardi’s concert, Filarmonic, Venice 1782

Takes a reading in his sextant of a different latitude.

All the finery, the ribbons, the gilt chairs are comme il faut

Certainly du monde is present but no individual soul

Not a pair of lovers, nor a torturer, nor Mars

Nor Giotto to encircle warmth with his Byzantine skies.

There is neither history nor suffering: it is all

Horeshair scraping over catgut and vibrating vocal chords

Candelabra and the velvet touched to highlights with a glaze

Clever Guardi learned the trick of in his architectural days.

I particularly like the use of French phrases (some might think a bit pretentious but in many ways typical of the self-conscious erudition of the autodidactic poet), and the line ‘Horsehair scraping over catgut and vibrating vocal chords’ is as brilliantly descriptive as it is alliterative. Unfortunately, however, the fourth and final verse, which seems formless, undrafted, unfinished, tips back into near-doggerel:

Can you smell the smell of order which has neither ears nor nose

Only odour of the odour of these bodies without pores?

Music cannot reach them therefore nor can sweat nor can the ardour

That might tempt to good or evil or the apple in the garden.

We’ve no people here but figures ranged according to a plan,

Guardi knew it, Guardi saw it, Guardi, he’s your man:

Points of light and points of darkness. Darkness, darkness which endures

From 1782 to 19… My guess is as good as yours.

It’s a relief, then, that the following poem softens the fall in a more focused ekphrastic lyric, ‘Your Touch Has Still’:

Your touch has still its ancient power,

Painter, and your full brush has made

Mythology of old desire

New. The explorer is afraid.

…

Your touch has still its ancient power

For man imagining a form in which

Eager and feminine desire

Is given lastingness in myth.

‘Past Years’ is an effective semi-rhyming envelope sonnet:

Past years brood on the plain like painted clouds

Which never can move into afternoon.

I shall not today be roused as I was once roused

By riddles and ballads sung to a folk tune.

These were my children of serenity

They told me secrets and they gave me power

But now their shadows in vain haunt me

In sunset mystery, the twilight hour.

To call a sound from past and quiet seasons –

Create a soul trembling with life at last –

In vain my crooked fingers pluck the harp.

Lost now is youth, and lost its far horizons

Mute in my throat the tunes of the rich past.

Shadows are round my feet and it is dark.

Part II. Songs and Choruses from Dramatic Works

Now to Part II of this book, titled ‘Songs andChoruses fromDramatic Works’. ‘Ballad’ is faintly Whitmanesque:

In Braddock Pennsylvania

Where the steel mills flare

The spring came in like a frightened child

In an ogre’s lair.

Jan Clepak a Bohemian

Going to work at five

Sees grass on the hills across the river

Plum blossoms all alive.

…

Wake up, the lever’s cracked

The steel is running through

Wake up! Oh, the dream is ended, the steel has got you.

Jan Clepak’s napoo.

There’s a refrain running throughout the poem but it’s rather prosaic: ‘Listen to the mournful drums of a strange funeral,/Listen to the story of a strange American funeral’. ‘Speech for a Fascist’ is, as its title signals, a particularly disturbing poem, it must have been so at the time it was written, and is unfortunately still so when read in the context of a once more rising European Far Right today—the poem is basically a monologue, the Fascist being the speaker:

You know, most of you, how the Marxists

Sprinkle desire with a dry sand,

Till women’s beauty and man’s physical courage

Are sick with self-distrust and undermined.

You know, most of you, how the Jew in business

Has turned virtue into advertisement,

Buying and selling love; and that the Freemasons

Have made kingliness into a cheap scent.

It’s an impeccably composed—semi-rhyming—poem in terms of its rhythms and cadences:

Beware of him who has no vices

There are less innocent forms of power.

We hail the dignity of laying down

Our old self-worship in our country’s hour.

‘Chorus from Easter 1916’ is composed in fairly straightforward rhyming couplets of just five or six syllables per line—I like the following two lines: ‘And swiftbereavement/ On the white pavement. Far more descriptive and scene-setting in its language, and with rangier lines in a free verse form, is ‘Chorus from Stay Down Miner’, which begins in the spirit of J.B. Priestley’s time plays:

Man Time, in the shape of a mine, time in that shape

Has the same backward progress underground,

And past explosions are now lighted roads.

Then turn away from lights and trams and whitewash

Into the critical Present where workings narrow:

Bend double at the coal-face, bend double and approach

The blank wall of the future.

Woman Pit-prop carefully behind you,

Pit-prop and scatter stonedust.

Here there are some similarities with the dramatic-documentary form of much of contemporary Marxist poet and broadcaster Joseph MacLeod’s poetic works. Time seems to be pivotal to this particular verse play of Slater’s, mostly in terms of how it dictates the daily labours and chores of the working-class protagonists:

Man We have our roundabout apart from yours,

Twenty-four hours divided into shifts.

Your marriages, your pregnancies and deliveries

By district nurses hurrying on bicycles,

Your shops, your credits, have no obvious harmony

With this dark round of ours, this onward march

Of Time along with death and fire and floo

And speed against time weighing coal we get;

This nice precision of the hewer’s path,

This separate world; this pit; this underground,

Time, caring little for the upper crust.

This extract closes on a wonderfully ambiguous and ominous image:

Man Yes. We have new men.

The new man, here, now, braving novel death,

Stands upright in the mine, and in that posture

Shakes more than pit-props.

It’s a wonder why ‘Deleted Song from Stay Down Miner’ was deleted, or rather, omitted, since it’s a deft slice of lyricism and begins and ends on the same brilliantly figurative lines—here it is in full:

These foothills which we speak of as a mountain

Are crossed by long-legged sheep and telpher span.

Mountains are formed by turmoil in earth’s crust;

The minerals bear their backs and miners must.

If any peak, however weather-worn

Feels dental-drillings, then a town is born:

Sometimes unsheltered, where the bracken grew

And sometimes pouched as by a kangaroo.

The foothills splayed like fingers on a hand

Shelter the southern ports and fatter land;

Oh! Climb still northward where the wrist joins on

To the Black Mountains and the hills of Brecon.

Oh! Climb still northward and against the wind

Into a world of mineral-bearing ground.

Mountains are formed by turmoil in the earth’s crust;

The minerals bear their backs and miners must.

‘Chorus from ‘Towards Tomorrow’ (1938)’ has its moments of resonance: ‘We whose sons and lovers were/ Charred and maimed, disfigured there’ and ‘How much blood to make a dawn;/ 

With what pangs a man is born’, and:

For the children gazing now

Into vistas of dismay

For the gardens that will gape

Into shelter pits and graves

‘A Verse for Arthur Benjamin’ (presumably the Australian composer) is reminiscent of some of the shorter lyrics in Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience:

Spilt wine of blossom fallen from

The bitter almond tree

Brings like the red of autumn leaves

Past happiness to me.

This was the past: the petals fall

The sun has filled their veins.

Let it be now! Love’s kingdom come.

O it is now he reigns,

O it is now love reigns!

Part III. Part III Libretti and Poetic Dramas

Now to the third and final part of the volume, ‘Libretti andPoetic Dramas’. ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ is a verse play in Yorkshire dialect:

There’s cheatin in life: when man’s brisk in his day

T’owd woman for spite begins to decay –

As the child falls.

Nay lad, shut up, tha’s come to no harm

Now shut thi row and I’ll tell thee a yarn.

Tha feels a bit dull when tha plays by thisel.

… Eh, thinkin’s for them as as wealth.

He sings rocking the child in his arms

Tha’s welcome here thou bonny brid

But shouldn’tha come when tha did

Times are bad

But that o’coursethadidn’t know,

So hunch up close, I’ll help thee grow

I’mthi dad.

As with much working-class idiom there’s much colour and tactile description, the language is much more physical and evocative than the abstractedness of middle-class discourse:

Stepmother And thine ’ud make pawnbroker weep –

Comes home wi no rent – all’t money spent,

Blewed it on wench next door.

…

Nay that I’ll not. I’ll see him mon

Or ye’ll egg yananither on.

Slater manages to draw out poetry from the poverty’s prosaic circumstances:

Man It’s my moral sense

Exhausted wicountin my shillings and pence.

She’s a bitch lad, and thou – too young for to know

How complicate beauties are made.

…

When green melancholy comes

Nay lad nay – stick up thi thumbs!

For tha’s got the looks, and tha’s got the guts

To win thiself owt that thi wants.

…

Boy …

Here nobbut a slave

I’ll be sacked when I qualify for a man’s wage.

And:

Fat woman I see it all in thi worried blue eye.

Tha’s like bakin powder eatinifts way

Through flour till it’sriz.

And:

Grandad In the madness of the moon

Playmates of the second noon

Meet your rival in your shoes

By the mirror introduced.

One in bed and fast asleep

While the other in the street

(The moon sweating hot as day)

Supperless is tired of play.

Man Tha’s a wise man grandad, tha’s read books,

Tha seest cause wherever tha looks.

Tell me grandad dosta know why

Men get moidered by t’moonin’t sky?

Grandad Because it’s dead lad and it stays,

Because a ghost’s a mirror face.

‘Old Spain’ is more figurative:

3^rd woman If you dare not understand

Pain as an invaded land

Let it be transfigure

To your own finger

Think of Spain as the limit of

Your private love.

The three sing.

…

And death and Cortes in the evening

Held High Mass for the slaughtered heathen.

…

Put Christ above the Aztec devil

And died contemptibly in Seville.

There’s something of W.H. Auden’s influence here, particularly his early verse plays co-authored with Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F6 (1936). There are aphorisms aplenty: ‘‘New tobacco, new wine/ New way with women’, ‘Saw all history/

Fulfilled in his gesture’, ‘A revolutionary/ Has a duty to die’, and ‘His English life/ Turned sour in his mouth’. As the verse plays goes on the language grows more figurative:

One asked him, ‘Are you persuaded

This is not perverted

Like dipsomaniacs

Flying Atlantics?’

But his slow grin

Damped the question down.

…

Man Such never come home.

The Man sings.

I, haunted by my dead

Refulgent friends

Find starting up in bed

That it was I who screamed.

Women Our life has its own dawn.

Man In my complacency

Sleep has to be a league

Between deceivers, my presence

Here is an intrigue.

Women Our life has its own dawn.

…

Women …

Glad for the sloughing of the husk

It bears the grinding of the ear

Accepts the birth pangs that begin

Rending the belly till a child is born.

Death had a festival but birth is here.

Our life accepts its dawn.

Finally, we come to Slater’s most famous piece of work, the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s operaPeter Grimes(1945). Briefly, Peter Grimes draws on one of the parts of George Crabbe’s long poem The Borough (1810)—the eponymous protagonist is a world-weary, faintly misanthropic and hermitic fisherman who is suspected by the local community of having murdered two of his young apprentices who have actually died in accidents when assisting him in his work.Slater’s libretto largely deals with Grimes’s trial. It’s difficult reviewing what is essentially a verse play or poetic drama, but narrative aside, I’ve concentrated mostly on the use of language and poetic form. 

Slater’s libretto isn’t short of aphorismic moments: ‘When a man prays he shuts his eyes/ And so can’t tell the truth from lies’. Grimes himself has many of the most memorable lines:

Peter Not till I’ve stopped people’s mouths.

…

Stand down you say. You wash your hands.

…

O let me thrust into their mouths,

The truth itself, the simple truth.

And:

Ay! only of drowning ghosts:

O, Time will not forget:

The dead are witness

And fate is Blind.

I’m reminded again of the contemporaneous verse dramas of Joseph MacLeod, particularly his nautical-themed plays, The Cove (1940), The Men of the Rocks (1942), Women of the Happy Island (1944), and Script from Norway (1953), even if his high Modernist poetic style, often obscure, even abstruse, was at several removes from Slater’s more direct and accessible style. But there are some similarities, particularly in the frequent use of choruses—here are some of them fromGrimes:

Oh hang at open doors the net cork

While squalid sea-dames at their mending work

Welcome the hour when fishing through the tide

The weary husband throws his freight aside.

O cold and wet and driven with the tide

Beat your tired arms against your tarry side.

Find rest in public bars where watery gin

Will aid the warmth that languishes within.

…

Dabbling on shore half-naked sea-boys crowd

Swim round a ship, or swing upon a shroud:

Or in a boat purloined with paddles play

And grow familiar with the watery way.

…

And if the spring tide eats the land again

Till even the cottages and cobbled walks of fishermen

Are billets for the thievish waves which take

As if in sleep, thieving for thieving’s sake

…

We sit and drink the evening through

Not deigning to devote a

Thought to the daily cud we chew

But buying drinks by rota.

We live and let live, and look

We keep our hands to ourselves.

…

Talk of the devil and there he is

A devil he is, and a devil he is.

Grimes is waiting his apprentice.

…

Now the church parade begins,

Fresh beginning for fresh sins.

Ogling with a pious gaze

There are plenty of colourful couplets: ‘Come in gentlemen, come in./ O her vats flow with poisoned gin’, ‘Shoo, you little barnacles/ Up your anchors, hoist your sails’, ‘Parsons may moralise and fools decide,/ But a good publican takes neither side’, ‘Tis lost soul of a fisherman must be/ Shunned by respectable society’, ‘If the old dear takes much more laudanum/ She’ll land herself one day in Bedlam!’, ‘This is the sort of weak politeness/ Makes a publican lose her clients’, ‘I’ll hold the gospel light before/ The cataract that blinds his eyes’, ‘See the glitter in his eyes!/ Grimes is at his exercise’, ‘Bring the branding iron and knife:/ What’s done now is done for life’,‘From the gutter, why should we/ Trouble at their ribaldries?’, ‘Then back to sea with strong majestic sweep/ It rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep’. 

The use of Suffolk colloquialisms is an authentic touch, such as ‘Methody’ for Methodist.  

Rockpools of aphorisms appear periodically like rockpools: ‘Man invented morals but tides have none’, ‘Pub conversation should depend/On this eternal moral;/ The satire never should descend/ To fisticuff or quarrel,/We live and let live, and look/ We keep our hands to ourselves’.

Slater’s libretto also manages to infuse the narrative with socio-political comment: 

Boles Is this a Christian country? Are

Workhouse children so enslaved

That their bodies sell for cash?

One character invokes a lesson from the New Testament in dissenting from the community’s mobbish attitudes towards the solitary fisherman:

Ellen Let her among you without fault

Cast the first stone

And let the Pharisees and Sadducees

Give way to none.

But whosoever feels his pride

Humbled so deep

There is no corner he can hide

Even in sleep

Will have no trouble to find out

How a poor teacher

Widowed and lonely finds delight

In shouldering care.

Slater is very skilful at versified dialogue, which is carried on the cadences and rhymes and semi-rhymes:

Balstrode Grimes, since you’re a lonely soul

Born to blocks and spars and ropes

Why not try the wider sea

With merchantman or privateer?

Peter I am native, rooted here.

Balstrode Rooted by what?

Peter By familiar fields,

Mudbanks, sand,

Ordinary streets,

The prevailing wind.

Balstrode You’d slip these moorings if you had the mind.

Peter By the shut faces

Of the Borough clans;

By the forgiveness

Of a casual glance.

The hermitic fisherman has long been invoked in local folklore as a kind of bogeymam in nursey rhymes:

When an urchin’s quarrelsome

Brawling at his childish games,

Mother stops him with the threat,

‘You’ll be sold to Peter Grimes!’

The following exchange reveals the inconvenient and rather prosaic truth behind the vicious rumours of the community which have always been used to create a single scapegoat for social failings:

Balstrode Then the coroner sits to

Hint, but not to mention crimes,

And publishes an open verdict

Whispered about this Peter Grimes.

Your boy was workhouse starved –

Maybe you’re not to blame he died.

Peter Picture what my life was like

Tied to a child –

Whose loneliness, despair

Flooded the cabin:

I launched the boat to find

Comfort in fishing.

Then the sea rose to a storm

Over the gunwales,

And the child’s silent reproach

Turned to illness.

And I watched

Among fishing nets,

Alone, alone, alone

With a childish death!

…

They listen to money

These Borough gossips

I’ll fish the sea dry

Swamp their markets,

Get money to choke

Down rumour’s throat.

When others shelter

In the bad weather

I’ll slip the painter.

Balstrode With your new prentice?

Peter We’ll sail together.

The Borough gossips

Listen to rumour

Listen to money:

One buys the other.

I shall buy rumour –

The wealthy merchant

Grimes will set up

House, home and shop

You will all see it!

Grimes has some of the more wistful and thoughtful flourishes:

As the sky turns, the world for us to change?

But if the horoscope’s

bewildering

Like a flashing turmoil

of a shoal of herring,

Who can turn skies back and begin again?

While Ellen remains the most insightful and empathic member of the otherwise hostile community:

You liked your workhouse with its grave,

Empty look. You liked to be

A lonely fellow in your misery.

When I became a teacher

I thought of school as bleak and bare –

Then found it the sort of place

I daresay like your own workhouse

Particularly towards Grimes himself:

Peter, this unforgiving work

This grey, unresting industry,

What aim, what future does it mark

What peace will your hard profits buy?

Ellen also posits: ‘O pity those who try to bring/ A shadowed life into the sun’.

Much is revealed in exchanges about the ethical conflicts and hypocrisies of the community, and society as a whole:

Rector My flock – oh what a weight is this

Pastoral authority.

Mrs Sedley And what a dangerous faith is this

That gives souls equality!

Balstrode When the Borough gossip starts

Somebody must suffer for it.

Ned And thanks to flinty human hearts

Even quacks can make a profit.

…

Chorus (crowding round Boles)

Whoever’s guilty gets the rap

The Borough keeps its standards up.

Balstrode Tub-thumping.

Boles O this prentice system

Is uncivilized, unchristian.

Balstrode Something of the sort befits

Brats conceived outside the sheets.

Ellen, Auntie O Lord, hard hearts!

and Balstrode

…

Chorus Who lets us down must take the rap

The Borough keeps its standards up.

…

No ragtail no bobtail if you please.

Boles (pushes them away)

Back to the gutter – you keep out of this.

Grimes has a rather rough-and-ready approach to his apprentices but it’s not malicious as the community suspects—Slater’s verse is continuously cadent:

Peter Lay off the blubbering. We can be

Friends when the town’s not standing by.

Not happy youngster? O the salt

Drowns ’em all, we’ll keep afloat.

You’re a landlubber this coast

Depresses with its muddy ghosts

Of withered trees and with the bleak

Ugliness in the ebb tide’s wake.

You’ll discover by and by

What this leads to is the sea.

…

Here’s your oilskin and sou’wester.

Stir your pins, we’ll get ready!

Here’s the jersey Ellen knitted,

With the anchor that she patterned.

The lines lengthen when Grimes goes into a wistful reverie on his own with his apprentice:

In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home

Warm in my heart and in a golden calm

Where there is no more fear and no more storm.

Where she would soon forget her schoolhouse ways

Forget the labour of our weary days

Wrapped round in kindness like September haze.

The learned at their books have no more store

Of wisdom than we’d close behind our door.

Compared with us the rich man would be poor.

I’ve seen in stars the life that we might share:

Fruit in the garden, children by the shore,

And whitened doorstep, and a woman’s care.

But then comes a kind of volta, a sea-change, and Grimes’ mood changes:

But thinking builds what thinking can disown.

Dead fingers stretch out to tear it down.

I hear my father and the one that drowned

Calling, there is no peace, there is no stone

In the earth’s thickness to make you a home,

That you can build with and remain alone.

…

Sometimes I see two devils in this hut.

They’re here now by the cramp under my heart –

My father and the boy I had

As prentice until you arrived.

They sit there and their faces shine like flesh.

Their mouths are open, but I close my ears.

We’re by ourselves young prentice. Shall we then

Make a pact before they come?

On finding Grimes’ empty hut a character called Swallow chastises the malicious gossipers:

Swallow The whole affair gives Borough talk its – shall

I say quietus? Here we come pell-mell,

Expecting to find out we know not what

And all we find’s a neat and empty hut.

Gentlemen, take this to your wives:

Less interference in our private lives.

There’s a probably completely inadvertent echo of the closing of the pub monologue from the ‘A Game of Chess’ section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

Burgesses Good night – it’s time for bed.

Good night. Good night. Good night, good people,

good night.

…

I’ll water my roses and leave you the wine.

…

Good night. Good night. Good night, good people,

good night.

Mrs. Sedley is someone who seems fascinated by crime:

Crime, which my study is

Sweetens my thinking.

Men who can breach the peace

And kill convention –

So many guilty ghosts

With stealthy body

Trouble my midnight thoughts…

Crime is my study.

…

Crime – that’s my study – is

By cities hoarded.

The Borough’s larcenies

Are mostly sordid.

Rarely are country minds

Lifted to murder

The noblest of the crimes

Which are my study.

The empathetic Ellen has a lovely figurative passage:

My broidered anchor on the chest.

(meditative)

Embroidery in childhood was

A luxury of idleness

A coil of silken thread that gave

Dreams of a silk and satin life.

Now my broidery affords

The clue whose meaning we avoid.

My hand remembered its old skill –

These stitches tell a curious tale.

I remember I was brooding

On the fantasies of children

And dreamt that only by wishing I

Could bring some silk into their lives.

Now my broidery affords

The clue whose meaning we avoid.

Balstrode is also one of the more empathetic characters:

We have the power. We have the power.

In the black moment

When your friend suffers

Unearthly torment

We cannot turn our backs.

When horror breaks one heart

All hearts are broken.

There’s a Chorus which strikes a moral, or rather amoral, note on the nature of social exclusion and othering:

Who holds himself apart

Lets his pride rise

Him who despises us

We despise.

Now cruelty becomes

His enterprise.

Him who despises us

We despise.

And so the story of Peter Grimes ends with the hermitic fisherman’s solitary suicide out at sea by jumping from his boat. 

The final entry in this volume is ‘Deleted ‘Mad Song’ from Peter Grimes (1945)’—here it is in full:

Home? Would you give a comet room

Beneath your eaves and call it home?

This God who made the world and said

Let there be light and darkness made

And breathed a self-degrading love

Into the dust and called it life

This is your God of love – but I

Climb to his heaven to defy.

Here is an eye that sees the plan

For the enfeeblement of man

And a will strong enough to roll

Creation back for a new man’s soul.

O I can breathe the naked dawn

And drink the sea to pull God down

Deny his laws, like fire consume

The shame that breathes in all things human.

O would you give a comet room

Between your breasts and call it home?

In its semi-rhyme, cadence and direct yet figurative language—particularly in its closing couplet—this poem very much exemplifies Slater’s Muse. 

These compendious and well-contextualised retrospective volumes are welcome additions to the Smokestack Books range in posthumous publications of underrepresented poets of the historic British Left, and take their places alongside previous volumes by Communist contemporaries Jack Lindsay and Tom Wintringham. They make an interesting pairing since the poets’ background contrast one another informatively—Slater the prolific working-class autodidact writer, and Branson, the public school-educated Spain volunteer and Second World War enlistee who was killed in his prime. Both of their oeuvres are certainly worth revisiting and I recommend them to any scholars of Thirties and Forties leftwing literature. 

Alan Morrison © 2023

Alan Morrison on

Alan Price

The Cinephile Poems

(High Window Press, 2023)

100pp

Poems from Picturedromes

I declare a liking of Alan Price’s clipped, aphorismic poetic style, having previously contributed the Foreword to his excellent The Trio Confessions (High Window Press, 2020) and published his slim collection of filmic cut-up poems, Restless Voices (Caparison, 2020). Perhaps unsurprisingly given the title The Cinephile Poems is another filmic collection but with, as is always the case with Price, a unique selling point: it comprises 39 prose poems which each distil the poet’s original impressions of a film which made a particular impact on him at first viewing (often in childhood or adolescence at his local Liverpudlian ‘flea-pit’). These exquisitely evocative compact prose poems aren’tentirely paeans to favourite films since Price’s selection is based mostly on the power of first impression and the mark it left on him at various significant moments in his life as much as it is on personal taste. Price explains his method in his compendious Introduction:

So, what does this have to do with the ‘art’ of poetry? Perhaps nothing. Maybe everything. I remember watching a TV documentary on classical music where the pianist Alfred Brendel said something to the effect that the highest compliment you could make about a work of art was to call it poetic. That this was the summit of artistic depth. Beethoven and Shakespeare certainly had it. But did jazz, popular music and the movies give you real poetry – that frisson of pleasure providing deep insight to change your life a little? 

Many of the films, in my contents list for The Cinephile Poems achieve this aim. A few films don’t have such pretensions to greatness but they are still films that I love. Yet all manage to convey an epiphany. They woke me up to perceive the world in a different light. And I wanted to convey, through the prose poem, the insight I had on my first and subsequent viewings. (The only exception being was to include one truly bad movie Mesa of Lost Women where trash triumphed over art.) 

Undertaking to write The Cinephile Poems I felt it best to drop the distinction between art-film versus entertainment-film. The more I wrote the more I wanted to illustrate their mark on my personal history. It was very hard to ration my choice of films to 39 poems as hundreds, even thousands, of films have affected me for good or ill…

A little further on he comments on the choice of poetic form:

My selections were conceived as prose poems. I didn’t want them to be seen as solely ekphrastic pieces but a hybrid of forms. Prose poem, film review, autobiography, a ‘letter’ to a director and sometimes an actor.

The poems do indeed achieve a hybridity and there are moments when some of them could quite seamlessly pass for the compact aphorismic critiques of David Thomson (whom Price cites in his Afterword), almost prose poems themselves, in his ground breaking and constantly revised Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975 et al). 

Price’s selection of films is, as one might expect, eclectic: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966),2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and EmericPressburger, 1946), The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1959), Los Olvidados(Luis Bunuel, 1954), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1958), 

The Maltese Falcon(John Huston, 1941), La Belle et la Bette (Jean Cocteau, 1946), Spione (Spies, Fritz Lang, 1928), Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969), A Canterbury Tale (Powell and Pressburger, 1944), Pick Up on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953), The Wind (1928, Victor Sjostrom), Summer Interlude (Bergman, 1951), The Gospel According to Matthew (Pasolini, 1964), The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952), UgetsuMonogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953), 

Sansho Dayu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954), The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946), The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Bunuel, 1952), The Incredible Shrinking Man(Jack Arnold, 1957), Mesa of Lost Women (Ron Ormond and Herbert Tevos, 1953), It(Clarence Badger, 1927), Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947), White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960), The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1954), Marnie (Hitchcock,1964), Vivre sa Vie (Jean Luc-Godard, 1964), Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956), It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow and 

Andrew Mollo, 1964),Pina (Wim Wenders, 2011), City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931), 

Ordet(The Word, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955), L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), 

Distant Voices, Still Lives(Terence Davies, 1988). 

It shows just how subjective taste is, as is the impact something has on one, which could be as much to do with some other significance of the moment when one is exposed to it and the subsequent association; not to say the old ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ nostalgia factor (though one which in the age of DVDs, streaming and Youtube, holds much less weight than it used to): of Price’s 39 films, only four of the 14 of them I’ve seen might make my own 39: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Matter of Life and Death, The Night of the Hunter, and It Happened Here. In his Introduction Price namechecks those directors whose films have all missed out on his selection: 

I could have gone on indefinitely writing film poems (already I see that I’ve forgotten to include the pleasures of Jean Renoir, John Ford, Roberto Rossellini or even Kenneth Anger…

I’m sure if Price continued on this track of thought he’d also possibly cite Francois Truffaut, Andrei Tarkovsky, Roman Polanski, David Lynch and many others. 

I’m an admirer of the films of Ingmar Bergman (and have previously written an extensive long poem on them, ‘Autumn Cloudberries’ in The Tall Skies, 2013) although much of my admiration is for the exquisite chiaroscuro cinematography of his cohorts Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist as it is for the deep psychological narratives and philosophical anguish of Bergman’s scripts. Personally, I regard the Bergman masterpieces to be Wild Strawberries (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963), Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Cries and Whispers (1972). I part emphatically with the critics in the case of the overblown and whimsical Fanny and Alexander (1982) which to my mind is almost a travesty of everything Bergman had built on beforehand. And I also didn’t take to Persona (1966) which I found pretentious and exasperating even though I was initially struck by its central conceit on the nature of individual identity and the disintegration of human personality (itself arguably a precursor to David Lynch’s equally exasperating, pretentious and inexplicably lauded Mulholland Drive (2001)). But Price’s compact poetic take on the latter film certainly picks up on its thought-provoking aspects—here it is in full:

Psychoanalysis in a run-down art house / sex cinema 

Aged 18 I didn’t understand what this meant, Ingmar. 

You split open my physical, mental and spiritual defences.

Alma and Elizabeth caressing each other’s luminous faces:

silenced actress and talkative nurse of vampirish moods.

The psychiatrist’s letter, a foot injured by shards of broken 

glass, self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on TV, a monologue, 

ravishment by the sea, the fights, babble of words: the merging 

of identities. Alma climaxing on nonsense speech, uttering,

“A desperate perhaps.” Then the projector broke down

in the movie (not the theatre one whirring on that day) 

and a skeleton danced for the beginning and end of cinema. 

Speechless I escaped to a freezing street. I stared at the jigsaw 

image poster. It was snowing. Catharsis perhaps.

There are some marvellous impressionistic descriptions of the film and its impression on the poet and this first prose poem sets the tone and template of this collection which I read in one sitting (always a good sign). On 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Price picks up on perhaps one of the most famous jump-cuts in cinema: ‘Your dawn of man’s/ bone thrown into the sky – cutting me right to the quick’—the bone, of course, cuts to a spacecraft. And on the incongruity of spaceships drifting to classical music: ‘I’d never imagined waltzing in space before.’ As to the lasting impact on the 19-year-old Price:

…Exhausted from

tripping I bussed home wrapped in Cinerama 70mm. 

Next day I was re-born (no relaxation for a star-child.) 

Dragged out of my deep-freeze youth to realise one day 

I might end up old, alone dying in bed: faked objects 

of Western civilisation all around me.

From Kubrick’s existential mindfuck to the metaphysical courtrooms of Michael Powell and EmericPressburger sublime A Matter of Life and Death (1946):

Pilot Peter Carter, so English a fighting poet. One moment 

in a three-strip Technicolor village, the next on a staircase 

to a monochrome beyond…

Price closes on a wonderfully epiphanic moment:

…AMOLAD determined 

my fantasy after-life. I was born premature three years later: 

taken out of my pram; nurtured in a cinema, entranced by 

black & white pearls with an option for wide screen rainbows. 

Hovering betwixt and between, knowing I’d never starve.

I confess I’ve yet to see The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and am more intrigued from Price’s elliptical take on it:

Orson’s bass-baritone voice intoning thwarted love, 

family decline and the birth of the motor car for 

the state of Indiana. …

…Agnes Morehead hysterical in 

the kitchen as George drank milk and gobbled shortcake 

to forget his social comeuppance. Mag-nificence, 

I’d repeat it to myself creating sacramental syllables.

Price’s response to Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1954) begins with an aphorismic flourish: ‘Bunuel, you were born to disregard Freud – never interpret/ our dreams only render them brutal, incomprehensible’—he later evokes Bunuel’s most notorious shock-shot: ‘And before this came an eye and an Andalusian/ razor.’ 

Price juxtaposes his hard-up parents with the eponymous Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde (1967): 

…Despite all the chatter 

in their flea-pit my parents (who were never in any money) 

stuck with the stalls: watching kids rob banks and healthily 

shoot at rednecks.

Price waxes lyrical on The Maltese Falcon (1941) with something of the staccato delivery of Dashiell Hammett’s private detective:

“You’re good, you’re very good.” Sam Spade weighed 

up Miss Wonderly (her back facing him) as she poked 

the fire, lit a cigarette and fussed: allowing time for 

a further lie. … The falcon remained a leaden fake covering 

no diamonds and precious stones. Nothing but a MacGuffin. 

Causing the fat man, the punk who shadowed and the one 

of perfumed handkerchiefs, to consider looking elsewhere,

possibly Turkey. … Bogart, touching stardom, all gritted teeth 

and intense cold eyes…

Poetic pearls aplenty on Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bete (1946): ‘Recoiling then approaching, ceremoniously taking hold/ of his paw: cupping water in her hand for a weeping Bête’, closing on an epiphany: ‘Back home from my first date I still glimpsed Belle shedding/ diamond tears for her dying father.’ 

Price views the silent espionage intrigues of Fritz Lang’s Spione(Spies,1928) from the vantage of our 21^st century surveillance state:

This oh so casual shrug of betrayal and sleaze. 

Spies getting everywhere. I exposed myself to a universe 

of evil. Inside the trap the nightmare went on forever. 

All those theorems, madness and fate. But your labyrinth 

held dark pleasure: shadows, design and abstract montage. 

Now we live in such a broken down spydom; watching 

each other more suspiciously than traitors in films in case 

romance sneaks in and disarms.

Price’s evocation of A Canterbury Tale (1944) certainly makes me want to watch it—there’s a great play on the provincial and metropolitan, esoteric and popular cultures:

An American soldier wanting to love the English and meet 

his buddy. In the blackout a Kent magistrate pours glue 

on young women’s hair. The cinema organist longs to leave 

tanks alone and play in the cathedral. The American wood

-cutter’s anxious for his special girl. And the shop assistant

weeps on opening her fiancée’s moth-ridden caravan. 

Three pilgrims and a patriarchal avatar fated to find 

coins on the old Roman road, converge their blessings. 

Out of the church comes permission to play Bach or even

Tin Pan Alley.

Price’s rather pessimistic but perennial view that life lacks the sense of wonder and magic of cinema 

Emeric and Michael’s vision congregates in our heads: a halo of technique – hiding, 

behind the sun. Transcendence can happen in the movies. 

But in life, the other side of the camera, I find it much less.

for some reason brings to my mind the despairing line of alcoholic Kirstie Clay in the devastating Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962): ‘the world looks so dirty to me when I’m not drinking’—in this context, intoxication as a metaphor for the immersion in cinema. 

Price’s highly evocative take on Pickup on South Street (1953) crackles with alliteration:

A necktie selling woman licked her pencil, informed the cops.

Fifty dollars – last instalment on a Long Island burial plot. 

“I have to go on making a living so I could die.” Plonked on 

her bed the shoes of a communist: gunning for a microfilm.

…

A pickpocket throwing a beer to a sweating detective:

dishing out bucks and hating routine. How on a summer day 

a thief unclipped the commie’s girlfriend’s bag in a subway 

train; groping behind tissues, makeup, ID, looking for money: 

scarcely registering the cops, the system, a dame’s bruised face 

and transformative love so sticky on arrival. 

Price closes on a striking aphorismic flourish: ‘I never met a Red./ Nearest I got was the SWP, gassy lager and an overdose/ of American imperialisms.’ The Danish silent The Wind (1928) sounds intriguing from Price’s haunting evocation:

“The wind makes folks go crazy – especially women.”

declares the womaniser on the train. Lillian Gish knows

all about craziness. An Indian ghost horse bucking

through the sky. “Old Norther” spirit galloping into

Lillian’s tempest mind…

Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951) inspires an aphorismic, almost stream-of-consciousness response in Price:

Touring Sweden I wasn’t disturbed by the colour

of nature draining away – for summer will always be 

Bergman’s in black and white. The ballerina wipes 

greasepaint off her face, removes false eyelashes, 

goes to the door to meet Dr. Coppelius who declares 

that life is futile. Her summer innocence has gone. 

Nothing makes sense in the Autumn. Returning 

from an island of crows and gusts where she stood 

hard by a cold handrail tackling a malign uncle that

mailed the diary of her dead lover who’d eaten wild 

strawberries.

The assonance and alliteration of ‘handrail tackling a malign uncle that mailed the diary’ particularly striking. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) inspires Price to express the furiousness of this particular messianic characterisation which sounds as if it bears similarities to that of Dennis Potter’s controversial television play Son of Man (1969):

Good Friday’s blistering gospel from a Marxist unbeliever.

“You will be hated by all, because you bear my name.”

Jesus rebukes, attacks, hectors and spits out his message;

knifing the Pharisees, bursting open the moneylenders,

stealing nets from fishermen. “Abandon family and friends”

Jesus demands that their darkness can only receive his light.

Armed with ecstasy and palms they dash towards Christ…

Note the semi-end rhymes of those last two lines. Kenji Mizoguchi’sThe Life of Oharu (1952) has palpably had a powerful impact on Price:

Oharu’s brief pleasure is not theirs; slipping down

from courtesan to concubine, shopkeeper, prostitute 

then labelled ‘goblin cat’. …

…Oharuwon’t be bought 

as she sires a son that’s pulled from her arms.

Slapped like a fish on a chopping board she flops,

despising law and order. When old they rent her 

a gaudy dress and underwear but Oharureturns

to claw and hiss. Each movement of Ohura’s hand,

touching her veil, cries out disdain, holding intact 

a huge sad grace. They’ll not abuse what’s deepened 

inside.  She fainted inside me, shaming us all 

for our looking on. I retreated from the screen.

Meanwhile, the same director’s UgetsuMonogatari (1953) elicits from the poet a domestic juxtaposition:

Once I watched my mother mend a pair of trousers 

and argue with father till each forgiving stitch was outed. 

Now Mizoguchi’s camera tracks down all evil spirits 

intent on destroying fired earthenware and any belief 

in the humility of sewing.

And on the same director’s Sansho Dayu (1954) Price begins eerily: ‘Zu-shio An-ju, Zu-shio An-ju, Zu-shio An-ju, Zu-shio An-/ Cry of an aristocratic woman spanning time and space.’ Then the intriguingly ambiguous:

A parallel fate was the savage breaking of Tamaki’s tendon, 

her blindness, chanting and collection of mute seaweed:

asking to be banished by the embrace of mother and son.

This poem closes with a nice filmic conceit: ‘I wanted to rescue this family from a life of beautiful compositions.’

Exposure to Robert Siodmak’sThe Spiral Staircase (1946) as a mere baby held by his mother as she watched the film at The Cameo cinema in Liverpool in 1950 understandably had something of a traumatic impact on the infant Price (detailed further in an additional postscript in this book):

In the hotel an eye watched at the back of a wardrobe

till a body blacked out, hands clawing at strangled air.

Babies in arms are not permitted read the bare regulation.

Held tight by mother I was bundled in to disturb the rules 

of their dark. If she’d turned for a second, made me choke

on projected light then the sound of a theremin and an old 

dark house would have recharged their menace, fixed me 

about-face in the Cameo cinema …

…his flickering, re-emerging to scrape at her throat.

Once again I love the assonances and alliterations in Price’s poems, as in his response to Bunuel’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952):

This thirsty son who went to sea was quickly shipwrecked;

hallucinating his father wasting water by scrubbing a pig. 

Bunuel sipped much Hungarian red directing his Crusoe

who drank rum and imagined harmonising with shipmates:

only to sob long and hard when they suddenly vanished.

Father drowned and his dog Rex died in the pouring rain.

When Crusoe shouted psalm 132 and heard his echo

taunt Robinson: all he’d left to master were insects to feed

unleavened bread or let them devour one another…

The details, images, descriptions are all first rate poetically speaking. The poem closes on another nice filmic conceit: ‘I returned to the book to discover/ a hoarding Crusoe who couldn’t befriend this screen/ Crusoe singing to his crops of Eastman-colour stock.’

Price enters the sublime with his take on Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), which is clearly much more than just a B movie:

When the cake crumbled in your hand you gave up 

old hunter instincts. The circle of the incredibly small 

and incredibly vast consoled. Such infinity of nature 

and God’s plan, on your side, for further shrinkage, 

driving every molecule with a greater urge to exist.

Price picks at the fairy tale roots of Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door (1947):

More than enough Freudianisms to have delighted Siggie:

keys, doors, corridors, lilacs, a stone lion spouting water,

wax cut from a candlestick, a duellist’s knife, church bells

and a secretary’s long-held pretence of a scarred face

bristle in the light and shadow of an obsessed husband

who collects and furnishes rooms, aching from murders,

committed by others, then pushes away any suggestion

that he has a Bluebeard complex to one day confront…

George Pal’s H.G. Wells adaptation of The Time Machine (1960) was a visually impressive film for its time—it’s only a shame in Price’s descriptions that he doesn’t emphasize the striking appearance of the Morlocks, all glowing red eyes, blue skin, fangs, claws and long white manes: 

In 802,701 the Eloi played in the sun, ignored old books, 

crumbling to dust, and metal rings you could spin 

to speak of conflict and disaster; the Morlocks took all 

the blonde Elois calmly underground to eat them up, 

making the cruel point that a species must always grow 

and develop…

Charles Laughton’s exceptionally photographed The Night of the Hunter (1954) is well-placed in this collection since it has to be one of the most hypnotically poetic pieces of cinema ever put to celluloid—Price captures some of its most arresting and lingering images particularly well:

The priestly husband tilted back his head, raised up an arm

to the window of the high-gabled bedroom as if to sing an aria

for the Devil, his legal employer. The message was the falling

blade: then a drowned wife, hair streaming with the seaweed, 

sat upright in her Model T. Auto…

The latter image is particularly memorable from the film (Shelley Winters seems to often encounter deep water, see also The Poseidon Adventure). Price closes the poem on some lasting imagery:

Escaping down the river watched by a frog, owl, rabbits, and us, 

through a spider’s web. Never seeming to sleep he chases you 

on horseback. A shotgun’s fired. When arrested a stepson beats

his sister’s doll against the killer’s chest bursting out the stuffed 

dollar bills so craved. Hands tattooed with Harry’s Love and Hate;

once gripped tight for a monster’s contest, now helpless, as lambs, 

handcuffed to the reverend wolf.   

There’s no mention here, though, of how Mitchum seems to squawk and flutter like a cockerel when he’s shot at, which only adds to his evident psychopathy. 

We head into French existential angst with Jean Luc-Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1964):

Faces are hidden, save for reflections out of focus: 

camera eavesdropping on the backs of two heads.

In a wintry Paris Nana talks to Paul of how to end

this thing called a relationship. Her soul is confined

in a coffee bar…

…

Karina’s stark tableaux in twelve parts –

a journey through “bad faith”, prostitution, B-picture

crooks, and a left-bank philosopher…

Price concludes: ‘At eighteen/ I embraced all things existential, adopting Karina to/ face the indifference of the world.’ Alain Resnais’ Night & Fog (1956) elicits a vivid description from Price:

In autumn light, developed as if the grain of film stock,

I walked the few kilometres from Auschwitz to Birkenau

discovering a railway track loosely handcuffed by weeds:

the end of a journey begun in your document shadowing

my footsteps; its camera tracking through deserted huts, 

latrines and crematorium. Incinerator, cold in my presence, 

burns raw inside the heart: hard to touch rust and iron

or even recoil from celluloid…

I would certainly include It Happened Here (1964) in my own selection of films—it’s a low-budget but thought-provoking cinema verité-style slice of filmmaking from the distinctive talents of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollowho also produced the gritty and historically authentic Winstanley (1975), which was also filmed in a crisp black and white. IHH depicts an alternative history in which Britain is occupied by the Nazis following the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940—this theme was continued and expanded on in the equally superlative television drama An Englishman’s Castle (1978) which depicted contemporary Britain under a collaborationist fascist government following Germany’s invasion in 1940 and victory in the Second World War. IHH is a thought-provoking drama, the main protagonist sympathetic yet pragmatic and to some extent amoral in her adaption to the situation she finds herself in (it is also notable for a rare appearance from Sebastian Shaw whose fame came late as the dying face of Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi; another cast detail is the cameo appearance of amateur actor Miles Halliwell who later played the eponymous Winstanley, his rather effete vocal delivery, however, unfortunately undermined his performance of the Digger leader). Price manages to encapsulate much of the most important aspects to this distinctive film in another compact prose poem which however is among the longest in this book:

It happened once again: moving to London in 1980,

seeing 14 Belsize Square, NW3 (Now Garden Flat 16a)

filmed in 1964, to be crushed by an imaginary 1945. 

I stood outside the long-gone doctor’s surgery, 

remembering the actor inside who’d said that fascism

could only be defeated by the use of fascist methods.

Pauline recoiled: a nurse who’d escaped a massacre 

by the partisans; trying to keep active, apolitical:

joined Immediate Action Operations and came to hate

both their salute and solutions – the staff rest-room

with racists talking of the weak and unnecessary 

and the sleepy country hospital where she was given

a needle to prick the disease of ‘worn-out’ workers

from the Eastern front…

Price cites a controversial component to IHH: a scene in which real life blackshirts are given an opportunity to vent their vile Malthusianism and Mendelist ideology. The most iconic shot in IHH is of the German soldiers goosestepping past Westminster, something which Price picks on:

In the city a cosy Englishness still occupied

the heads of citizens: shoes cleaned, buses driven,

trains departing, an army chatting up the London girls,

kids doing a cheeky goose-step, a soldier photographing

his mates outside the Albert Hall: with flaming torches

a Nazi anthem was sung by a gang, so solidly British,

for their murdered comrade: with widow and son 

now to be nursed by a comfortable Reich.

But IHH ends on a new hope of rising resistance against the Occupation—as does, interestingly, An Englishman’s Castle. 

Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) is given the Price treatment: 

“You?” says the former blind girl, now an all-seeing florist.

A tentative Chaplin nods his head. “You can see me now?”

(He’d been a swanky destitute playing at being wealthy.) 

Girl nods back – widening the gulf, freezing the moment.

She gives a rose to a tramp, which he puts in his mouth;

smiling with his longing, her waiting: silent deception 

and a live orchestra sprung for tragedy.

I’ve never got round to viewing Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet(The Word, 1955) and after Price’s pellucid description I’m certainly more inclined to:

One hundred and fourteen shots – long takes, tracks, 

pans and wipes: on average measuring ninety seconds.

A slow journey to resurrection. Everyone talks much,

not giving direct eye contact: distracted and waiting

for the word to be spoken: a conflict of love, madness 

and faith for a Jutland family at their farmhouse.

A kitchen glowing with utensils, constant drinking 

of coffee, and the opening and closing of doors by 

a priest and doctor. That holy fool, convinced he was 

Christ, now calmed down, assisted by a child, to bring 

Mother, who died in childbirth, back from the dead. 

All that spent passion, anguish and grief. All that talk 

about the truth of miracles. And then she rises up from 

her coffin; to kiss and mouth her husband’s cheek, 

hungry for him and her baby (He’s told her it now 

lives in the house of God.)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) also sounds fascinatingly metaphysical and numinous:

A rich Italian party: bodies, looks, 

gestures, an island, rocks, the sea,

a church, a piazza and a rooftop

holding on to a continual ache

in an exquisite design of loneliness.

Anna went missing on the island.

She was already about to vanish;

made invisible by her friends’ boredom.

Her body never found. No one’s ever found.

The camera as Anna’s ghost watching

others failing to see her or themselves…

Price resolves at the close to ‘let the film fall/ into my mind, validate my melancholy,/unable or unwilling to deflect this other/ time and place.’ 

Finally, we have Price’s treatment of Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988):

“We shall not gather by the river but in the beautiful pub.

We’ll have a sing-song to praise, then quickly batter down,

our bringing up. Our religion’s Catholic yet we prefer beer

and candles to wine with that brute our father in the cellar.”

Two daughters fighting against the blows of a broom. 

A son conscripted to the army; returning to light a fag, 

swear, marry and escape. Lives desiring to escape tyranny. 

If you knew Susie. Buttons and Bows. Taking a chance on love.

Voices joined with neighbours over an ale-drenched piano.

This leads to a resonant epiphany of Price’s which closes this evocative and disarming collection of prose poems on a beautiful note:

…I heard my dead brother   

crooning loud and raw. I caught myself, a young shipping 

clerk, in a Liverpool long vacated: all its celebrations eclipsed 

by time.

There also follows an Afterword, the first chapter from a memoir-cum-novel on the theme of formative cinemagoing, and three prose snippets on a trio of films which had a particular impact on Price, Persona and The Spiral Staircase again, and A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1963). 

The Cinephile Poems is a compulsive read and one can sense from each compact prose poem-cum-filmic appreciation how this hybrid poetic form and topic became something of a compulsion for Price—any poet reading this book who has an interest in cinema or even television may well find after reading this collection of finely sculpted poem-appreciations that they’re inspired to compose 39 of their own. 

My own 39 choices would be The Hill (Sidney Lumet, 1965), The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), The Bofors Gun (Jack Gold, 1968), The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Newman, 1972), Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970), Billy Budd (Peter Ustinov, 1962), Zulu (1964), Breaker Morant (1980), 

Suddenly Last Summer (1959), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Inherit the Wind (1960),

Wild Strawberries (1957), Tunes of Glory (1960), Black Narcissus (1947), Walkabout (1971),

Becket (1964), Lust for Life (1956), The Heart of the Matter (1953), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Days of Wine and Roses (1962),

Fahrenheit 451 (1966), It Happened Here (1964), The Hireling (1973), Alien (1979), The Snake Pit (1948), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Jules et Jim (1962), The Rebel (1961), Repulsion (1965)

The Tenant (1976), The Four Feathers (1939), Equus (1977), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), Rembrandt (1936), The Elephant Man (1980), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), The Gorgon (1964), Heavens Above (1963).

ButI’m already thinking about it in relation to my long-standing love of vintage Seventies television drama. And, as Oscar Wilde said, Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… Price has hit on a poetic formula ripe for replication, what one might term cinepoems. 

Alan Morrison © 2023

Alan Morrison on

Niall McDevitt

London Nation

New River Press, 2022

(Hardback) 143pp

Rimbaudian Imbas

London Nation is the final posthumous collection by Irish-born, London-based poet, poetopographer, psychogeographer, Blakean, anarchist, republican and poetry activist, Niall McDevitt, who passed away on 29 September 2022 at just 55 years of age following a long but very private battle with skin cancer. McDevitt lived long enough to hold this finely produced gold-framed hardback volume in his hands when it arrived fresh from the printers, on the day he passed away. This bespoke production, replete with front and back cover paintings by his partner Julie Goldsmith,is published by Fitzrovia’s avant-garde New River Press and serves as a fitting though far too premature valediction from one of our finest and most distinctive countercultural poets. (For a more personalised tribute to Niall please see my obituary on this site). 

It is only the fourth full volume of poetry by McDevitt, following on from the critically acclaimed b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo(International Times, 2013), and Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016), though he did also publish a pamphlet-length poem, Albion (No. 1 Free Poetry Series, Ragged Lion Press). Barely two months old at the time of my  starting this review, London Nation has already been picked as a Book of the Year by the New Statesman and The Tablet, and deservedly so. 

The book is divided into four sections: I LONDON NATION, 2 BABYLON, 3 PSYCHOHISTORY, 4 IN THE REALM OF THE ISMS, and an EPILOGUE. The structure and much of the poetic style and aesthetic is distinctly Blakean—McDevitt regarded Blake’s four-part Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-20) as the greatest poem in the English language, and it’s possible he used its structure as a template for London Nation. 

The eponymous first part of the book is preceded with a quote by Thomas De Quincey (who is also the subject of the macabre portrait on the book’s cover). The opening poem, ‘Windows’ (which I previously published in The Brown Envelope Book, 2021), sprawls across the page in long eloquent Eliotic lines which pay testament by contrasts to the vast wealth divides of the early 21^st century:

In Ulanbaatar, the poor live in ‘ger’ tents pitched

on suburban scrubland. the rich shop in the designer

centre.

…

in Madrid, the poor live with their parents, the rich

buy and sell empty properties

in London, the children of the crystal palace are homeless,

trapped in windows, partitioned by windows.

windows multiply

and the population

multiplies in windows

There’s an almost hymn-like quality. The perceived length of the lines, however, on closer inspection, as with much of this book, is in itself partly a matter of perception since the character spacing is quite marked, the words being stretched a little wider than is usual, giving the impression of lines longer than they actually are.

‘A Carnival Without Sound’ is a Rimbaudiantake on London during the pandemic, a sequence of eight stanzas each closing on the refrain: ‘a carnival without music, a carnival without sound’. There is almost a complete absence of capital letters throughout the poem except for ‘Mecca’. Itbegins: ‘it is strange to see the young so afraid of death/ walking badly dressed in emptied-out streets’.This poem appears to be in a form of sprung rhythm (pioneered by Gerard Manley Hopkins) which is to say its rhythm imitates natural speech. The third verse has a faint Eliotian quality pace The Waste Land and its seasonal opening:

fear is in the equinoctial weather, the primal war

between winter and spring is in its endgame

so that March would have discombobulated anyway. 

fear is even in the sun that registers win-win

by flaming through a status quo of negation

to glow so warmly and brilliantly and sanely

polishing the infrastructural surfaces we share.

the sun! it may be the last some of us ever feel.

So if ‘April is the cruellest month’ then March is the most ‘discombobulated’. These verses are highly assured, and almost leisurely in tone reflecting the national inertia of lockdown. In that purgatorial period, there was a “boon time’ for criminals’ who are ‘discernible/ – though everyone’s masked, gloved and hooded now –/ by their Cain-like gait and cloven hoppings’ who ‘gob on the flagstones’. McDevitt asks whether this is ‘etiquette of the demimonde? territorial markings?/they are staking a claim in the fresh dispensation’. 

In the sixth verse McDevitt depicts pandemic-hit Albion in lockdown as ‘a land with no grail. Avalon’s/ stupefied queues forage for basic provisions’, where ‘only Tesco and the undertakers/ are trading. pasta, alcohol, soap and toilet rolls/ are the commonweal of the atomised-by-law’ and most people are ‘vacant, half-afloat on shuttered parades’. At this juncture one can only imagine how a sepulchral London must have haunted the poet acutely knowing at the time that he was battling terminal cancer—this knowledge makes the poetry all the more poignant—The poem becomes more exceptional as it progresses, it has an affecting momentum and is astonishingly evocative:

7

ambulances dance via christmas-cake mansions

and brutalist blocks of two-nations architecture  

…

one house is entered, a ton of chattels piled up

on the grass outside, eerie eviction. another flat

sellotaped-off. a trio of hazmat safety suits

hovers about the foyer as noiseless as astronauts.

I excerpt the final verse 8 in full as I think it’s the most perfectly expressed and it brings the poem round full circle to its earlier seasonal meditation:

8

freezers ordered, freezers delivered, freezers stocked

in a political landscape like a pop-up morgue.

the older and wiser look down toward the ground

who knew death could come soon, but not this soon.

they too have shopping bags and thinned-out newspapers

standing under natural white blossom umbrella

grateful to insert a key into their own front doors.

they know the rhythms of spring better than anyone. 

a carnival without music, a carnival without sound

The manner in which McDevitt juxtaposes aspects to the lasting—and scarring—social architecture of austerity (‘two-nations architecture’, ‘pop-up morgue’) against the new Covid reality in the capital is exceptional. That fourth line aches with added poignancy in the knowledge of its author’s impending premature death. After the poem proper there is an ‘emptiness coda’ with some random aphorismic lines:

traffic lights turn red but there is nothing to

STOP

the steel birds of Nostradamus are nowhere to be seen in a 1555 sky

…

from the I-SOL-ATION-SHIP

cruisers disembark

in clingfilm

…

what capital is this?

latex hands swimming in the doorways

things empty out

office party balloons

skins and navels rationing the final oxygen

As snapshots of pandemic they are eerily effective. ‘De Quincey (1821)’ is one of McDevitt’s compact literary-historical poems which he always managesto make sound so contemporary and sempiternal—it’s this sense of the timelessness or ever-present-ness of history, that everything is happening simultaneously in the same spaces and nothing is ever actually past, present or future, but just perpetual, that McDevitt’s entire oeuvre excavates. This ever-present-ness—key of course to the poet’s legendary literary walks in London—is addressed in this poem’s opening:

O smoke-rings, the lunar eyes of De Quincey, an opium fog 

on Oxford Street, English orphism, the half-world, the class 

he has fallen into, the time-space. Via Trinobantium evolves 

to Tyburn Road, thence to Oxford Street

it stops. it goes on forever. it goes on forever. it stops

It’s interesting that McDevitt opts for Trinobantium as the medieval name for London rather than Trinovantumwhich would have worked more alliteratively between ‘Via’ and ‘evolves’—the names roughly translated as ‘New Troy’ (this was prior to King Lud’s rebuilding of London and its morphing through consonantal shift: Luen’Deun-Lundinium-Londinium). It seems the spectral De Quincey is adrift on the empty pavements of pandemic London, but he ‘doesn’t follow Ann ‘de haut enbas’ but picks her white flower in shadeland

…together they crawl kerbs. he doesn’t save her. he cannot

ride with her from Oxford Street to Oxford College, ever. they walk

Tyburn Road. pedestrianism — once a crime — is in. Ann’s decaying, a

Drury Lane vestal…

This is the compassionate prostitute ‘Ann of Oxford Street’ (portrait by Julie Goldsmith on the back of this book) from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). The poem becomes more figurative and image-based as it comes to its close:

…he cannot drag her up from that cough.

he’ll abandon her to the Beau-Nasties who rent her in Market Place

to write in smoke, to scry ruby mirrors, his handkerchief, her wraith.

he stops. he goes on forever.

she

falls

in

          droplets

One notes the appearance at the end of a sample of concrete or shape poetry, where the typographical arrangement on the page is meant to reinforce or even subordinate the verbal meanings of a poem, and the further into this book we getthe more varieties of word-arrangements become apparent, randomly vari-indented lines of free verse. This is signalled in the following poem, ‘Cernunnos’, subtitled ‘from the Gundestrup Cauldon’—McDevitt chooses the archaic spelling for Cauldron: his poetry is often heavily inflected with etymological curiosities—Cernunnos, or Carnonos, was an antlered Gaelic god of animals and wild things (presumably related to the English Herne the Hunter) depicted on the aforementioned ancient carved silver cauldron which was dug up from a peat bog in Gundestrup, Jutland, Denmark in 1891—as well as Druidic associations, the cauldron has also served as a shamanic symbol, and McDevitt often described himself as an ‘urban shaman’ (his poem recitals to the accompaniment of his bodhrán could be quite incantatory). I excerpt the first two verses:

1

Cernunnos

floats in shiva position

as irish as indian

  are gods

is he smoking a hookah

or fixing a band

to the nozzle of his hoover?

no,

he is friend

      to the serpent

2

Cernunnos

      here looking like hughes

      clean-shaven with thin lips

      making a tiny O

hovers in relief on the cauldron

in a company

        a

        faber menagerie

The poem becomes more opaque and cryptic, almost riddling, into the third verse:

is that some cat 

or dog or boar

who turns away from the handsomeness

to a fairy darkness?

      anyway,

      the background goat

      ogles

McDevitt was in some senses an autodidact, an aspect I associate with strongly, he was an amateur scholar of all things literary, poetic and occultic, and he attitudinally tilted irreverently at establishments and institutions—this is hinted at in the fourth verse:

4

academics quiz the silver

an earthenware pot on his head? a rose-tree?

no, they are horns

tacked off the stag

the exact stag’s antlers

he

        — antlered —

is more than man

but also isn’t he

the highclasshighfashion deity

in tunic belt and torc 

of his forest court

The anti-materialist poem ‘The Bourgeois’, subtitled ‘after Dostoevsky in London’, might have been composed by Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov—it begins with the aphorism ‘money matters are a/ baal’. I’ve often noted how McDevitt seemed drawn to b-words—‘baal’, ‘babel’, ‘Babylon’, ‘bourgeois’, and in this poem also “branson”, “bitcoin”, ‘Holbein’, ‘Burberry’. The poem contains some striking phrases—‘silk chicanery’, ‘heads centurion grey’. McDevitt takes aim at the ephemerality of capitalism in a wonderfully figurative polemic:

we will endow our scions

with what we have amassed — grey squirrels —

a fiscal nervous system

There’s a simmering subversiveness here—in the following verse there seems to be a subliminal referencing of the hyperbolic anti-capitalist slogan Eat the Rich:

looking out from portraits by Holbein

at the pret-a-manger crowds

with distaste as they inspect us

in this and other mirrors

(as if they’d like to eat us!)

In reality, of course, and not entirely figuratively, it is the rich who effectively eat the rest of us. This is where McDevitt really comes into his own: a polemical thrust communicated through an armature of seemingly semi-detached allusion and irony—an anarchic takedown of anarcho-capitalism:

moneyed, thankfully, never enough

for our bursaries of water light heat

gentrifying, as we lap, wild troughs

ogling with the eyes of forty thieves

There’s a wonderful cadence and lyrical confidence to these verses:

domiciled, not slunk to foxholes,

but fodder for the perceptive

virtuous manners vicious maths

cocooned in Burberry, bone-dry

raw material for novelists (how dull)

who infiltrate as provocateurs

suffocating us with elephant ears

as we drool on them from sleeping mouths

The anarchic, punkish quality to McDevitt’s varied Muse comes to the fore in the mordantly satirical ‘Sinkland’, a collection of fragmented monostiches (one line poems) separated by asterisks—they are like avant-garde graffiti scrawls on the paper walls of the pages, random aphorismic statements that visually echo ee cummings, always thought-provoking: ‘gris/ empty as the channels/ manufactory/ pulped by quants * the poesy is monostich/ written blocks * / newspaper ceiling/ London commas)/ the four humours/ oh grey state// * bourgeois trolley-cameras roll/ through the sold-off henges/ hoping to capture/ (hopelessness) * inspissation walls/ dirt/ thickens the spaffing * gris corpses gris suits/ line the advantageous balcons * I was cleansed too/ by the rock salts’. With use of the term ‘cleansed’ and, in an earlier poem, ‘gentrifying’, McDevitt intimates apposite juxtapositions with the social cleansing and gentrification of the early austerity years (2010-16) and the later literal cleansing of hands, faces, spaces, surfaces during the Covid pandemic—it’s almost as if Fate is always waiting in the wings to follow up the human-generated figurative with a literal equivalent, and poets like McDevitt there to spot the pattern and make the poetic link. 

Almost all these symbolist monostiches seem loaded with meanings: ‘fighting for oysters/ by industrial islands/ the fish-lipped/ politicians * // crown/ (a sainsbury bag landscape)/ orange tory * // false voices/ once omnilocated/ are ‘shut the/ fuck up/ no one does them anymore’. Note the neologism ‘omnilocated’—portmanteaus and puns are common features of McDevitt’s poetry, as are archaic terms or a conscious choice of foreign phrasing or spelling, such as ‘balcon’, Spanish for balcony.Sometimes obscure or esoteric diction and etymological curiosities crop up, what collectively might be called McDevittisms. There’s a sense of punning in the line ‘the sink states/ watery/ as annals of tears’.  

There’s also an occultic and pagan seam—presumably converging in the shamanic—to much of McDevitt’s poetry, symbolisms and thought, and this surfaces and resurfaces throughout ‘Sinkland’: ‘by rivers of missing names/ the/ blue/ druids/ officiate *// SELL THE HENGES’. Death inevitably stalks these pandemic poems—again, we have a subtle polemical pun: ‘the bags we were clad in’—presumably referring to both body bags but also the cladding which combusted to cause the horrific Grenfell fire. There’s the haunting image: ‘shadows in the window/ windows in the shadow’. What one senses is the bitingly satirical—though I’m not completely certain in what sense: ‘kingship divvied/ among a thousand rich-listers’. The anarcho-punctuation of ee cummings comes into play: ‘the realisation( // we are not good enough for rooms/ asset/ holes’. Then there’s the superlatively assonantal: ‘mandarins/ pander/ sharpening/ elbows’. ‘Sinkland’ closes on some apocalyptic images: ‘lemmings from the crownland jump */ mobility scooters queue for the sea * / dover graffiti  [ write your own monostich here ]’. So, graffiti is finally mentioned, partly vindicating my initial impression of the poem. 

It’s unclear where ‘Mother and Son (masked)’ is set: it could be in pandemic London, or it could be Iraq or Israel, both places McDevitt visited in his latter years on poetic pilgrimages—there’s mention of ‘passing a bakery’s scent of cardamom’—perhaps it doesn’t really matter where it is since in McDevitt’s realm all spaces and places are simultaneous just as all times are. Wherever it is, it’s in midsummer. The poem closes with the wistful lyric: ‘the airless air/ fills with Arabic/ spoken by men/ born long ago’. 

‘Brain fog’ is a striking lyric the title of which of course references one of the lingering symptoms of ‘Long Covid’—I excerpt it in full:

the sun drums. this is no empty synasthesia.

the sun drums as the ill fill questionnaires. 

I eavesdrop on the lit percussion

profound as a gong’s.

this is my ore. this is what I have mined

oh you conspiracists of the plague.

stop calling at my door with red leaflets.

stop telling me I don’t look dead.

It seems as if McDevitt might have had to cope with a dose of Covid while also battling his cancer. ‘Imperial Nostalgias’ comprises four fourteen-line poems (some of which appear to be in a form of sprung rhythm) divided up into two quatrains and two tercets stanzas—this would seem an intimation of the Petrarchan sonnet form but of course without the end-rhymes, so a kind of nonrhyming sonnet. In the first poem McDevitt addresses his psychical displacement in London as an historically attuned Irish (lapsed) Catholic who feels as if under atmospheric Protestant surveillance:

by the Irish Passport Office in Cromwell Road

a flood of A4 motorway fumes

drugs the pedestrian with imperial nostalgias.

I feel my race in petrol-sniffing muscles

in the Anglican sanctum it is a redress

to kneel by the luxury of a vase of lilies

exchanging street perfume for this incense,

indoors with its underfloor heating

I don’t eat the eucharist here or anywhere

and soon lift my kneecaps from the cushions

transferring weight to ass and pew

but feel a final epiphany in the south transept

with its icon of Eliot candle-hovering

as if to lean over and ask what I’m doing

Having said these are nonrhyming poems there are some semi-rhyming or at least assonantally chiming line-ends: ‘redress/incense/transept’ and ‘hovering/doing’, the latter almost working as a final couplet. The second poem is another religiously themed vignette:

my mother silhouetted in Marylebone sun

worried, half-weeping at the bronze of Holmes

‘I assumed he’d be on Baker Street!’

my belated shadow falls like Moriarty

years earlier in her car — a Ford or Fiat —

foundered in the vicinity of Golders Green.

Orthodox Jews strolled on their Shabbat

home to family feasts, she got out, sighing.

The son then relays how his mother lifted the bonnet and cooled down the overheating engine with water—the poem closes:

the holy people walked to the end of the dusk.

we were back at the beginning, then elsewhere,

shipwrecked in Jerusalem with no sea to bob in

The third verse returns to the poet’s meditation on being an Irishman adrift in London—the English capital which he seems to still feel somehow eludes or excludes him and yet he has in many senses poetically colonised it not least with his literary walks and their posthumous legacy. 

Irish males in the English capital

saunter on Georgian avenues, kings in exile.

though they feel like blue-skinned barbarians

they move big-eyed and slow as market oxen

when they’ve had enough of royal facades

the brehon law of alcohol summons them 

to a mock-Tudor inn for more than small beer.

soon they’re wading in Falstaffian barrels

…

apes of John Tenniel in a numerical realm

that never has nor will deign to notice them:

the City bulls, the Pythagorean moneymen

In terms of the prosody here, the ends of the lines are mostly near-rhymes—‘capital/ exile’, ‘barbarians/ oxen’, ‘facades/barrels’—most noticeably in the final verse—’realm/them/
moneymen’. The fourth and final lyric in this assured sequence concerns the poet’s sister:

my sister of the French name is almost French

among the plane trees of Holland Park Avenue.

flaneuse, she turns it to Paris boulevard

with the ire and trance of a protest poet

it was on this grid she saw ‘the male eclipse’

through the looking-glass of a French café,

a man like a hooded falcon, immersed 

in a chimera even more violent than hers

then the masculine pilgrimage took sail —

a riffraff transported to Australia, sparing

only this martyr with hanged man nimbus

I twirl my pen camera, spying on her

spying on him, father of raindrop children.

I paint the portrait he could have done, in fog

This enigmatic and highly figurative poem makes for a fine and ambiguous close. The French noun ‘flaneuse’ is the female equivalent of ‘flaneur’, meaning a street-sauntering observer of society, a term which McDevitt often applied to himself. McDevitt has a fondness for French diction—it is after all arguably the most poetic language—as is also apparent in the title and first verse of the following poem, ‘Fils Roi’:

the tower towers blue

worded

could sway in winds of poetry if it wanted

but instead detournes the surround

*

I lounge at the base marvelling

at the small things poets do — the low numbers they use

compared to the huge things engineers do

hauteur of their calculus

There’s much of French poetics in the shape and tone of this aphorismic lyrical sequence—shades of Rimbaud in particular—the following verse is honeycombed with o-assonance:

a charged space without a charge

reality is a dodo here (o metareality)

the colportage so stoking

so drugged with something

And the parentheses recall ee cummings:

adjacent is a door number 42

a family of magi lives there

(it’s rumoured) I saw them as I lay chewing on a yellow 

flower 

called London rocket’ … a cabal of 3 or 4.

The poetic landscaping of this poem grows more metaphysical:

the front window looks onto ‘location 23’

the back window

looks onto eden rewilded

outlaster of apocalyptic clashes

Not to say, opaquely allusive:

calligraphy geometry is all theirs

who live next door

to a ghost neighbour in a disappeared street

Arthur’s Bosom, they say

The last verse closes on a bacchic note: ‘from filsroi to the human hills/ ithyphallus enough, a people carrier’. 

The next two pieces are set out as prose poems or poetic prose, and they certainly have their poetic moments. In ‘To the Statue of Lord Cromwell’ McDevitt candidly expresses the understandable ancestral Irish Catholic resentment felt viscerally towards the historical memory of Oliver Cromwell who was—so history tells us—merciless in his campaigns against the Catholics in Ireland. The poet here feels frustrated by the fact that the statue of the Lord Protector outside Parliament is protected by a ‘blue’ ‘New Model Army’ of ‘silver-nippled custodians’ (referring to the ‘rose top’ of police helmets: a raised metal rose)—presumably this is during a Black Lives Matters protest or petition for Cromwell’s statue to be removed, since other Cromwell statues elsewhere in England had been vandalised during that statue-toppling summer of 2020. This is an unusually vituperative piece of work by McDevitt:

…Lord Cromwell keeps a lion! such a pet can’t be easy to feed when all you have is a sword and Bible unless you recite from Numbers while tossing it Roundhead foreskins and ignoring its roar of rebuke in Gaelic: MALLACHT CHROMAIL ORT!

It concludes more subtly though the historical-satirical taste is as yet unsatiated: ‘your ghost hates stone, exhumed, cut-up and scattered/ at Tyburn, the real you is barebones through and through’.The term ‘barebones’ is a reference to the Barebone’s Parliament of 4 July 1653 which was Parliament’s last attempt by the Commonwealth authorities to cement a permanent form of government before Cromwell was instated as Lord Protector—the name ‘Barebone’s’ came from the City of London’s representative in the Nominated Assembly, Fifth Monarchist preacher, Praise-God Barebone.In a similar vein is ‘On the Statue of Baroness Thatcher’ which starts alliteratively: ‘what’s a statue of Thatcher made to incarnate but stasis?’ The ‘irony lady, upgraded to bronze’ is a political anti-icon who 

stands for closure: closed shops, closed pits, closed minds with a d, closed books, closed doors for the grocery world where she came from; only trapdoors flew open. her grey aureole brainwashed voters to reject the red, setting them to play on boards of snakes and ladders, ascending one or two rungs then slithering into a fiscal abysm, exchanging mass-Marxist struggle for a mass-Murdochian cop-out. Rupert shares her pedestal (whose rhino hide would snap any chisel). when there are so few carved, curved forms of historic females it seems a shame that from her stone paps the only milk on offer is militancy and mediocrity…

As with the previous poem, after an asterisk comes a more figurative coda: ‘a decade in Pluto is more than ten years/ where her shade thunders, cool as ice ages’. 

‘A Quartet for Lysaght’, a ‘hommage á Shane MacGowan’, ‘Lysaght’ being one of MacGowan’s middle names, from one London-bound Irishman to another, comprises four short randomly indented lyrics. The first invokes Irish folklore with the terms ‘imbas’ (from imbasforosnai—gift of clairvoyance or visionary ability practised by poets of ancient Ireland—Wikipedia) and ‘Dagda’ (chief of the Tuatha dé Danann, foremost of the Irish ancestral gods—Wikipedia): ‘we had met gods/ in detritus/ of London/ we had met you, tall// paddling buttermilk manna/ from an/ imbas oven// raw Dagda/ bequiffed// in ether/ but available’. The second lyric continues the figurative, almost Symbolist tone, slightly opaque; McDevitt makes effective use of assonance giving the lines a real cadence: ‘the polis groaning again/ sounding itself// the pained birds/ Baudelairean or Eliotian// urbs underbelly/ chiming you// circles of hell/ reserved for living// cloth doused in/ petrol’. McDevitt continues the invocations of ancestral Irish deities into the third lyric: ‘Lugh pushing// the wheelchair of Cuchulainn/ up/ a never-ending London hill/ to clatter down again’ (an Irish Sisyphus?)—Lugh was a warrior-god and also associated with craft and the arts while Cúchulainn was his son who was—intriguingly—’often depicted with the shadow of his doom looming over his shoulder’ (Wikipedia). The fourth and final lyric has an ominousness: ‘through gelignited holes in your mouth/ spat/ distilled air’s/ isms and versicles/ glenside and rose moon/ poetry excarcerated/ drudgery annulled// the city droning/ to a metronome/ of ticking clocks/ and judges’ gavels. 

The wonderfully titled ‘Mauve Baudelaire’ comprises 23 nonrhyming quatrains, and is in memory of the late actor, comedian, writer, director and experimental theatre pioneer, Ken Campbell, with whom McDevitt collaborated as part of his street theatre troupe in his earlier London years. McDevitt frequently uses French terms in his poetry which emphasizes his poetic links to the French symbolists—Rimbaud, Verlaine et al—via Surrealist poet David Gascoyne and his Parisian years:

2

nothing was normal this autumn matin.

the weather was shrouding wondrous squadrons.

in the impregnated streets

below the high mansard roof

3

which one poet had already dubbed ‘The Ship of Horus’

and a rival poet the ‘arc-en-ciel’

no traffic was abrading the human ear or nose.

how could this be?

There’s an element of surrealism, or phantasmagoria, in the ensuing verses:

4

the Sunday silence was a sage-brush

of noisomeness to purify the space.

below the red-herring garret, below the blue-wine brig

which had once bled tiger stripes

5

the house we were safeguarding

stood angel-white

but if you looked close-up

paint flakes were peeling

6

like decadent feathers

off moulting albatrosses.

below the meccan door with its goddess number 8

was a cast-iron Georgian-era boot-scraper

7

which — obviously — our poets in question

had luxuriated in never using

but this ‘decroittoir’ was a talismanic aid

as we time-travelled from 2007 to 1873

8

where thankfully too, no steampunk traffic

— not a chariot, not an omnibus, not a penny-farthing —

was interfering with or molesting us.

perhaps Metatron or Astarte or Ogmios had arranged it?

9

perhaps Thespis himself? …

For the uninitiated, Metatron was the name Enoch was given after his transformation into an angel, Astarte was the Greek version of Ashtart who was a female Canaanite fertility goddess, Ogmios was the Celtic deity of eloquence, and Thespis was an Ancient Greek poet, playwright and actor whose name, of course, birthed the alternative term for actor, Thespian. McDevitt’s poetry often contains much esoteric and occult referencing—in the case of this poem, we have references to Hyle (an Aristotlean term for ‘matter’) and ‘Fludd’, Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus, a 17^th century physician who had occult interests. The notorious Alistair Crowley is referenced by surname further on, though McDevitt has a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone when he refers to ‘occult chic’. There’s almost a suggestion of conjuring up some sort of demonic force at one point—’footfall — which too often passes by —

14 

was coming our way and stopping

(or hoof-fall to judge by the positively goatish

Pans and Baphomets hopping to the zone.)

Then there’s mention of a Crowley Theatre: a ‘cast were flaneuring to and fro

sanely disguised as insanely French poets

or the people they’d made suffer

scripts in hands (like real poets)

sticky moustaches nestled on limp upper lips

18

conferring on such pronunciations

as Club des Hashischins etc.

and with the gamut of ‘Allo ‘Allo! accents

transmogrifying London into Leun’deun

This is all, presumably, purely symbolic—some sort of occult-tinged street theatre: 

19

it seemed the elemental, the ether and the empyrean

had deployed their full vanguards

when — just as the show was due

for a final drumming and trumpeting

20

the man who was the very embodiment

of the concept ‘one-off’

materialised as suddenly as

a genie from a silver spout

21

with a presence both English and exotic

goblinesque and Gurdjieffian

commanding the currency of eyes

to flow in his direction

22

magician-like he pulled

a couple of items from his zebra wheelie-bag:

two of what must have been 1001

comic mask tokens therein

23

‘is mauve okay for Baudelaire?” he inquired

before donning a starlet’s mauve wig

and a gold robe shimmering to the floor

where we stood attendant

McDevitt often wrote poems in support of individuals ‘made examples of’ in a very public way by established powers for perceived breaches of ‘national security’ or ‘the peace’ but more often than not semi-confected charges driven by covert motives. ‘Assange (2020)’ is an impassioned plea for the release of Australian editor and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and although it is a polemical poem, McDevitt manages to keep the focus as much on image and language in order to reinforce and elevate the message:

let Assange walk in the sun

let Assange inhale air

you put the pharaoh into a tomb alive.

black scarabs walk over his face alive.

law dies. the kingdom dies. the will of

the authors imposes itself with smirks.

truth’s a dog must to Belmarsh. Lady

Brach stinks of MSM. the hero is deformed

and dehumanised, made to look mad.

his health is crushed in a dark-age cell

like Boethius, like Gramsci…

Boethius was a Roman senator who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while in prison awaiting his execution for ‘treason’—when one considers the deeply worrying implications if Assange is eventually extradited to the US, this historical comparison isn’t necessarily as hyperbolic as it might at first seem.Perhaps the comparison with Gramsci is more apt: the Italian Communist intellectual and philosopher who was imprisoned under Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1926 eventually died from the ravages of physical neglect in 1937 while still in prison—but it must be hoped Assange will escape a similar fate. McDevitt puts his poetic scalpel to the injustices of ‘justice’:

…the will of

the authors smiles a sociopathic smile.

the judge deems him a narcissistic type,

clearly not a team player (like the judge).

what is this land? a shadowland without

substance. let ingrates cut Australis

from this ‘Little Ease’, this sepulchre,

for his pale and dusted visage lives on

to shame false witness with holy aura

let Assange walk in the sun

let Assange inhale air

The refrain which bookends the poem gives a prayer-like quality to it.McDevitt was never short of wit in his poetry, in ‘The Propagandist’ I find the line ‘Richard III — that well known virtue/signaller’ utterly hilarious given that king’s historical notoriety, but of course according to Ricardians (and I can imagine McDevitt regarding himself as one) the Richard ‘Crookback’ of popular legend was a product of Tudor-Shakespearean propaganda. There’s some effective use of alliteration in the following lines: ‘time for the druids/ to actually earn some of their public money/ instead of cavilling about criminal entrails’.McDevitt produces a distinctly Larkinian aphorism: ‘(the millions of disappointments we eventually die of)’—perhaps this quality in itself warrants the parentheses. This is a finely figurative poem witha focus on images and colours to convey its symbolisms:

ramhorns butt ramhorns some more anyway

in the dead sea scrolls of outer space.

I close eyes in afternoons to dream of a green finer than

any green

but ah the great smear is over

the primer the undercoat the second coat

the gloss.

we have daubed toilet walls in double entendres

we have flown by bluebottle our tour of duty

‘Twenty-Seventeen’ comprises four sections—the first, ‘albion (cont.)’, finds McDevitt in polemical mode addressing—or dressing—Irish scars from history:

a thousand years English rapine of Ireland

counts for nothing in intellectual circles today

“ah but you are white…

the English rapine of Celtic neighbours

needs excuses to continue, the strangest

being that one word

“whiteness”

After bringing in the parallel of Catalans seeking independence from Spain, the poem closes on what seems to be a Brexiteer commenting: ‘the apron’s imperium sinks or swims/ as a fruit-voice on Radio 4 insists/ “Europe doesn’t understand Anglo-Saxons”’. The second section, ‘conservatism (contd.)’, returns to familiar polemical stomping ground for the author of the ‘anti-Tory’ collection Porterloo(2012)—here McDevitt plays on the inherent contradictions of attitude under English anarcho-capitalism:

the news the numbers

voxes of the quantifying debate

are plummified and correctly measured – by rulers

but when blackout lifts and vox populi is mic’d

the cry of the pauperised is really too much to bear

then you feel in your hand the diamanté heart

of Tory England, cut and pristine, proffering zero,

but neurotic, so neurotic, prisms of rainbow guilt

filtering into the public tones and vocabulary

e.g.

“we have sold our humanity but are yet human beings.

help us! we have everything and/ or nothing.

help us! we’re cocooned in bourgeois materialism

following the neoliberal way, not the way of Christendom

as once we sought…

The third section, ‘israel (contd.)’, is drawn from first hand witness, McDevitt having visited Israel in 2014 during which he researched and composed his third poetry collection, Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). This poem is a series of socio-cultural-architectural observations, each capitalised as if imitating commands, statements, or street signs, separated by double slashes as if to visually evoke barriers or bollards, and right-justified:

THE WALL // THE FENCE // THE BARRIER // THE WALL // THE FENCE //

THE BARRIER // THE VOLTAGE // THE RADARS // THE IMAGING // THE

SENSORS //

THE OPS // THE TRANSFERS // THE WRIT // THE BULLDOZERS // THE

FLAGS //

THE TANKS /THE UZIS // THE UAVS // THE QUADS // THE SKUNK-

SPRAY//

A CLOVER MAP //OF CENTRES // OF BASES // OF PRISONS //

THE OUTPOSTS // THE CROSSINGS // THE ROADBLOCKS //

THE GRIDS // THE AIRSPACE

McDevitt’s chosen presentation on the page has a visual bluntness and brutalist quality which effectivelycommunicates much from an outsider’s witness to a contemporarily militarised Jerusalem with all its tortuous religious and historical resonances and associations. The fourth and final part is titled ‘fascism (contd.)’ and contains some resonant and painful lines: ‘they walk with torches in xtian hands/ calling from human tonsils/ rawly/ continents are under spells’. There’s a curious echo of the title in ‘fashions’, which appears further into the poem. It closes with figurative ambiguities:

the shamans of bodhranbodhranland

drum

to 2017’s

twitted ideologies

news is white

supreme

‘In the Shade of the Brutal’, dedicated to his partner Julie, is a Rimbaudian meditation on metropolitan architecture—McDevitt is enjoying language here with painterly splashes:

may syrup. light is honeyed. reality has sweeteners.

on a wooden platform

I stand in the shade of the Trellick Tower from 1972

and at the side of the Grand Union Canal from 1802.

algae in a pool have a trompe-oeil trellick superimposed

on their green film.

the building, the canal, the platform, the pool, the 1972,

the 1802, are artifice.

tiny wisps of foliage are shimmying in wind. people wade

in the liquor of spring. blue nettings and scaffolds shroud

the tower to about halfway-up. the Grade II classic is

having a clean.

soon its tyrannosaurus teeth will smile for kilometres

of London to behold. a druid of the sensory, I bask in this

grove…

McDevitt’s sense of the timeless is signposted in his remark on different dates being ‘artifice’—all is sempiternal. A ‘druid of the sensory’ is a fine and fitting self-epithet for this occultic, Celtic poet. The poem closes on an almost Buddhistic lyrical coda which borders the sublime:

I do not live here

but in the shade of the brutal.

such things are made.

I am being unmade.

‘The Empress State Building’, subtitled ‘At the foot of the baldochino – Rimbaud’ is an enigmatic poem which could be about Margaret Thatcher, or the Queen:

…oh yes she’s a tripartite giantess. one angle is called F,

one angle I, and one angle L

indeed she houses the mystical peelers

inside the belly of her chrome robot leviathan are

the agents of order who’d stop us fifing, libating,

tupping etc. the way we like to mimic our gods

the Empress is puritan. she — one of the twenty

tallest — looks into our televised living-rooms,

unamused as Victoria…

…solid as Empire on its coping-stone.

high the masons have carved and raised her. oh Empress,

your men in aprons… (whatever turns her on).

imagine the purpose — the strategics, logistics,

dynamics — in the blue shadows she breeds

but let her be, for in the storm she sees off dragons

and her turnings are equinoctial

This is where hermeneutics can become counterproductive since the verbal/aural effect of a poem is debatably as important as an understanding of its meaning or message, and at times such as this I hanker after Keats’s Negative Capability. ‘Red Bonnet’ has colouristic, Symbolist echoes, and is steeped in eschatological allusions:

this is the head of imbas, this is the crown of fire

it wears in eternity. the analogy of the sun is no more,

the black and alchemical suns are out. the problem

for classical and christian cultures is that the dead

seem governed

(in Hades-Tartarus-Gehenna-Dis)

in fact, they are free from interference…

The word ‘imbas’ is Old Irish for inspiration and derives from ‘Imbasforosnai’, which refers to the visionary/clairvoyant powers of the gifted poets of Ireland—according to McDevitt’s note at the back of the book, this Old Irish phrase roughly translates as ‘fire in the head’ (similar to the Welsh ‘awen’), which immediately reminds me of the opening lines of W.B. Yeats’ mesmeric ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’: ‘I went out to the hazel wood,/ Because a fire was in my head’. ‘Hades-Tartarus-Gehenna-Dis’ are all cultural variants of Hell or somewhere similarly infernal from the Greek, Jewish and Roman respectively. I assume the title of this poem refers to the Bonnet Rouge worn by the sans-culotte of the French Revolution—but the altercation depicted in the final stanza could well be during a modern day protest in Tory England and the cranial injury seemingly inflicted on a protestor, which immediately recalled, for me, the case of Alfie Meadows during the student riots of November-December 2010 (McDevitt paid impassioned homage to the student riots in his 2012 volume Porterloo):

the red-hot band about his forehead is slipped off.

the police truncheon brandished at the cup of bone

cradling his consciousness, by way of warning, is gone.

no ruling-class shades take a census. the dead

are decentralised. one by one they shake off limbs

of finance, of law, of nationhood, of war.

here was Orc branded POET, a red bonnet hemmed

within. he snapped off chains from maps of England

to firewalk on hot coals of poesy, spitting portals

‘Shopping Bag’ is an ecological polemic on the plastic type of the title—it opens with an Irish Republican’s wry juxtaposing of Orangemen: ‘the loyalists exit with orange trophies in hand’. The poem grows more ghoulish:

…even the gravitating sun looks like an orange

shopping-bag, ballooning onto black warehouses. feudal capitalism,

I have no choice but to go in and let his lordship chew on my debit card.

though Her Majesty doesn’t use them, the Queen’s Speech broke the

news that bags would cost 5p from October. I imagine her pulling a

Sains**** bag over her head, tying the loops tightly, yanking to knot

and how the blue of her face would look behind the orange veneer

(and how a thousand-year-old bag would spiral to disintegration…)

The soulless cash machine, ubiquitous ATM, features in the previous and following poem, ‘Arbiter’, subtitled ‘After Petronius’—this is a discursive poem in eight vari-indented verses, and while the style is fairly sparse, the substance is anything but, it is weighty and philosophical:

2

from polytheism to monotheism to atheism

a bad trip

tear

Greek hire flying over the ramparts

tomorrow we’re minus one god

The next verse is a strikingly candid meditation of a childless man:

3

not to be with a woman to clone myself

and/or the woman

not to breed is an achievement

(without a medallion)

the unborn in my balls are uncomplaining

I suspect I’m not the only Roman Catholic who can’t help seeing some sort of Satanic travesty of the Eucharist when queuing up to take cash out of an ATM, almost a secular materialist Communion to Mammon—McDevitt’s perspective is similarly metaphysical:

4

the cash-machine helps but is hardly a god

I queue

advised to be suspicious of fellow humans

they suspicious of me

the CCTV helps but is not a god either

the CCTV cannot disarm assailants

the fruits of enlightenment are helpful

but not enlightened per se the numbers

the notes do not affirm a just order

there’s no communication no community  

McDevitt is incredulous to the uncaring godlessness of capitalist society:

a homeless man

— lying in rain — tries to break the silence

the queue answers with body language

admonishing him with arses, Aquascutum-clad

Again, one admires the commanding alliteration, assonance and sibilance. McDevitt gives a devastating verdict on the culpa felix of capitalism: 

the fruits of Eden

a nappyclad Eros

flies paper planes

embossed with faces

of plutocratic queens

The final two sections are meditations on mortality and carry both Eliotian and Rimbaudian qualities:

7

death

a fashionable theme

when it seems far-off

the fashionable wear black

when not at funerals

darkness swallows

human heads as oysters

darkness swallows

the shells

8

we cannot see the air or analyse it

air is life

but air pollution monitors tell us

air is also death

now a report on Grenfell says

we inhale ashes, named and unnamed

the fire dead

swim in blood

 

‘Bull’s Pizzle’ is as robust a satirical poem as you’ll find anywhere, with all the caricaturish grotesquery of a political cartoon by Steve Bell or Martin Rowson—it’s target is the proverbial tabloid-reading, pro-Brexit, white British xenophobe, here characterised as John Bull, though curiously no use of the contemporary meme ‘Gammon’ (maybe McDevitt felt this had too many other problematic connotations, which it arguably does). It begins, no holds barred: ‘Bull withdraws./his little English pizzle is as a fools/ tickling-stick to Europa’s wine seas, olive shores’. Briefly, it touches on the tragedy of drowning refugees: ‘a thousand boats pregnant with human cargoes cross/ the unpoliced channels to be aborted’. But its visceral satire doesn’t let up:‘Bull wonders who or WTF he’ll beef-bayonet next?/Hibernia and Alba are playing hard to get’. 

‘Financiers’ is an acute critique rich with cutting c-alliterations—I excerpt it in full:

they move in formations within City of London’s

dragon bounds, young financiers printing shadows

of a modern Brutus onto the Roman walls

as fruit-machine minds fix on abstracts: flat yield.

aquascutum coats add to the Roman theme, a ‘cena’

of posh cheddar and turmeric latte in St. Olave’s.

their bubble of protection glows like a skull,

detecting dissent. a police horse-box parks close by.

in the city within the city they have special status.

they are humans lost in bullrings and bearpits.

we suspect we shall never know them, walled-off.

they have capital adventures, ethereum wallets,

entering marble pages of Shakespeare’s Folio

through the eye of the Threadneedle to exeunt.

‘A Mother’ is an enigmatic lyric which opens and closes on images of smoke:

…that I can sit with coffee

in the smokes of the streetcars

in the smokes of Greek cigarettes

not my own

and see a mother

as if through crystal

completely made of whiteness

completely made of light

shining from glass tables

as if closer than the sun…

where is this? Africa

in an egg-yolk heat?

the sophia is flowering

even as she smokes

‘Cabals’ is a series of eight gnomic lyrics that continue in a Rimbaudian vein with a distinctly occult or shamanic flavour—the subtitle is ‘The poet, a magician with insecurity – René Char’. The lines seem disconnected somehow, as if representing fragmented thoughts, a stream-of-consciousness:

…names grow. the light flowing in my limbs

thins like the moon

the royal camp and republican camps parley in each field

I was taught to walk in this polis by closing my eyes and

imagining fumes

as incense, taught to vote holding my nose

There’s a palpable sense of metropolitan ephemerality and yet also of the sempiternal aspects of the human psyche amidst it:

more and more it seems money is the coping-stone, an

abstract. but can

a number hold up a tower?

it would be better if gold were the foundation and the

tower made of gold.

it would be better if the whole city was made of diamond

it feels solid. we walk on roubles

Money is indeed ‘an abstract’, nothing more than a tangible symbol of transaction. As well as the occultic, there is also McDevitt’s psychogeographic psyche coming to the fore:

there is a real hill of dreams but its very splendour is up for

grabs. cardboard

signs go up in cover of darkness. they want it to become a

mall of dreams (we

much prefer the hill)

their magic is stronger than ours, but the hill of dreams will

live on when we

are inside it, under it

History, ancestry, dynasty—factors of which McDevitt is always acutely aware:

again and again in eternity we see the triumphalism-

before-defeat of those

who should win, the triumphalism-after-victory of those

who should lose

the cabals are mysterious. one oddity is that we often find

ourselves warring

against the great-great-great-great-grandsons and great-

great-great-great-grand-daughters of the royal bastards of

William IV

they omnilocate, bastardy thrones

The latter lines no doubt allusions to two recent prime ministers, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, descendants of illegitimate offspring of William IV and George II respectively. We get a McDevittism with ‘omnilocate’. The following verse is particularly lyrical, and gnomic, Rimbaudian again:

white roses grow by the waterhouse gates. there are free

roses — free beauty —

for anyone passing

jasmine salves, white-flowered, purple-budded

theatres are theatres-within-theatres (poems-within-

poems)

I particularly admire the Shelleyan sixth section: 

we see images of lions on the sides of disciplinary

buildings. they do not need

guard dogs. the lion is sufficient to ward us off. night is

bonged

in the great city we are thrown to lions daily

The eighth verse is brief and tongue-in-cheek, reminding us that wit is something ever-present in McDevitt’s verse: ‘but sadness is understanding./it is not getting a joke:/ 

people who live in orangeries shouldn’t throw stones’. The ninth verse hints at McDevitt’s long-time disdain for the poetry establishments:

wisdom? the dust that falls on us used to be Catholic but

now is orange. we walk in orange fallout

I saw a poetry competition on the theme of Yeats and magic

but it was ‘the magic of everyday life’ the organisers meant,

not the magic of the cabals (poetry too has cabals)

the city dragons roar into iphones

The tenth and final verse of ‘Cabals’ is a sardonic anti-salutation to monarchy, superficiality and materialism:

the dragoness has her crown, embossed on a helicopter

in a public park, former friends walk by silver trunks to

collect branchlets for wands to use against one another

Ipsissimus—  we made you so —  assist us in the radical

humility of our quest

Ipsissimus translates from the Latin as something like ‘His most Selfness’and was apparently an ultimate spiritual goal of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 

The second section of the book is titled with the biblically and historically resonant name oft-used by McDevitt, ‘BABYLON’—it includes a quote from surrealist poet and favourite of McDevitt’s, David Gascoyne: ‘London Bridge is falling down. Rome’s burnt and Babylon the Great is now but dust’. The opening poem is titled ‘Pazuzu’, the name of a Mesopotamian-Babylonian winged demon and personification of the wind who was destructive but also protective against other demons, what is termed ‘apotropaic’ (those who have seen The Exorcist will be familiar with this particular demon). McDevitt’s poem is a kind of prayer to the demon asking for protection from the nefarious ‘animal spirits’ of the City finance sector:

protect us. Pazuzu—  glaring in your wall of wings —

from number-demons who squat occluded in the air

and light about us, lunging like barracudas while we bath

or hunting in darkness as sour fingers feel for a switch.

protect us.

Given McDevitt’s occult convictions it is unlikely this piece is intended merely ironically. 

‘Babylon (a neoliberal theodicy)’ is a discursive sequence of aphorismic lyrics which in semi-calligrammatic form on the page are visually reminiscent of the work of one of McDevitt’s poet-mentors, the late Michael Horovitz. This is a typically McDevittian deconstruction of capitalism in its linguistic focus and incantatory tone—it is also a little abstruse and esoteric in that each section begins with a phrase in Sumerian, the agglutinative language of ancient Mesopotamia. 

The first section starts with ‘erset la tari’ which apparently translates as ‘land of no return’:
‘the orphans of neoliberalism: :/ children who cannot understand/ what mathematics/
mathematicians/ do to them/ cry/ privatisedly// from the Switzerland-of-no-return/ sequestered// in Babylon’. One notes another McDevittian neologism with the adverb ‘privatisedly’—a tantalising though deeply dystopian manifestation of the increasing commodification of lingua franca. Verse 2 begins with the Sumerian phrase ‘hu-bur’ which probably means ‘netherworld’—it gifts us the striking phrases ‘clay proletariat’ and ‘clay precariat’, McDevitt always having his finger on the pulse of contemporary linguistic mutations. Babylonian gods ‘Randa’ and ‘Hayeku’ are invoked. 

By Verse 3 it seems clear these are essentially incantations—this one beginning with ‘gi-pis-tam-tim’ (Sumerian again?): ‘a human ruin/ in human ruins// emaciation// eats/// you live below the landmass of failure’. The m-alliteration almost evokes a Buddhist mantra a la ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’.There’s a sense sometimes in McDevitt’s poetry of words being chosen as much for their sounds as their meanings—this is, I think, a semi-conscious propensity, something perhaps associated with a poet’s euphonic focus on language, and one which I often find in my own poetry. Another interesting visual or calligrammatic feature in this poem is some words and lines with strikethroughs—this rather quirky form of visual self-editing or self-censoring is something I’ve come across in the recent work of other poets and is a technique I’ve also started to occasionally use myself. 

Significantly there is a gap in this work as the next section is numbered 7, so it seems as if McDevitt decided to remove sections 4,5 and 6. Verse 7 continues the fragmented effects and McDevitt produces many portmanteaus: ‘[fraud mice… // unsupplicant to goddess Randa// the canaldiggers/ the dykebuilders/ callcentre workers/ checkout workers// the pauperised// of Babylon’. 

In Verse 8 McDevitt continues to experiment with visual form and assumes mock-Shakespearean idiom:

their numbers run rings

                           planet

     (odds of a crash)

disregard the divine crunchings if thou wilt

the sound rules

of thy goddess

The poem then jumps to Verse 13—9, 10, 11 and 12 having been omitted. This a vituperative verse impeaching the gratuitously propertied: ‘homes shit/ us/ out// property/ flushes/ us/ out// estate/ more ideal than real// homes dwell// in emptiness// felons/ scale gated properties/ cross thresholds/ from emptiness to emptiness// no one is domiciled/ in Babylon’. Verse 14 deals with official correspondence, bills, DWP brown envelopes et al—three open square brackets appear randomly on the page without closures: ‘everything takes// its toll  [// 

the window envelopes/ the small print/ computer-generated threats// and blackmail  [// you are sunk// in sunk cost  [// things have slowed down// (to 1929)’. Use of repetition gives Verse 15 an almost hypnotic quality:

ferals

run

at neoliberals

ferals

urod

at neoliberals

ferals

leer

at neoliberals

ferals

snarl

at neoliberals

             precariat-runs-

             at plutonomy

ferals

in runners

run at

neoliberals

run on

the banks

of Babylon

‘Babylon’ was probably composed by McDevitt during the early austerity years since much of its themes, memes and polemical targets seem to be circa 2008-13, as in Verse 16 which takes aim at the austerity tsars of the Troika:

clay employees

of gods

humble

the heads

on walls

bow low

                          to DSK

to Lagarde

humble

the heads

in windows

bow low

                          to Hollande

humble

the heads

on screens

bow low

to Le Pen——————–
to Elysée

clay temps yellow temps

humble the heads

     on scaffolds

     in baskets

bow low 

     to lions

     of Babylon

Verse 17 seems to take aim at the monarchy: ‘the crown prince is/ clothed in/ televisions// is/ clothed in/ newspapers// he waves to thousands/ who’ll never/ know him// a whitegloved/

claw’. Verse 19 repeats the phrase ‘structural adjustment’ several times down the centre of the page as a kind of refrain but also forming a kind of concrete scaffolding. Verse 20 starts with typical McDevittian satirical wordplay: ‘you have no property/ [no property rights/ you despise the proper/ [proprietors propriety’. Further in, McDevitt mocks two iconic names of neoliberal thought simply by paragogic excrescence of the names with the letter ‘u’: ‘Greenspanu is not your/ savant/ Keith Josephu is not your/ saint’. Verse 22 berates the asset strippers of capitalism: ‘the fall of plutocrats/ racing to/ the bottom/ they fall/ chased by death-dealers/ to eat the dark’. Verse 23 continues with the demonic imagery: ‘progress/ clawed back/ by Pazuzu’—and there is some wonderfully alliterativewordplay: ‘upperclass underclass/ spit/ into spit-hoods// their solidarnoscs’. The polemic sharpens up for Verse 24 as McDevitt takes aim at those among the educated classes who are complicit in neoliberal theodicy:

intellectual capital 

flow liberalization

Prof Jobsworth:

“I’m a professional Marxist!

it’s more than my job’s worth

to revolt!”

the intelligentsias sell out

sell intelligence for six figure sums

the commentariat fix rates per word

their intellects

don’t sit

at the centre of the cosmos 

(likeReaganitu

or on the peak

of Mont Pelerin

(likeThatcherita

they sit like pats

in the morphic field

counting clicks

in Babylon

Verse 26 finds McDevitt focusing on economists and thinkers who influenced neoliberal laissez faire capitalism of the mid to late 20^th century—once again he mockingly applies paragogic excrescences to names (Ayn?) Rand (author of the dystopic pro-capitalist tome Atlas Shrugged, 1957), and classical liberal-cum-conservative economists (Friedrich) Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) and(Milton) Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962):

falsifiers

made by the gods

Randa

who invented the concept ‘humanity’

Hayeku

who supplied the clay

Friedmanki

who fused clay and concept

madeth us to lie

Popperu

made us to falsify

PHDs to say why

social cleansing is a good idea

op-eds

leaders

etc.

to raise

rich towers

to lower

poor doors

to expel

clay figurines

 

from Babylon

‘Babylon’ concludes with its 27^th verse, an Eliotic coda with a hypnotic if despairing prayerlike quality:

help

oh sands of this place

we who walk the Processional Way

[from lion to lion

the more we protest

[the more we lose

we have blockaded

[the extreme centre

we have placarded

[the Square Mile

from auroch to auroch

from dragon to dragon

 

heads low voices low

unreal estate 

[oversold

the solar the temple of Murdoch

is fallen

 

into sands

of Babylon

Despairing it might seem on first appearances, but this is also an imperishable prophecy of capitalism’s inescapable decline and future disintegration—and what more brilliant term for the brutalism of the contemporary neoliberal political mainstream than ‘the extreme centre’. 

‘Marduk (neo-liberal sonnet)’ would appear to be a damning critique of Rupert Murdoch, his surname coinciding with that of the Sumerian patron god of Babylon (who was, however, regraded as benevolent and compassionate, so the comparison stops there):

…the moneycomb in

flares in your favour, barbed with policy, in the sub-edited days

you issue. your pornography and puns are crude and black as oil

but the massed ranks in your scriptorium work energetically

as wasps producing it, anxious to please their solar monarch.

alas, you’re too busy inspecting sewage of the sky’s imperium

and dipping cuneiform discs into lion droppings

— for pungency — to care about the hacksawing minions

who hoist your red letterhead onto a dawn of optic nerves.

McDevitt has encrypted his polemic but not too obscurely: ‘solar monarch’ and ‘red letterhead’ seem to clearly point to tabloid newspaperThe Sun. 

‘Poem of the Right-Wing Sufferer (Tablet II)’ is a surreal satirical monologue:

midnight, the sun is ink-blotted.

this social death, how to survive?

ill-luck happened, just not cricket. I fell from my privileged class

into a place of no landing-pads,

of black-and-white brutalism, a people with no implants, nonstop

drumming, poems to gods unheard of, some with female names.

It contains some memorable puns and wordplays: ‘I was a protestant in the realm of the incenses’, ‘I thought I was left-libertarian but — scratched —/ found out in the polling booth I was a right-wing twunt’. The poem has many lurid flourishes: ‘the privileged classes now seemed like holograms from my 23^rd/ floor,/self-aggrandised soldier ants, shouldering artisan breadcrumbs/ all the hours their God sends’—and:

…the vision was of a world upside-down : :

the populace walked on circus mirrors, like tightrope-walkers,

trying to ignore the reflections of distressing crimes high above.

children rioted for the sake of it, hating anyone over 10

and hunting in the streets, little Ashurbanipals chasing cats.

(Ashurbanpial was a Babylonian king). The final poem in this section of the book ‘Tower of Babylon’ is, in stark contrast to McDevitt’s usually completely lower case poems, written entirely in block capitals—this is a powerful threnody to Grenfell, utterly distinctive in  McDevitt’s inimitable voice:

THE TOWER OF BABYLON IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

SMOKING INTO THE AZURE OF PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE

WHERE THE UNACCOUNTABLE DEAD NO LONGER SPEAK

A THOUSAND LANGUAGES IN A THOUSAND WINDOWS.

*

THE CONFUSION WAS ONLY EVER BETWEEN TWO LANGUAGES:

THE LANGUAGE OF THE RICH / THE LANGUAGE OF THE POOR.

RICH MOUTHS, POOR EARS, THEY’RE LIKE CHALK AND CHEESE

POOR MOUTHS, RICH EARS, THEY’RE LIKE CHALK AND CHEESE

*

‘WE WILL CLAD YOUR TOWER IN SUCH A DRESS OF BEAUTY

IT WILL STAND ON THE HORIZON LIKE A CATWALK MODEL

AND LO! THE UGLY ZIGGURAT THEY BRANDED AN EYESORE

WAS NO LONGER ANATHEMA TO THE HIGH ONES OF BABYLON

*

‘THANK YOU FOR PRETTIFYING OUR OUT-OF- DATE ZIGGURAT

BUT NOW WE DON’T FEEL 100% SAFE IN OUR OWN HOMES’

AND LO! THE RICH EARS ONLY LISTENED TO RICH MOUTHS

WHILE THE POOR MOUTHS CONTINUED WITH THEIR BABBLE

*

THE FLAMES OF THE GODS BURNT OFF THE DESIGNER GOWN

AND SPOKE A LANGUAGE NO ONE THERE HAD EVER HEARD

OF HELLS ON EARTH (OF HELLS ON EARTH)             NAKED

AND WALLS OF FUME (AND WALLS OF FUME)          BARE-FORKED

*

THE HIGH ONES OF BABYLON RESPOND IN RICH LANGUAGE

BUT NOTHING BUT NOTHING BUT NOTHING IS DONE

POOR MOUTHS WILL TELL THE STOREYS FOREVER

BUT RICH EARS HAVE ALREADY SWITCHED OFF / MOVED ON

*

THE TOWER OF BABYLON                          IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

THE TOWER OF BABYLON                          IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

THE TOWER OF BABYLON                          IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

THE TOWER OF BABYLON                          IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

The image of the scorched tower as a ‘black wicker basket’ is strikingly evocative.

The third book is titled ‘Psychohistory’ and is preceded with an excerpt from the play The Massacre at Paris by Christopher Marlowe. The first poem is simply entitled ‘John Dee’ and is a homage to the eponymous occultist. This is a delightful, picturesque poem showing that McDevitt’s command of language had a sure delicacy of touch when the moment or subject required it:

John Dee your name is talismanic

magic-mirroring friends

to your occluded house for consultation

on the shores of Mortlake

Unobtrusive alliterations trickle through the lines: 

not progressing on a steed or a barque today

but by red bus

stopping off at St Mary’s to divine your bones

feet shuffling from chancel

to a Christian plaque

remembering you as cleric

— oh man named after the holy delta — 

as stained glass honeycombs

empty pews

There’s again the symbolic, colouristic Rimbaudian-Eliotian aspects:

in the green-brown Thames

there are red shrouds

a dust of ochre

Elizabethan wigs

Echoes of the esoteric and occultic convey obscurities but these are not ecliptic:

soon the bench he picnicked on is swallowed

then the tow-path

as the river climbs to its apex

at four o’clock

in Beltane sun

hexing like a Chinese dragon

then magically, impossibly,

stopping and about-turning

to flow east again

Lundrumguffa, called, isn’t there

-oh man named after the holy delta –

but only an atmosphere

of DDD

a tree-trunk touching my forehead

whispering of seed-sown grounds

a library of ciphers

The wonderfully evocative name ‘Lundrumguffa’ was that of an evil entity which apparently haunted Dee’s house. 

Next is a sequence entitled ‘Psychohistorical Sonnets’—each titled after a Plantagenet king, speaker of the fourteen-lined monologue. In our Tudor-saturated times it is perversely refreshing to read poems about the frequently fascinating and underrepresented Plantagenet line (though curiously McDevitt omits the first four of the Plantagenets—Henry II, Richard I, John and Henry III). 

‘Edward I’ tackles Edward ‘Longshanks’ (so-called due to his contemporaneously unusual height, thought to be around 6 ft 1), a ruthless expander of the kingdom, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, among other brutal epithets, with evocative figurative language:

I have thrown a blood shadow on your island

to encrust on the map like black puddings

a thousand scabs

congealing wax enseaming chronicles

I cut native clay into chunks of victual

a hot, wet, bloody geography

the stone keeps

and arrowslits of my legacy defend

England nods as my Frankish engines

creak through night’s gore to expulsions

parcels wrapped in law

from ploughed south to harrowed north

the shade of my shanks is a tree of death

to meet giantkillers

with royal ordnance

The archaic-sounding term ‘enseaming’ apparently meant covering something in grease. The diction here is very tangible and gustatory: ‘blood shadow’, ‘encrust’, ‘black puddings’, ‘scabs’, congealing’ and ‘enseaming’. The phrase ‘parcels wrapped in law’ is also striking. We might call this, then, the first example of a McDevittian sonnet whose chief characteristics are: irregular free verse with no end-rhymes and a split second line in the final couplet. The doomed ‘Edward II’ was usurped and dethroned,and then, so legend has it, murdered by having a red-hot poker inserted into his rectum (it is thought as a symbolic punishment for his alleged homosexuality)—which is figuratively alluded to by McDevitt:

crownless, the foliage on my chin’s

a heraldry fending off no barons

the fop of yore

ill-equipped, Franglais unheeded by all

son of the hammer lain on Scots’ anvil

l am Europe’s fool in the sports news

aide-de-camp quartered

as Londoners bawl for the princeling.

unpurpled, no wardrobes of regalia

unseated by what I most fear – a female –

the worm of manhood

eats its corpse exhales its last

cruiser

crusader I chase the glow of irons

welding inside me

this satanic spine

The struck-through word ‘cruiser’ might refer to Edward’s reputation for laziness. ‘Edward III’ is a beautifully descriptive poem:

we now contend with God’s darkness

this thunder of murrain

I close my eyes I espy the Black Sea

a dust falling off the skulls of magnates

black bulbs illume the paling forms

as the eyes of the commonality

close like candles

and black ears block Latin prayers.

we elite, we gartered are no Arthurians

hating the icon of bondage’s skeleton

no ring-givers

chivalry clouded in miasma

I am half dead my subjects half dead

and remember:

they fund me not I them

The unobtrusive b-alliterations are brilliantly judged: ‘Black Sea’, ‘black bulbs’, ‘black ears’, ‘bondage’s’. ‘Black’ has many symbolic meanings in the context of Edward III’s fifty year reign: it alludes to both the Black Death whose pestilence decimated the European population during his reign, and Edward the ‘Black Prince’, eldest son of Edward III, who died before succeeding him, the throne instead, and fatefully, inherited by his ten year old son Richard, speaker of the following poem, ‘Richard II’:

view from my casque the faces of simples

my head on a silver halfpenny

milking fists

levying scutage for music

he half-groat’s silver platter

my fleur-de-lys crown my effeminate locks

illegal tender

a loosening link in heredity’s chain.

the pauperised the meek

are not encased in God’s aura (like me)

but my writs falter

I cannot gild their living conditions

I’ve hung villeins on municipal gibbets

who’d crave of me 

one word

one touch

This is another exquisitely written poem which makes use of some evocative period terms such as ‘casque’ (something resembling a helmet) and ‘scutage’ (a kind of vassal-tax)—the c-alliterations and sibilance work effectively throughout. Like his great-grandfather Edward II, Richard II would also be usurped and murdered (or at least, left to waste away in a dungeon)—to be a ‘II’ seemed distinctly unlucky in Plantagenet times. Richard’s usurper was his cousin Henry Bollingbroke who speaks the ensuing monologue, ‘Henry IV’:

alas! the body of monarchy holds

as the body of the monarch implodes

usurper with muscle

so begins my anointment by pustules

this England is a scriptural desert

into which I walk forty days too long

leper king

not of Jerusalem but stiff-necked London.

the anglophone of the coronation

loses lips, nose loses its bridges

a prolapsed rectum

turns my throne inside-out spits innards

the holy oil in the eagle casket

perfumes the merde

my swimming bones

This is another evocative piece tangible with sense-impression and sumptuous diction of period-apposite, alliterative words: ‘muscle’, ‘pustules’, ‘scriptural’, ‘leper king’, ‘prolapsed rectum’, ‘spits’. ‘Henry VI’ conveys the creeping psychosis of the scholar-king whose reign was unwittingly flung into the dynastic catastrophe of the Wars of the Roses—McDevitt has clearly done his research here, mentioning ‘Charles the Mad’ which refers to Charles VI of France, a relation of Henry VI, whomsome time earlier also suffered from psychosis (the horrendous delusion that his body was made of glass and could shatter at any moment)—so it is supposed Henry inherited these traits from his French relation:

a child in the room fathoms adults

heir to the brainpan of Charles the Mad

a great slump

begins in the core of my egghead

the royal ear stinks of influencers

as English ponds of carp excreta

I agree with all-comers

to be true king in something.

a great slump a bullion famine

hums in the stomachs of roses

contention’s edict

manna falls upward out of reach

at 50, blessing the medieval city

a foetus with ax

I’m unbearable

Next up is Henry VI’s usurper and defeater of the House of Lancaster, ‘Edward IV’ of the House of York, by contrast, a physically and mentally fit and robust figure:

a Longshanks, I’m long as lances

vaults of rib rugged as castles

a domineer of eyes

to console for the misshape Henry.

Ego and maw ballooning

the table eclipses the war field

I vomit for Rome

ejaculate for royal frogspawn

slashing and slashing, a deathsman non- entity

filling the vacuum 

with penile will

And finally, the much-maligned Richard ‘Crookback’ , last of the York and Plantagenet lines, routed and slain only two years into his reign at Bosworth by the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII—‘Richard III’ continues the high calibre of the previous sonnets:

the coverture over this insane imp

is blown off. The groundlings know

my manners are null

grains of sugar iced with gall

the ungulate humps on my back

brim over with pus and jaundice

ill milks

mothering the spheres liming the orbits

an impure calculus guides me home

less addition than subtraction

I’ll cancel you

dining on swan crane heron and pigeons

the state fetishises

my cacodemon DNA

on live television 

oddly, Protestants pray

Once again there’s some sumptuous use of period diction and alliteration: ‘coverture’, ‘imp’, ‘sugar iced’, ‘ungulate’, ‘pus and jaundice’, ‘ill milks’, ‘spheres’, ‘impure calculus’, ‘cancel’, ‘crane’, ‘cacodemon’. The phrase ‘I’ll cancel you’ gives a contemporary polemical edge to the topic of the poem, since this is effectively what later Tudor and Shakespearean propaganda achieved through historical records and even subtly altered portraits of Richard. So concludes a wonderful cycle of beautifully crafted sonnets. 

McDevitt had a background in acting in street theatre for the likes of Ken Campbell, and this thespian aspect comes to the fore in a series of miniature dramas or micro-plays beginning with the grisly ‘The Heads on Poles (a masque)’. This short ‘masque’ has six characters: four anonymous of the title, Francis Bacon (presumably the Elizabethan, not the late 20^th century bohemian painter?), and William Blake. Whilst I’m unable to decipher precisely the point being made by this piece I can at least suppose it has some contemporary bearing, and admire the period-handiwork:

1^ST HEAD:

why hanging? Why drawing? Why quartering?

What for?

The national self-interest?

The holocaust of the poor?

No

it was for Christ, well

the schism of England

my entrails

eviscerated like a fish

in front of thousands

my privy

parts enflamed

[…]

WILIAM BLAKE: Bacon supposes that the Dragon Beast

& Harlot are worthy of a Place in the New Jerusalem

Excellent Traveller Go on & be damnd

CHORUS OF HEADS

black sheep warped in our natures

imagining we could outmanoeuvre

the black shepherds yonder without the pen

witness the petrification in iced eyes

as dragged and swung as pressed and cleaved

ghosts were deciphered from our bones

rocks smashed backs

ropes singed necks

blades cut bladders

maw and colon

(it was much better

than it is on television)

our message is

TRUNCATED

‘To the Spymaster General’ is an acrostic to the titular figure, Sir Francis Walsingham: the first letter of each line spells out vertically the name ‘Sir F Walsingham’—McDevitt leaves out his full name opting for the initial; it’s significant that here, in order to highlight the encoded name, McDevitt uses capital letters in bold to start each line. This is a deft period-piece, meticulously phrased:

Saviour, it’s encrypted in your face, the gematria

Invisible — in which you cocooned her body,

Ruffs veiling virgin neck from the wrong espials.

Friendless as the dot in the centre of a circle…

Warped by what you saw in Paris — Latin knives —

And petrified to engagement, you turn archangel

Loving and hating the charge of God’s annals

Sifting in your wings. a black skullcap catches

Ideas flying out of your mind like ireful wasps.

No man knows you, but that leather o-thing — your purse —

Goads many to serenade, and your spideress ears

Have heard men’s mouths disgorge the babble of ages

As gold sequels clink in time. the ‘V’ of hair

Marks you luciferic, Moor, a cipher for Vauxhall

According to Wikipedia ‘gematria’ is ‘the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher’. McDevitt immerses his diction in the period with words such as ‘Ruffs’, ‘espials’, ‘skullcap’, ‘ireful’, ‘disgorge’, ‘luciferic’. There are some striking images here, some wonderful assonance and sibilance as in the fourth line, and alliterations—‘Warped’, ‘Paris’, ‘petrified’ etc. The line ‘disgorge the babble of ages’ is tangibly alliterative and assonantal.I wish McDevitt had composed more such acrostics as he demonstrates a true talent for the form. 

‘The Body of the Queen (a masque)’ is a depiction of the‘Coroner’s inquest into the death of Xtofer Marlowe, MrsBull’s house, Deptford Strand, June 1, 1593’. The dramatis personae of this miniature encounter comprise ‘Verge’, manifestation of the ‘Saturn-ring/ about the body of the queen/ moving as she moves’, a kind of protective aura or bubble around Elizabeth I, her sphere of influence, a ‘Coroner’, ‘Body’, Marlowe’s speaking corpse, and ‘Poley’, ‘Skeres’ and ‘Frizer’ who were spies/government informers/“professional deceivers” hired to murder Marlowe.  

POLEY/SKERES/FRIZER:

we English agents

must not presume to

must not presume to

our work is CLASSIFIED

we are deeply schadenfreuded

by loss of our brave colleague

missing his flamboyance

and taffety attires

in our secret world

he was the worst-kept secret

biting the hand that fed him

like a Montaigne cannibal

(They point at the wound in his forehead)

this hole in the universe

this window into the soul

we invite you the jurors

to look into

and look through

(THE BODY on the table shifts position and begins to speak)

BODY:

I worked hard for that extra eye. I out-stared the age.

POLEY/SKERES/FRIZER:

his mouth is unstopped!

BODY (looking at POLEY/SKERES/FRIZER):

ah Lucifer! ah Mephistopheles! ah Beelzebub!

I thank you as emissaries from the realm below

for your moving speeches and loving mementos.

as surely as I’m lying here, you are lying there!

but you are handsome devils, as all devils are

for we pass through fire, air, water, earth to be

what we are, elemental, inspired, daemonic,

dancing on the mountain-tops, clacking goat-hooves.

I had no choice, stabbed by the devil’s syllogism

at school, studying divinity to find out I’m reprobate.

heaven went the way of the Spanish Armada. I sank

with it. Faustian, I had supernatural helpmeets.

I became a woman, then a harlot, then a mother

who was born to die in childbed, a child of state.

McDevitt is again inventive with his language, ‘schadenfreuded’ is a curio of Germanic verbification; ‘taffety attires’, as well being brilliantly alliterative, has a double reference to taffeta, the thin silk fabric used for making clothing, and taffety, an old world for a thin crisp pastry filed with apple; and ‘helpmeet’ is an archaic term for a ‘helpful companion or partner’. 

This brings us to perhaps one of McDevitt’s most accomplished poems, ‘A ‘Hymn’ To Marlowe’, which first appeared in The London Magazine (a Marlowe-themed issue which included Julie Goldsmith’s phantasmagorical portrait of Marlowe on its cover):

Marlowe empurpled, the state and stations of death

archive his cloven mind as it conjugates

the Latin of reality into past/present only.

the future is the faces of the triumvirate

†

an English agent is not an English patient

crossing blood-brain-barrier into night’s syllogism

in time for Faustian bells to relay

news to the newscasters of the hourly schism

†

the living stand smaller than the supine cadaver

(they who never brandish truth as a scourge)

Baconians to a man, quantifying the blade’s value.

the river is the helm of Her Majesty’s verge

†

navigating its blue are about the Isle of Dogs.

Marlowe embalmed in the place of the skulls

is consumed by the earth of the holy boneyard.

o chalice misused, misunderstood by God’s gulls

It’s also notable here that McDevitt uses a rhyme scheme for the second and fourth lines of each stanza to good effect. 

‘Masque of the Heads’ is a sequence of grisly (internal) monologues from three heads on spikes, two on London Bridge and one at the Tower of London. Once again the language is evocative and period-charged—the 1^st Head describes itself with ‘eyes and lips stock-still as a Billingsgate fish’ whose ‘phantom limbs ‘below my locked jaw dance pavans and voltas/ as entertainingly as the Earl of Leicester./it is raining applause’. A deft use of internal rhyme. 2^nd Head depicts itself in sumptuous period-idiom with much attention to alliterative effect and sense impression, particularly gustatory:

…bloody prop

but throng to espy the ghostly chrism

in my par-boiled and tarred aura, ogling

as I deliquesce in Elizabethan weather,

a dinner-host to sycophants, the murders

of crows, though saving a just desserts smile…

Chrism is a consecrated oil used in Latin masses. The alliteration, assonance and sibilance here are highly effective: ‘ghostly chrism’, ‘par-boiled and tarred aura’, ‘deliquesce’, ‘just desserts’. 3^rd Head self-describes in similarly tangible, gory fashion:

posture clenched, philosophy Baconian,

my idea of eternity portcullised.

exalted above the mortal? or toffee-apple?

England drags itself on Thames’s hurdle

by the irritable bowels! lord chancellor,

your law screws my head onto a stick, because

it does not think as I do, in numbers or rhymes.

The toffee apple image is particularly disturbing, and again continues the gustatory imagery. The 4^th Head brings these gruesome monologues to a triumphant close—the language heightens still more for maximum effect:

fourfold man, cut to the chine, quarters touring

suburbia, coming to a gibbet near you.

here at Traitor’s Gate my head feels no burden

but a tickle at the bottom of the throat.

pendant eyes fix not on William the Bastard vistas

but on the indelible image of the last thing seen:

the afforcing blade’s triangle of silver,

vatic, pointing out everything I’ve done wrong.

caesarean death, now I understand power

as I understand the inner life of a hog

hung for the blood to slow and stop. nothing

pleasures me on the rod. unconsciousness

at the climax of the ceremony — pain’s apex —

[William the Bastard refers to William the Conqueror, illegitimate son of Robert I,Duke of Normandy].I love McDevitt’s use of archaic diction throughout: ‘gibbet’, ‘afforcing’, ‘vatic’. The assonances are particularly striking: ‘Bastard vistas’, ‘afforcing blade’s triangle’, ‘pain’s apex’, ‘blood’, ‘slow’, ‘stop’, ‘nothing’, ‘rod’. 

Last of the miniature dramas in this third section of the book is ‘The Masque of Puritans’ set in 1595, St Helens Church Bishopsgate—a dialogue between Shakespeare and Lord Mayor John Spencer. It depicts Shakespeare as a recusant, a secret Roman Catholic (during a period of persecution), as some historians suspect he was:

SHAKESPEARE:

it is the law

that I kneel here

I do not ask for this salvation

or forgiveness

of sin

anymore than of fever

inner ears, remembrancers of Latin,

enshrine English now

the Bishops Bible

blows like keys

in Genesis, I hear ‘The Lord’ and ‘God’,

in Psalms

The Tetragrammaton and ‘Elohim’

(who’s who? Parker? Grindal?)

it is the law

I pray at Helen’s

but this English is sweet as sherris

to one who swims in sound

The marvellous term Tetragrammatonis the vowelless Hebrew theonym YHWH which represents Yahweh (and  is not meant to be uttered), while Elohim is another Hebrew name for God. Grindal alludes to Edmund Grindal bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury. The term ‘sherris’ is an archaic spelling of sherry. Spencer is incredulous as to Shakespeare’s recusancy:

I spy your pretence 

of Protestantism

you’d rather be at the

Boar

your ‘works’

ha!

emptier of the Christ

than a doxy’s will

you’d rather be in woman’s garb than man’s

curved like Eve 

mouth red with serenading

you rue your duty to attend God’s house

when in fact

you should be debarred

McDevitt demonstrably had a true talent for period turn of phrase—the assonance really carries those lines. The odd word ‘doxy’ is an archaic term for a mistress or prostitute (I’d initially mistaken it for an abbreviation of doxology). Shakespeare, too, is incredulous as to Spencer’s hypocrisy:

a Midas atop his gold middens

clothworker 

for the square-pegs

his chain’s

the chain of Dispater

his city

stands portcullis to my art

(to SPENCER)

your Lordship’s as much a player

on the stage of London as I

SPENCER:

this metaphor of yours

‘the stage’

you think London you think England

a polygon

an inn

this is your idiocy!

a loon’s ball!

the unseriousness of it

galls

debasing lawyers law itself

to rooting hogs 

like some Comus

as you are low

I lower myself

to pluck the weed of your ‘humanism’

and call for the final suppressing

The word ‘middens’ meant dungheaps; Comus was Greek god of festivity, son and cup-bearer of Dionysus. 

SHAKESPEARE (mumbles then aside):

I am dumbfounded by this doleap here

such levels

of vituperation

I am not used to

who more usually must fend off

the over-enamoured.

my wings fall by my side.

I am

engrossed

I am not sure what ‘doleap’ means. There then follows some exposition: 

(1595. One of the demonstrations by City apprentices and others involved taking down the public pillories, a symbol of municipal justice… and setting up a gallows outside the Lord Mayor SPENCER’S house. Thousands waited. He did not appear.)

SPENCER (hiding in Crosby Hall):

what black art’s this?

doorstepped by Shakespeare’s mob 

a gallows

hangs on my skyline

and the foul calls are for

my legs to be paddling

the air

my mayoralty!

their laughter is like death.

oh lord send fleas from furs

high fevers deleriums

convulsions

a white sheet to enwrap them

a toxin ringing out for life

and a voice crying Tue! Tue!

There’s truly something of mediumship at work here in the verisimilitude of McDevitt’s uncanny period ventriloquism. The chamber piece closes with the return of the Plague to London in 1603:

CHORUS OF PURITANS:

this silence of yours is purple, is godly,

the hush that has fallen on playhouses

as the people fall in the streets, scythed

we saw them in your audiences, the poor,

the hungry, the homeless and mad, flashing

like the fetches of the about to be dead

they would have stolen our life from us,

our god, but their hands were thin as sticks

and slowed by cold, Abraham men at loose

congregating at the interludes, looking for

and finding something like wit’s manna

falling from the proscenium onto, into them

we refused the sound. the masterless swam

in it and drowned. our sound runs dry again

[Abraham-men were beggars in Tudor and Stewart times who allegedly pretended to be escaped lunatics to curry sympathy]. This is a ringing lyrical close to a beautifully composed sequence.

The fourth and final book of London Nation is ‘In the Realm of the Isms’—this section is more in the polemical seam of McDevitt’s Porterloo (2013). McDevitt often described himself as an anarchist, he was certainly to the left, an ‘anti-Tory’, , but belonged to no political party as far as I was aware—it seemed increasingly clear to me following his poetics through the years that he was essentially an immaterialist, that he came to believe that human salvation would most likely come through spiritual rather than material revolution. With ‘isms I’ he sets out his stall strikingly:

the isms stored in their vials like biological weapons

await release, above metropolises, below masts, to fly

from gut to gut. they have colour codes and symbols.

nihilism white, socialism red, zionism blue, anarchism

black etc. each chasing its own philosopher’s stone.

the isms are fountains jetting from the lips of public

intellectuals, sullied springs, mixed with human spit

and bile, envenoming the very foodbanks for thought

they draw on. isms awake masses to gold-plated dawns

of their choice, isms with flags, isms with slogans

…

globalism displaces and replaces as if by algorithm.

conservatism culls foxes, mithraism culls bulls,

isms never

stop working

In ‘isms 2’ McDevitt dismantles the materialistic, spiritual philistinism of Thatcherism—but this polemic is wrapped in beautifully figurative language and images:

isms are as orbs. the grey moon in the ether

is like an Englishwoman, glass-visible, moving the grey seas

with a magnet will: thatcherism seeking her guerdon ever

while blairism, blue-suited and male, orbits in her wake.

children at amusement arcades, they play the coin-pushers

monetarism, militarism. Newton-defying, the sterling

is stacked, teetering over the abyss, image of trickledown,

but the bonanza never falls from machine to human hands.

thatcherism: a grey ghoul, sometimes manifesting

in forms of statues, much-unloved, vandal-prone, fenced-off.

whenever she waxes the mare returns, glowing sinister.

the grey seas charge again and the people go under…

[‘Geurdon’ is an archaic word meaning a reward or recompense]. We again have symbolic colours: Thatcher associated with grey and Blair with blue. The brilliantly imaginative trope ‘like an Englishwoman, glass-visible, moving the grey seas/ with a magnet will’ is indicative of the ever more Rimbaudian trajectory of McDevitt’s Muse. ‘ism 3’ is, again, figurative and brilliantly descriptive:

in marxism, the victorian economy strips, empress

without clothing, gargantuan hausfrau, wart-arsed,

a millennium of boors squatting under her hunkers

consuming pints of hobgoblin, pouches of old holborn.

its three-volume bible is more guidebook to etiquette

than revolution, all-alienating, the toad-in-the-holeariat

croaking of things to come, male vocal sacs ballooning

to outdo the other in imitation of their Meister.

reservoirs of ire replenish the fire-buckets-and-axes

they parade with daily, curmudgeonly homocides

in progress, plotting how to divvy the queenly assets

then spilling from wasps’ nests into jam jar palaces

drilled to gouge,

coup and recoup

There’s some wonderful assonances throughout: ‘victorian economy’, ‘gargantuan hausfrau’, ‘hobgoblin, pouches of old holborn’, ‘toad-in-the-holeariat’, ‘cargo cults covets’, ‘curmudgeonly homocides’, ‘jam jar palaces’, ‘gouge, coup and recoup’. Last but not least is ‘ism 4’ and its target,‘orangeism’, presumably Protestantism:

orangeism: an ‘ism’ imperilled as some fauna

though from its cloth a people is unhusked.

history’s filleted, then boned for what remains

to go into tins. orange dawns spiral westward

*

freemasons and housewives shake off soiled aprons

as red hands turn pages of trusted MSM organs

to find headlines, stats, verdicts not going their way

even through shaded lens, propaganda’s cyclops.

the rock of monarchism and roll of republicanism

play out their discords, drum a cubist ‘one nation’.

palaces transition to co-ops. …… staycationers outstay welcomes

as the partitioned sea

closes in on Egyptians

‘A Tale of Two Johnsons (ism 5)’ implausibly dovetails Boris Johnson with the lesser known Lionel Pigot Johnson, London decadent poet of Irish descent who, so legend has it, died after falling from a barstool at The Green Dragon on Fleet Street:

as I studied the blond hollowman a kia. Boris Johnson

in hopes of finding a poster boy for latter-day nihilism

I chanced upon quatrains by a dead different Johnson:

poet Lionel Pigot and his fin de siecle lyric, ‘Nihilism’

*

equating Nietzsche’s blond beast with the incumbent of 10

and witnessing, as we did, his exercise of will to power

while the UK played Leda to a plump, plum-voiced swan;

it seemed we’d found a modern man who believes in nada.

but comparing the speeches of this PM to the cadences

of the poet, I think again. that rasp! that raspberry-blowing,

world-beating guff is not the tone of one who eyes the void

but the cant of an archbishop trading God for position,

the mind of Lionel touched heavens even as his body fell

backwards from a barstool at the vanished Green Dragon,

head hitting Fleet Street

(aura shattering to ash)

Lionel Johnson was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, a group of poets also including John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Francis Thompson, Selwyn Image, Arthur Symons, W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde, among others, who met regularly in the ‘Domino Room’ of Café Royale and, more famously, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Fittingly, the book launch of London Nation was held at the latter still-existent tavern.

Finally, we come to the ‘Epilogue’, a single poem presented with double-spaced lines, which has to be one of the most open-hearted and moving expressions of an Irishman’s self-deprecating sense of identity in contemporary literary London. It is simply titled ‘English’, and is preceded with a short quote by Blake, ‘English, the rough basement’:

English is an apparatus

attached to the mouth and skull

my diction is bubbles

no one on land can decode

I cannot use very well,

murmuring and mispronouncing

root units of sound

from Latin, German, French

like a noveau amphibian

in an oral marsh

*

the clamp of my jaw

somehow doesn’t champ or chew

the syllables with enough bite.

behold my skull in the Thames

trying not to sink

as the tide gulps its sockets.

my diction is bubbles

no one land can decode

*

I use this apparatus,

its foreign face

not unlike a masquerade,

failing to convince or pronounce

with the force of — say — a judge.

spitting puns, gibbering quips:

it’s like I’m disabled

or my language amputated

*

my poems are English subtitles

But McDevitt’s poems are far from simply subtitles—they are writ large and lastingly. I hope he felt in his final days that he had, in spite of his doubts and circuitous path, established himself and his significant poetic legacy in the vast and daunting old imperial capital which so fascinated him. For swiftly following the shock announcement of his passing, tributes and obituaries poured out from metropolitan literary and journalistic quarters—The London Magazine, The Times, and a commemorative event at the British Library—such are the tributes bestowed on poets of reputation. If McDevitt felt his ‘language amputated’ then posterity will show that such insecurities wereas phantom limbs. The timelessness of McDevitt’s oeuvre, too, its contradictory qualities, its uncanny patina of historied zeitgeist, guarantees posterity.  

McDevitt knew, as the most astute and intuitive poets know, that time is essentially a human invention, that all times, and places, happen simultaneously, and that the same happens in language at its most acute: a medium where the old and new, the past, the present, and anticipations of the future, coalesce into the poetic. This was not only a Blakean notion, it was also an Eliotian and Joycean one: what else were those two clothbound colossi of 1922, The Waste Land and Ulysses, but poetic archaeologies grown from the aggregate loam of human knowledge, from the classics, from religious texts, steeped in etymological and linguistic curiosities—and yet, at the same time, avant-garde productions of high modernism. Eliot’s poetry sought to make something new out of the old, and largely succeeded. Blake’s work, steeped in biblical imageries and pagan mythologies, was simultaneously anciently wise and chiliastic and yet, in its progressive visionary gusto, prophetic and future-seeing. 

McDevitt’s oeuvre has sought to mine similar seams of ancient, historical, classical, religious, esoteric and occult wisdoms in its attempts to grapple with the contradictions of the contemporary anarcho-capitalist society in which its authorfound himself misplaced, as are most poets (because poetry  has no purchase in capitalism), and for some periods, unemployed (even though, of course, poetry is an occupation, if impecunious, a symbolic occupation then—capitalism only stamps something asan occupation if it pays, but money is, ironically,  little more than a symbol itself). 

McDevitt, ingeniously, forged his own form of self-employment through his psychogeographical (or poetograhical) Literary Walks and tours throughout London. In a figurative sense, his works are their own literary walks on the page through all times and all places happening all at once. 

London Nation is a fittingly multifarious and idiomatic valediction of an oeuvre which is a living thing in its own right, even if its author’s life has been cut unexpectedly shortat its prime and, many feel, when McDevitt was on the cusp of greater recognition. It’s a strange but perennial paradox that that greater recognition has arguably now arrived, prompted and accelerated by his shock passing. McDevitt’s spirit will live on in hisexceptional poetry, and his memory remain undimmed in the minds of the many, many, people his poetic presenceand passion inspired. He leaves behind him a whole community of poets, writers, musicians and artists who will ensure his legacy is secured for posterity. 

Alan Morrison © 2023

Alan Morrison on

John McKeown

Ill Nature

Mica Press, 2022

64pp

Yellow Snow

Ill Nature is a beautifully produced slim collection of 55 short lyrical poems by veteran Liverpool-born poet John McKeown who is based in Ireland where he works as a newspaper columnist and feature writer. His first full volume, Sea of Leaves (Waterloo, 2009), was a very fine debut, and it was followed by a further volume, Night Walk (Salmon Poetry, 2011). So, it would appear that this third volume is McKeown’s first in eleven years—though in the interim period he has had poems published in numerous prestigious poetry journals. 

The55 finely sculpted lyrical poems in this volume have a lucidity, imageries and sharp phrasal sculptingwhich reminds me in some ways of Wallace Stevens andWilliam Carlos Williams. 

In the first poem, ‘Coming Down’, we get the striking image, ‘the knife-edge of the iced roof’, and the almost anti-Housman phrase ‘all the jaundiced fire of youth’. The Hardyesque ‘Night Wind’ is a wistful lament on time and mortality, ‘the hollow voices/ Of parental ghosts, buffeting the house’, while ‘the wind/ Is the noise of deeds’, and the eternal sleep we all must meet in the end ‘In beds of earth, in the shifting sky’. Mortality but also something possibly sempiternal pervades ‘Airbrushed’: 

the lengthening light of the afternoon,

my own years lengthening;

stretches of shadow increasingly

uninterrupted by anything.

Similarly in ‘On the Road’, which is almost two haikus:

Walking round the Sun,

bathed in radiance,

the straight road turning.

Walking round the Sun,

the ageless sun, ageing.

walking into dust, borne up

in a blaze of bright magnificence. 

‘Empty Vessels’ is three subtly half-rhyming tercets:

The slim wood-pigeon swooping back and forth

Above my head, building her nest

In the fresh leafed maple tree.

There are other nests along the street

Growing dim among the thickening leaves

Like hearts placed in fibrous chests.

Invisibly doing the real, silent work,

While people make their fraying ends meet,

Empty vessels blown beneath.

The sardonically titled ‘The Great British Sunday’ is a strange mixture of striking images—‘Cloud-strafed light’—unusual verbification—’perspectived’—and incongruously commonplace phrases—‘Beating about the bush’, ‘The wind gets up’. Here it is in full:

Cloud-strafed light, and wind

Beating about the bush;

a perspectived tangle of bare branches.

Cars of course, the minions

of a monotonous, parcelled-out fate, 

the soundtrack of complacency.

The wind gets up, tries

to reach in to the strings of thought,

finds nothing more substantial than itself;

blows on, rifling things for miles.

I appreciate the middle anti-car micro-polemic—the ‘of course’ after ‘Cars’ is a wonderfully understated emphasis on their ubiquity. ‘Miser’ is an apt rhyme for our times:

Time, tight as a fist,

not a cat

unfurled in the sun.

Languid days are done, 

the nails bite.

Nine lives into less than one.

‘Beautiful Night’ has a wistful, wintry, slightly haunted quality to it—there’s a sense of absence:

A beautiful night outside

Unruffled trees silently shedding their leaves 

A dying fire facing inwards.

The dark sky raised clear

The air still, things distinct; the world collected 

Its gaze elsewhere.

Lights are sharp in the chill

Clear cut windows have nothing to hide 

There’s a certain perspective

Though I’m not included in it.

But somewhere a pressure has eased

A space left vacant.

The phrase ‘A dying fire facing inwards’ hints at another meaning, as if, figuratively, the ‘fire’ could also be a mind. There are aspects that recall Harold Monro’s phantasmagorical Georgianism—what one might term phantasmageorgianism. My only quandary is with the absence of full stops or commas at the ends of some of the lines which makes it ambiguous—possibly deliberately so—as to whether the line breaks are meant to signal the close of the line or whether are meant as semi-enjambments.

‘Continental Drift’ is a lyric on mortality and the even more terrifying possibility of no posterity, of even memory dying:

The low clouds’ lugubrious drift: 

Cold bellies chilling the spring

A damper on everything.

Plans, hopes, stretched out thin 

Contingent, ridiculous.

Everything slowly disappearing. 

These houses rubble, the city dust, 

The very continent not even a memory.

The near-rhyme of ‘thin’ and ‘disappearing’ is a nice touch. In some ways this brings to mind an even shorter—surely one of the shortest at just ten syllables—lyrics by Alun Lewis:

Must

All this aching

Go to making

Dust?

In a similarly Lewisian mode, the dream-like ‘Commission’ rings despairingly and hauntingly:

Sculpt a keel

out of twilight deck 

and rigging and sails

all of blueing cloud.

So I can board it now 

as it turns, darkening 

into night and never

suffer day again.

‘Monomania’ borders on the sublime in its description of a beating heart:

The heart beats, beats,

Like something incredible,

A feat that can’t be done

But is, repeatedly.

Hearing it is seeing the whole

Of Atlas, one compact

Tautened mass, in throbbing support 

Of nothing but himself.

I’m sure many of us have often meditated on the rather frightening fact that our lives and consciousness are completely dependent on the continued pumping of a muscle in our chest—a cardio-anxiety. ‘Near the Sea’ meditates on a shoreline horizon:

Certain silver clouds

strung in distant tumultuous titanic lustre 

along the landward horizon.

A limitless backbone washed up

on invisible tides of sky.

Backbone of what immaterial leviathan

denizen of what immaterial sea?

(I wonder whether a question mark should have come after ‘leviathan’ and ‘denizen’ thus be capitalised). The beguiling short lyric ‘Moonflower’ describes a ‘celestial flower’ ‘blooming … radiantly’. The five-line ‘Buttercups’ uses a rhyme to lend itself cadence:

Weighed down, I pass and repass; 

while the buttercups, strewn across 

the railed-off lawn, float

on stems so fine they’re invisible 

against the green of the grass.

In ‘‘Fine bird song…’’ we get some striking tropes: ‘The pale green fir an explosion of thrusting stillness’—and the following visionary lines:

The bird’s voice now like a worm.

A note slithering fragile, querulous,

through the wreckage of a collapsed world.

Pure little remnant, precursor, survivor.

Bright nail waiting for the right wood.

There’s elements of Imagism in McKeown’s poetry, that last trope reminds me of William Carlos Williams. There are also elements of Symbolism, and García Lorca comes to mind. Indeed, in ‘Grim’, one wonders if the colours are meant symbolically:

While the birds are out of hand, 

Singing like there’s no tomorrow

In the greening thinning wood.

And now a blackbird, visible, close 

Through the screen of bare branches. 

His breast plump, beak a yellow crocus.

Certainly the colours stand out in this poem: ‘green’, ‘black’, ‘yellow’. As a side note, another commonplace phrase, ‘like there’s no tomorrow’, detracts slightly from the concentrated imageries of the other lines—but at this point I begin to wonder if this use of everyday turns of phrase is in some sense intentional. Colour again comes to the fore with ‘Yellow Snow’ (a lovely title):

Yellow snow where a dog has pissed

Around a human footprint.

A day of frozen, dirty snow, everything foregrounded, 

In nauseous detail.

After briefly touching on the aching mundanity of driving, working and shopping, McKeown defiantly turns back to nature, which constantly fascinates him and draws his longings towards it like a vortex:

Me, I want to break out,

With the bare, black twisted branches thrown

up against the window,

Go wherever the sky has gone.

The length of that penultimate line works especially well in evoking the urge to break through the glass of human entombment. ‘Enough’ is another striking miniature:

Enough

The loftiness

of the stars’

intimate silence

is enough.

I look down

at the moths

around the streetlamp, 

busily unthreading the web

of every question.

‘Twilight’ is another haunting meditation, Monroesque:

Where the streets end, the sun

wrestled down in a darkening

blue confusion of cloud,

people – automata – unnoticing.

Here and there, on houses’ upper reaches 

the faintest touches of gold

ghostly as breath on a mirror

in an empty room.

‘Me & My Younger Self’ finds the poet haunted by his younger self and the poem is a kind of reflective relay race of time’s different selves:

I climb the stairs wearily 

he climbs within, wearily.

I slump in a chair,

he slumps too.

I wish I could smoke,

he lights his tenth cigarette. 

I weigh out a drink,

he fills up the glass.

I sit and stare at the window, 

he puts on Ravel.

I wonder what life is,

he’s racked with sobs

by the music.

What is life but emotion 

intensely lived?

I formulate the lesson,

he has no need to learn it.

(In his photo on the back of the book McKeown has an unlit cigarette in his mouth—just when I wondered if there were any poet smokers left other than myself). ‘Naivety’ is a little blaze of witty self-examination which recalls Roman aphorisms of the likes of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius:

I never thought I’d live forever,

but I did think time would be

commodious enough for my dilatoriness.

How naive I was. It’s my dilatoriness

which is endlessly commodious;

as if I were designed, not for time, but eternity.

If one believes in the soul then they will sense that we might well be built for eternity—poets, at the very least. ‘Real Life’ brings a whole new perspective to the GravesianWhite Goddess Muse of the male poet:

I almost pity it;

naked, radical, a bag of bones, 

knock-kneed, pregnant; 

its waters breaking in the snow.

‘Self-Sacrifice’ is an imagistic meditation on the consolations of drinking:

Drinking, I escape

the pressure of reality, 

but remain

rooted to the spot.

The spot a cafe table 

where red wine stands;

a rootless plant

I drain myself to replenish.

‘Relic’ is a musing on time and contains some startling imagery:

My new wrist watch has no tick, 

and no numbers, only slivers.

All very apt, as we neither hear

or see time pass. It’s just fingers,

attenuated as the silvered fragments 

of the bones of a saint

under a smooth perfection of glass.

Which can neither rub my life 

back into shape, or erase

one tiny period of all the waste

I unfalteringly accumulate.

There’s a Roman Catholic aura to this poem, and in some associated sense the use of Latinate words such as ‘attenuated’, ‘fragments’ and ‘accumulate’ seem linguistically fitting. ‘Tête-à-Tête’ is a curiosity but again has a Roman aphorismic quality to it:

I remember the octopus

in the undersized glass case 

in the aquarium in Madrid, 

so close to the sea.

The octopus: a roving animal 

full of curiosity,

with a large brain.

Apparent to me, at least,

as I stood, close to the glass, transfixed,

in a more diffuse predicament.

The Roman Catholic aspect detected a little earlier comes to the fore in ‘Past’:

Every moment past

free from this exists 

detached in bliss.

In pain I caress each 

rounded impenetrability, 

like a rosary, disordered

broken on the thread of time.

In ‘At the Hairdresser’ McKeown cannot help but still see the macabre, this time, in his own awkward reflection while sat in the chair with the ‘black sheet’ up to his neck, he thinks he resembles a ‘penumbral peacock,/ reduced to a life-size puppet/ stuck in a chair, its strings cut’. ‘Guillotine’ is a faintly disturbing five-lined oddity:

The star’s glide across the window 

Cuts my throat where I sit.

It moves quick; it takes years; 

Egged on by the surrounding stars, 

And a little of everything that exists.

In ‘Proof’ the poet expresses a sense of apostasy sparked as it is for so many by a perceived divine indifference to suffering: 

What could be 

more beautiful 

than the blue dome 

beneath which

we breed our horror?

Who could come up 

with such

a perfect antithesis 

to what we are 

than a God

sick to perfection?

‘Order’ is a peculiar poem which appears to be about a pickpocketing tramp: 

The tramp hitches his pants

Where the diners dine,

Patting fat wallets at the tables 

Under the night-bearing trees.

‘Pravda’ is an interesting poem which compares bricks under stucco with bones beneath the skin—there’s something of Keith Douglas in this nine-lined verse:

Brick, beneath all these ornate facades, 

Brick piled on brick,

As bone’s wed to bone beneath the skin.

You notice it here and there,

But one patch of exposure’s enough

To see it everywhere.

Worn brick under crumbling stucco

As the putti flounce, the cornucopiae spill 

The injunction not to be fooled.

‘Among the Gods’ is in three parts and is the longest poem in the book to this point. Part I of the poem dialogic and discusses whether barbarians permanently sully the temples they enter—but the ‘gods’ are not ‘so easily overrun’. Part II has the speaker-poet reasons:

And I don’t know

which gods to thank,

so I thank them all, on my knees, 

clutching tight my wine-cup.

Part III enigmatically addresses an ex-lover:

You smashed me in the face,

but it’s you I place, broken, 

among my memorials of goddesses.

Where I can play my fingers

over your jagged edges, 

filling in all the missing parts.

Broken myself, of course, but

by erecting you thus, I make myself 

a kind of thwarted god.

The tone and leitmotivs remind me of Dysart’s monologues in Peter Schaffer’s Equus (1973):

“Look, life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods… spirits of certain trees, of certain curves of brick walls, of certain fish and chip shops if you like. And slate roofs, and frowns in people, and slouches… I’d say to them, “Worship all you can see, and more will appear…”

‘Palladia’ is an imagistic ten-line ode to the women of Prague:

All pale skin, pale, 

Blonde-hair, sun-lit

As she strides, 

Matching the pale green 

Of the building.

‘Bibliophile’ is back to the use of symbolic colours in a touching poem about the poet finding a small photo of a past lover or ex-partner inside one of his books:

Against the red background

Of the passport photo

The black blazon of your hair.

And within it, the spots

Of your blue eyes, in your white skin,

Like the wings of a butterfly,

Bore into me.

I cracked the old paperback,

And there you were, your youth,

Your beauty, your personality,

A pressed flower, flushed with colour,

Retaining its life on an uncut stem.

The poem closes on the rueful lines:

Now, there’s just you, pert, erect,

Unfazed, undimmed, unanswerable;

Vivid, vital against the browned spine

Of a book I treasured more than you.

‘Bookcases’ reflects on a relationship breakup or marital breakdown, presumably related to the subject of the previous poem: the bookcases have been taken by her, while the books have remained with him. ‘Peekaboo’ relates a passing flirtation:

She looks into my eyes

as we pass, unsmilingly.

She looks into me

as if my skull were glass

my writhing thoughts plainly visible.

Motionless, opaque, inscrutable,

she passes, her eyes, hazel, mild,

clear as untroubled, standing water.

The poems in this part of the volume are achingly honest accounts of the frustrated desires of less assertive males, or rather, the burden of the male libido in more sensitive men—‘Old Get’ ends with: ‘Each fresh beauty cuts me to the bone;/ Gutting me of acceptance of being alone’. ‘Haunted Orchid(for Lina)’ is a more spectral take:

If an orchid were haunted

it would be like you:

shiveringly delicate

tenaciously fragile.

But I’d have no green-fingered priest

called in to conduct

some botanical exorcism. No, I’d keep you

under observation,

under glass, the sweep of glass

sealed around me.

‘After Reading Cavafy’ continues in similar mood, the poet imagining the shadow of an ex-lover taking on physical form for one last caress:

While the mock candle

made to flicker like flame

glows deep autumn yellow,

and the blinds are strips

of shadow waiting to be parted

unsupported on the wall,

come to me, shade of you,

slip into my bed, slip

your lovely sliver of flesh.

In ‘Forgotten’ the poet recalls being jilted by an ex-lover, and closes on an androgynous image: ‘while I sit/ on the bare bank,/fragmented as Ophelia’. In ‘Wishbone’ McKeown uses the titular image for a passing encounter of mutual attraction: 

As I pass her it’s her breastbone I note

moving softly beneath the pale skin.

…

There’s a snap as of a wishbone,

a fusion, a recognition;

as our bodies pull quickly apart.

‘To a Hedge-Witch’ is another sensual meditation on the opposite sex, and has something of Roman love poetry in its shape and cadences:

And as I sit, pink blossoms thick

Bid for tender of my fingertips.

To touch the softness of your lips

The glistening root your body is.

The second and last short verse of ‘The Gold Standard’ produces a nice image at its close:

Locked in a vault

whose combination I’ve lost,

lie, numbered, the still moist

petals of your smile.

‘Branded’ picks up on the painful intensity of attraction:

You can’t know

the peck of your kiss

is a branding iron.

Or that for all

my sour talk

I’m just a calf who needs

the sweet milk

of his own small horizon.

You can’t know

But how that ignorance

burns.

At this point I’m reminded again of the lyricism of Alun Lewis, as in his ‘Raiders’ Dawn’:

Blue necklace left

On a charred chair

Tells that Beauty

Was startled there.

Sure enough, the next poem, ‘The Chinese Lady Serves the Wine’, continues in this Lewisian medium:

Everything

like a spilling bolt of silk

and thought embroidery

the mind may or may not stitch.

Nothing matters

for everything

is the blue silk

or the gold silk

or the watered silk

of Heaven.

‘Moving On’ is an aphorismic meditation on the loss of love—again, there appear two commonplace phrases in the third and fourth lines and it’s up to the reader’s own judgment as to whether this is to some conscious purpose on the poet’s part by way of, say, providing prosaic grounding to better emphasise the heightened language elsewhere in the poem:

Only movement

makes things bearable,

hell in a handcart

but the wheels are turning.

Only movement;

that’s why I check the sky

as you maunder on,

speech a bubble of death

at your lips;

but that low star

is in a different place.

‘Pianissimo(for Nell)’ is an exquisite lyric—again, there is an emphasis on imagery and colours, as well as on aural sense-impression, and wonderful euphonous assonances:

She appears, conjured

By the soft piano notes

The silk lament of horn

Afloat out of the café.

She sits down there

Pale hair, pale skin, distinct

Against the black leatherette

The white brick wall.

All the pain, trouble, torment

A gentle magic in her eyes

At rest in me

Restless outside,

With morning coffee

Under the maple trees.

The poem’s emphasis on romance and music reminds me in some ways of Caparison poet Christopher Moncrieff. ‘Pianissimo’ is an inspired choice for final poem of this book since to my mind it’s one of the very finest of Ill Nature—another beautifully crafted and affecting lyrical collection from McKeown. 

Alan Morrison © 2022