ISSUE 8
On
The Buses with Dostoyevsky
by Geoff Hattersley.
Bloodaxe Books. £6.95. ISBN 1-
85224 - 439 - 9. The
obsession of this book is the discrepancy between serious and popular
culture. The blurb says that Geoff Hattersley's poetic allegiances are
with contemporary American writers, but it's the influence of Eliot and
Pound that is obvious. The title poem sets the tone. It's about the poet
reading classics while downstairs his father watches trash on the T.V.,
the sound turned up high because of the deafness caused by his years in
the steelworks. So On The Buses and Dostoyevsky rub shoulders in a jokey
way This is the kind of coming together of cultures joke that is all over
the place Proust in Blackpool, Drinking Boddingtons with Saul Bellow. That
kind of thing is supposed to be funny because of the incongruity, but it
gets cloying. What lies behind it is a hint of reverse snobbery. Just as
Eliot and Pound tried to defend culture from the masses, so this kind of
thing tries to defend the masses from culture. There's also an Eliot
influence in the language. Eliot wasn't nicknamed 'the undertaker for
nothing. He had a fear of the sexiness of language just as he had a fear
of sex. it's Eliot's paring down of language that is more at work here
than, say, the relaxation of Ferlinghetti (which is quite sexy). Geoff
Hattersley faces the problem all working class artists and intellectuals
face: how to make an honourable exit. In the first and last sections of
this book are poems that show him straining to break away but held back by
loyalty or maybe a residual but unstated political commitment. This is the
source of what is, wrongly, taken to a be a surrealism In these poems.
Surrealism flaunted every convention. Here the tension arises from being
held by conventions you would like to throw on the back of the fire. South
Yorkshire is a depressed and, in some ways, so these poems say, a
depressing place. All that relieves the gloom are the oddities, the
lunatics, the freakishness of the ordinary. But there is a collusion with
the ordinariness, as If the freakishness is regretted, as If some dream of
harmony has been lost. What the poems don't rise to is a really subversive
vision, like surrealism. They are schoolboys who would like to sag off but
don't quite dare. The
second section is based on his experiences in a Kibbutz. The striking
feature is that the poems remain stylistically like those based in
Yorkshire. The poet's sensibility remains constant, but on the other hand
there's a slight disappointment that a change of milieu so radical didn't
bring at least a temporary escape from the mood that dominates the North
of England poems. When he writes that you can forget who you are I what
you are, back home" it's hard to believe him. He carries his
northern, working-class identity everywhere. It's from that, from his
knowledge that his own people have been done down, cheated, that emanates
his sense of rottenness, that society has got it in, not only for the poor
and defenceless, but also for the modest and honest, and there's little
that can be done. That low-key, downbeat mood, searching for a moment's
comfort here and there in a touch of humour, a little warmth and sunlight
in the gloom, is what characterizes this collection. Those who know Geoff
Hattersley's work will find no surprises, but those who love it for its
resolute straightforwardness and its refusal of the commonplace tricks of
poets on the make will be delighted.
Contemporary
English poetry is generally uneasy about the word "we". the use
of the second person plural is not often much more than a form of
disguised soliloquy, implying membership of a sexual relationship or of an
intimate group, a device to dignify private experience by extending it to
a hidden listener just outside the poem.
How
welcome then, is the confident, untroubled political grammar of Paul
Summer's first full-length book, arguably the best first collection of
1998. The "we' and "us" in THE LAST BUS never needs to be
explained, sliding easily from family and friends through generation, town
and region to class and back again:
We
are more than sharply contrasting photographs
This
is - as the wonderful, bathetic last line suggests - the poetry of
Dead-Pan Alley, the quiet, dark city streets down which Summers follows
writers like Geoff Hattersley and David Crystal. As you would expect from
one of the editors of BILLY LIAR ( and in a collection which includes work
from Summers' three ECHO ROOM pamphlets) these poems are unemphatic,
understated, urban pastorals:
while
we were sleeping, the damp patch on the ceiling
It
is the triumph of this kind of detail which holds the writing close to
experience ( a " squadron of airfix planes" in a bedroom in his
parents' house are "so heavy with dust they are grounded";
"a consultant from malaysia" holds up an x-ray showing "the
future on acetate, like a sonar swoop
on a school of fish or a colony of snowflakes descending wet
glass.)
At
times Summers sounds like he has been reading too much Gordon Wardman,
(CLASS ACT, FORT APACHE NE 24, COWBOYS). The influence of James Kelman in
the eleven Kelman-like prose poems is more useful, giving him room to
stand slightly apart from the shared sensibility they transcribe (
PROCTOR, PHILOSOPHY, EASTER SATURDAY 1993, RANT).
But
the poems in THE LAST BUS are rarely motivated by an idea, or even by a
story, rather by a shared feeling and a shared experience ( most
successfully in the title sequence about his grandfather's funeral). They
address head on the ways in which that experience has been written up and
written off by outsiders, by them. (NORTH, FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME). And
they never simplify the mixed feelings about belonging to a people and a
place united by the experience of defeat (THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, SCAB).
All of which occasionally enables Summers to extend "we" and
"us" to speak for all of us, as in the fabulous IF KEIR HARDIE
WAS THE MAN ON THE MOON:
What
would he make of it ? we wondered;
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