The Power of Birmingham, or: is there poetry in the city?

My literary hero, George Mackay Brown, was once unforgiveably rude about Birmingham. “A poet could not choose a better place to be born than a group of islands, like Orkney,” he wrote in his 1993 essay Enchantment of Islands: A Poet’s Sources. “...If I had been born in Birmingham, for example, I would know that any creativity in me would be impoverished from the start, perhaps fatally.”

Closeness to the natural world, to ancient history and mythology, is a tremendous blessing for a poet, I agree. Most of my own poetry uses nature, myth and fairy tale as its starting point. But surely, surely he’s being unjustifiably harsh?

I have to admit that when I think of ‘city poetry’, the first examples that come to mind are largely negative ones. William Blake’s hymn to London could hardly paint a darker portrait of an urban landscape:

“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 infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

“How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening Church appals
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.”

Eliot’s The Waste Land is hardly much kinder with its haunting portrayal of urban desolation. And we all know what John Betjeman thought of Slough.

But hang on a minute. These strong gut reactions are poetry. You don’t have to be in love with a place to be deeply moved by its emotional undercurrents. What Blake and Eliot are trying to capture is the complexity of the urban setting and the effects of human habitation in close, crowded quarters. Both poets are reaching out to make a human connection within the ruins – and isn’t that what poetry is always trying to do?

Mackay Brown points out in his essay that ‘city poets’ such as Keats and Shakespeare were reliant on being able to retreat to the countryside in order to reinvigorate their muse. I’m in the same boat myself: I need open space, coast and sea, landscape and legend, to refresh me and to rekindle the poetic fire. But actually, not all that much of my own poetry is set in open countryside or the distant past. Most of it is in the city because that’s where people are – and it’s people, for me, that make the most fascinating poetry of all. “This is not the countryside, this is the cityside,” declares Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit 2. “The city is full of people, and people are very complicated.” It may be a throwaway quote from a daft film, but there’s more truth in this line than the script writers realised.

So: does living in Birmingham (or any city for that matter) really kill the creative impulse? I’m not convinced that it does.

Psychogeography – the fundamental connection between place and emotion – is a bit of a buzzword in poetic circles. And I believe the interest in psychogeography is a trend that makes poetry less introspective. It prompts poets to look outward, to understand how their past lives and their current psychological make-up have been informed by the landscapes of their past, as well as the places where they are located now. It prompts them to think about the politics of their environment, and its effects on the people who live there. And because most poets, like most people, have been born and raised in more or less urban environments, this could mean we are on the cusp of a golden age of urban poetry.

As I’ve got older, I have become more interested in tapping into the personal mythology of my childhood to find source material for my poetry. Seen through a child’s eyes, an urban landscape can be a place of wonder, terror and magic, every bit as much as a far-flung island can. My childhood in Merseyside was full of the strange and the mystical: the haunted railway tunnels of Green Lane station, the convent behind the high sandstone wall where we never saw a living soul, the aquarium with every colour of fish imaginable (and. incongruously, an impressive line in Space Invaders machines), the stained-glass hush of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, the treasure trove of Skeleton Records. I’ve lived in many different cities since then, each of which has got under my skin in a different way. Some I’ve loved, such as the 1990s Edinburgh that I commemorated in my first ever prize-winning poem, Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan. Others have elicited more ambivalent reactions, as attested by the set of poems from my three years’ exile in Milton Keynes which became the heart of my Satires collection. And my ten years in York have mythologised my current home to a certain degree, too. This is a city where the Green Man catches the Number 10 bus home from work, but it’s also a city where couples at the sharp end of Cameron’s Britain are trying to find a new language of love in the teeth of austerity:

“Leaves confetti round,
a dark scarlet tumble. You laugh;

clasp my cold hand, warm it
between yours; pick a thread
that’s trailing down my sleeve. Kiss, and whisper
this is our show – our red carpet –
all these lights, just for us.”

(from Red Carpet)

I’ve lived in Birmingham, too. In fact, in my writing, the very word ‘Birmingham’ has taken on a whole new meaning:

“We banned the ‘L’ word from conversation
the third time Tainted Love came round on the jukebox.
Decided it was much less bitter, somehow,
slipping in something innocuous. Like ‘Birmingham’.

“We played the game
seven nights in a row.
You give Birmingham a bad name.
I’d do anything for Birmingham (but I won’t do that).
Too much Birmingham will kill you.
Birmingham will tear us apart...”

When I wrote this poem, I was aiming at something more than a frivolous bit of word-play. The Power of Birmingham is an urban love poem, full of the tensions and uncertainties that are the heartbeat of a city:

“I walked you to the station
Sunday night at twilight,
the sky exploding violet.
You giggled, kissed my cheek
and said Birmingham is a wonderful colour.

“I waved you goodbye
and promised I’d text
and I shuffled my feet
on the concrete grey platform
and wondered when I’d see you again...”

Its sequel (which ended up being called Ever Fallen in Birmingham with Someone you Shouldn’t have Fallen in Birmingham With?) inhabits that disconnected space that I’m often aware of in a city environment, where the rapid changes that take place in the physical space mirror a shift in the emotional landscape too:

“I stop at the railway station corner
by the boarded-up letterbox.
Remember envelopes
sneaked through the slot,
jokes scrawled across the flap.
Birmingham really hurts without you.
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to Birmingham.
I don’t know who you are but you’re a real dead ringer for...
I wonder
about the ones that never got delivered,
the kisses and wishes
shut behind peeling flakes of fly-posters
for bands long since broken up. Silenced.”

Is there poetry in the city? Of course there is. It might not be the poetry of dramatic landscape and timeless mythology. But it’s there alright – in the cafes, the alleyways, the roar of traffic and trains; in the pulses of the people that are a city’s lifeblood, a poet’s stock in trade. You may have to dig a little to find the poetry, but I promise it’s worth the effort.

And you may really Birmingham the results!


(The Power of Birmingham appears in my collection A Long Way to Fall (Lapwing, 2013). Red Carpet, Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan and Ever Fallen in Birmingham...? appear in my collection Satires (Stairwell Books, 2015)).

Poetry, politics and That Difficult Second Book

After a frenetic week (and a more than usually busy couple of months), I’m pleased to report to Soapbox readers that my second book is now well and truly launched. Now that I have a minute to catch my breath, this seems like a good time to set down some thoughts on the journey into print for the second time.

Satires is quite a different book to my debut collection. A Long Way to Fall, although praised by one respected poet for its witty qualities, was in essence a serious collection. It was a culmination of seventeen years’ labours at becoming a Serious Poet. Satires is nothing of the sort. The title gives it away; most of the poems in the new book have a heavy element of satire, or at least of social comment. The majority of the pieces are rhyming poems, where A Long Way to Fall was almost entirely free verse. And most of the poems are really rather silly.

So do I see any problems, or contradictions, in going from one to the other?

Well, no – not really. I’ve blogged before about how difficult it is to write good silly poetry, especially in rhyming verse. There’s as much craft in the art of Pam Ayres as there is in that of Carol Ann Duffy. John Betjeman, one of our wittiest British poets, was meticulous in his attention to the musicality of his rhyming verse; there’s scarcely a skip or a stutter in his metre. I’d like to think that I have put as much effort into crafting the whimsical rhyming poems of Satires as I have into the free verse of A Long Way to Fall.

One of the reasons I admire the masters of rhyming verse so much is because it’s often easier to sneak a serious message into an ostensibly silly poem than it is to bludgeon a reader into emotional submission with a poem which tells the tale straight. “A serious message in silly poems” could even be a tagline for Satires. Much more so than in A Long Way to Fall, I was conscious of the social and political landscape in which the poems in the new book are set. The UK has endured five years of what I can only describe as misrule from a Coalition of bankers, economic theorists, consultants, ideologues and millionaires who don’t seem to have the faintest idea what is happening to real people every day. Slashed welfare spending, the near abolition of Legal Aid, the creeping privatisation of the NHS – it all hurts those in our society who are most vulnerable, whilst leaving the men at the top (and they mostly are men) pretty much unruffled. A right-wing media agenda has created a climate where immigrants, benefit claimants and people with disabilities are automatically assumed to be cheats and scroungers, while mega-corporations get away without paying tax and siphon vast (often taxpayer-subsidised) bonuses into the pockets of a new ruling class of fat cats. Meanwhile our schools and universities are being hijacked in a way which allows narrow interest groups to dictate what can be taught, what the next generation is allowed to think. Whether it’s the imposition of fundamentalist religious narratives in so-called “free schools”, or Michael Gove’s attempts to re-package the horrors of World War I as some sort of glorious patriotic misadventure, the end result is a stifling of creativity, a discouragement of critical thinking, and an erosion of the right to question what is being done in our name.

I’ve always believed that poets (and practitioners of all the creative arts) have a responsibility to reflect and comment on the times in which we live – to reinterpret the received wisdom of the day, to question and challenge the propaganda machine. I don’t want to claim some grand socio-political agenda for Satires. The silly poems in the book are there to entertain, primarily. But they are also there as a challenge to the Keep Calm and Carry On generation. I’d far rather produce a book of light entertainment that makes people think a little, than a weighty political diatribe that ultimately preaches only to the converted.

Actually producing Satires was the easy part. When I put together A Long Way to Fall, there were a number of poems in my repertoire which didn’t fit in the collection. The rhyming satirical pieces that remained included a couple of prize winners, so I knew that they weren’t “bad poems”. But they sounded a discordant note in a collection of free verse that was so steeped in nature, folklore and fairy tale. I knew that there could be another use for these poems, and my original plan was to self-publish them as a pamphlet and use the proceeds as a fundraiser for charities working at the sharp edge of Cameron’s so-called Big Society. I was delighted when Rose Drew of Stairwell Books told me that her imprint would be happy to publish the pamphlet for me. That meant I had the clout of a small but well respected publishing house behind Satires: an assurance of the physical quality of the finished product, and of committed editorial input as the collection was finalised.

Satires, in the end, became something midway between a pamphlet and a full collection. Poems kept going in: a few free verse pieces to counterbalance the rhyme, new political satires alongside the older pieces, some socially conscious love poems to provide a variation of tone. Only two poems were dropped. Once production costs have been paid for, all profits from sales are going to homelessness prevention charity Keyhouse, so (sales permitting) Satires will eventually achieve its dual purpose as fundraiser and awareness-raiser. I really couldn’t be happier about the “difficult” second book.

It’s the third one that will require the real hard work...

(Note: Satires is available now from Stairwell Books and can be ordered online by clicking here)

Too much of a good thing?

2014 has been an unprecedentedly lively year in my neck of Yorkshire. The Tour de France and its spin-off celebrations, the York Literature Festival and the success of local publishers such as Stairwell Books and Valley Press have really helped put this part of the UK on the literary map. My colleagues in the Sounds Lyrical Project have been celebrating their first Arts Council grant with the launch of a brand new concert series fusing spoken word with original music. My neighbours at Harrogate’s Poems, Prose and Pints have just celebrated their fifth anniversary with the launch of a cracking anthology featuring work from regulars at their monthly open mic alongside nationally known writers. Performance poet Henry Raby has triumphantly brought poetry to the Yorkshire masses at the Galtres Festival and is launching a programme of poetry slams bringing national superstars of the spoken word scene to York. And my own little contribution, The Speakers’ Corner, has started up again in a lovely new venue, delighting regulars and visitors alike with the work of some excellent guest features.

So why is it that I’m beginning to doubt the saying You can never have too much of a good thing?

Here’s the problem. If all of this were going on in London, nobody would ever want for an audience. But York is not London. We have more than our fair share of great writers and performers – but sad to say, we still don’t have large audiences. And the problem with having a literary calendar where events are happening every night (as was true a couple of weeks ago) is that most people are simply physically unable to get to every event. Put too many events on, and you begin to split your audience.

I’ve noticed this a lot, of late. There might be tons of events, but at many of these events you can count the audience on your fingers. It’s also noticeable that at a lot of these events, the audience consists entirely of other writers. And that bothers me. It suggests that literary York is beginning to turn into some sort of highbrow ghetto. Are we forgetting how important it is to engage with the wider community? Are we failing in our efforts – or are we just not bothering?

Something else which is a cause for concern is that I’ve noticed the language of rivalry starting to creep in. It makes my heart sink to hear participants and audience members talk about such-and-such an event as “the best” literary event in York. It’s even more worrying when event organisers do it. It smacks of a suggestion that other events are somehow inferior. The message that goes out is “Don’t go there – come here instead.” But a literary scene should thrive on being “better together” (to use a well-known phrase of the moment). It won’t thrive on rivalry and one-upmanship.

But there’s something even worse than one-upmanship – and that is wilful ignorance of what else is happening. This became obvious to me a few months back, on a night where not one, but TWO, poetry events were happening in York in two different venues simultaneously. In the first (let’s call it Event One), the most critically lauded poet in the UK at the moment was giving a reading of work from his multiple award winning collection. In the other (which I’ll call Event Two), an Arts Council-funded event organiser brought together ten of the region’s most well respected poets in a high-profile showcase of their work.

The problem this created is obvious. Most of the audience who were at Event Two (and most of the performers) would really have liked to be at Event One. But a poet can’t be in two places at once. The audience was divided. And NEITHER event got as big an audience as the performers deserved.

Double booking really gets my goat. I can understand it happening in London, or Glasgow. But there’s simply no reason for it to happen in a place the size of York. Our literary community is a small demographic in comparison with, say, the audience at the Theatre Royal or at York City football ground. It really isn’t difficult for information to be shared, diaries synchronised, and events timetabled in a way that doesn’t split the audience.

Having multiple events take place on multiple nights in a row can be almost as bad as double booking. York’s literary community lead busy lives. Many of the most committed members are older, or have health difficulties which make it physically impossible to come to events on consecutive nights, no matter how much they might wish to do so. Others have family commitments which mean that even getting out of the house once a week is a luxury. Choices have to be made: do I go to Event X or Event Y? And audiences are divided as a result.

So why does this keep happening?

The problem doesn’t lie with the performers. It’s the people who promote the events, nine times out of ten, who don’t bother co-ordinating what they are doing. It’s the promoters who often don’t see a NEED to co-ordinate. Their event is the best and most important thing happening, and why shouldn’t everybody drop everything and come to their event, regardless of what else is going on?

I’ve been a literary promoter myself, ever since I joined the organising team for Speakers’ Corner back in 2007. And one of the first decisions I made was that Speakers’ Corner shouldn’t be an event which only promoted itself. We proudly support up-and-coming local talent. Through newsletters, social media and word of mouth we do more than our fair share of promotion for other people’s events. I like to think that this has helped boost audience numbers, and foster the lively literary spirit which is so much in evidence in York today.

But there really are limits. And when our efforts get thrown back in our face out of rivalry, or thoughtlessness, or sheer bloody arrogance, then you can’t really blame us for stopping every now and again and asking “What’s the point?”

Perhaps the answer is for some of us to stop running events altogether. Let the law of the jungle govern the literary calendar, so that the strong survive while the smaller, and those who make less noise, disappear. Speakers’ Corner did have a sabbatical in 2013, while I worked on my poetry collection and my co-organisers concentrated on their own projects. There was an immediate clamour of “It’s not fair”, “Why did you shut down?”, and “When are you coming back?” So clearly we met a need that wasn’t catered for by the upsurge of newer events.

But there is only so long you can keep working at a thankless task. If audiences are doomed to dwindle, then perhaps some of us really need to stop organising grassroots literary events. Give the bigger boys what they already seem to feel they deserve. See if they sink, or swim.

But I don’t really want to be part of a literary scene like that. It flies in the face of the very experience of community and mutual support that drew me in in the first place.

How Not to Write About Sex

I was surprised (and a little perturbed) when a performer at one of the regular Yorkshire open mic nights recently referred to me as an “erotic poet”. I don’t think he was referring to my magnetic, romantic personality. Rather, and I’m not sure quite how this happened, I’d been pigeon-holed in the category of Poets Who Write About Sex.

I do write a lot of love poems. But my published (and occasionally prize winning) love poems are poems about libraries, rivers and ornithology. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘poems about sex’.

I’ve written one poem, to date, that is overtly ‘about sex’. And I’ve performed it to an audience exactly twice. Breathing for Me was a challenge set by a writing tutor some years ago, and writing the damn thing terrified me. It was published in a Ragged Raven Press anthology, and eventually found its way into my collection A Long Way to Fall. It’s not an especially explicit poem. Although it’s clear what is happening, I made sure that the sex itself stayed firmly in the subtext. But it’s a very sensual poem – and I think this is what my fellow poet was referring to.

You don’t have to be writing ‘about sex’ to write a poem where sex, or the possibility of it (or the consequences afterwards) infuses the subtext. When Andrew Marvell wrote about his Coy Mistress, he didn’t write about the actual physical process of having sex with her. Carol Ann Duffy is hardly an ‘erotic poet’, but Valentine and Warming Her Pearls are filled with sensuous imagery that positively electrifies the atmosphere.

‘Erotic poetry’ (by which I specifically mean ‘poetry about sex’) was a bit of a craze in York a few years back. There were whole evenings dedicated to it. An element of ‘dress-up’ was involved, which made these events doubly intimidating for an introvert like me. Some participants opted for the classic ballgown or dinner jacket; other people’s costumes were more suited to a BDSM dungeon than a poetry night. Many creative people have an exhibitionistic element about them, and that’s fine. It takes all sorts, as they say. But ‘erotic poetry nights’ really didn’t do it for me.

I did once appear in an anthology titled The Exhibitionists, as it happens. But that’s another story.

‘Erotic poetry’ is not the only place where a poet can tread on uncomfortable ground. I was made aware of that at another poetry reading recently: a book launch event for a well known poet whose latest material draws on dark recollections from the poet’s past. The tragic history of the poet’s first love affair was a major theme of the poems.

If romantic verse is one aspect of the poet’s stock in trade, then ‘love-gone-wrong’ poems are the other side of the coin. I’ve been there before too (“many, many times,” to misquote Betty Marsden), and made a fair bit of poetry out of the experience. Even a little money, too; a couple of these poems have been prize winners. But what applies to the ‘erotic’ love poems also applies, for me, to the ‘love-gone-wrong’ poems. Their power is in the imagery, the subtext: the things the poet chooses not to say explicitly but only to hint at. These are what allow the poem to transcend the poet’s own experience and find a new life in the heart of the reader, or listener.

When a poem of this nature becomes explicit – when it becomes biography, when the lost love is named and shamed in the poem – then I can’t help feeling that a line has been crossed. The poem becomes journalism, or confessional, or – at worst – revenge. No matter how well crafted, it is a report of someone else’s life. That thread of connection which binds the poet and the audience is broken – or else it was never there to begin with. And as a reader, I will never feel that the poem really speaks to me.

Just as I have no wish for my sex life (poeticised or not) to be on public display, so I have no desire to broadcast the details of past heartbreak to the world. My ex-girlfriends deserve the dignity of me keeping our private affairs private. That doesn’t mean that what went wrong in those relationships will never influence my poetry again. But I prefer to use the experiences as source material to inspire my poetry on a subtler level. With the aid of metaphor, imagery and subtext, I try to make something a little bit beautiful out of the wreckage of past mistakes. Something that I hope others can relate to.

The poetry tutor who made me write Breathing for Me was pushing me to a greater degree of honesty. He wanted my poems to be truthful about the ‘inner me’ – he wanted me not to be afraid of using my art to express the deepest, most personal aspects of who I am. For the record, I think he was right. But that doesn’t make Breathing for Me autobiography. That was never its purpose. Instead, it was permission to find new freedom in how I use my imagery, metaphor and subtext. It was a pivotal moment in ‘finding my voice’ as a poet.

But it was not a ‘poem about sex’. And I don’t really want it to be seen as one.

Is poetry a feminist issue? Part 1

Last week I had the pleasure of being one of the support acts for performance poetry star Hollie McNish. The event was a special one for International Women's Week, organised by my friends at Stairwell Books, and advertised to a largely (but by no means exclusively) female audience.

The material performed by the singers and poets covered a vast range of topics. Motherhood featured prominently, as did tributes to women who were inspirational in the lives of the performers. But so did nature and the turn of the seasons, love, sex and heartbreak, and one or two more outlandish subjects – a song about tapeworms, for example!

I was struck by the fact that this wasn't an evening of “women's poetry” – it was an evening of poetry, pure and simple. It's possible that some of the subject matter may have been more appealing to female listeners than to males – one male audience member did comment to me afterwards that there were slightly more poems about childbirth than he was entirely comfortable with! But on the whole, it seemed to me that the idea of “women's poetry”, as sometimes raised in critics' circles, was a pretty much artificial one.

This does not appear to be the view of the literary establishment, however, according to one recent article. Poet Angela France, writing on the Litro blog, reports a positive disdain from poetry critics towards female poets who write autobiographically or in the first person, particularly about subjects such as childbirth and parenthood which were traditionally considered as being of interest mainly to women. Such poetry, she says, tends to get dismissed as “confessional” and treated as if it is of lesser worth than more intellectually centred poetry. Worse still, she claims, a double standard exists which allows male poets to write autobiographically to great acclaim (in the case of, for example, Christopher Reid), but exposes female poets who do so to derision, sometimes of a disturbingly misogynistic nature.

France's hyper-awareness of this critical disdain, she says, has inhibited her own approach to her poetry. She's almost scared now of writing in the first person, anticipating what she sees as an inevitable critical backlash if she does.

These claims seemed far-fetched to me when I first read them. All poets take it personally when their work is rejected, after all – so was this just an attempt by the writer to shift the blame for a bad review away from herself? Sadly not. What makes this article particularly galling is that France presents compelling evidence that what she perceives is actually going on.

To take just one example: publisher Neil Astley and blogger Fiona Moore have both surveyed reviews of poetry books in the Guardian over a period of several years. It turns out that in 2012-13 only 25% of the poetry books reviewed were written by women. The situation was even worse a few years earlier; in 2003-5 only 10 out of the 66 books reviewed were written by women, and all but four of the critics actually writing the reviews were men. This in a climate where women significantly outnumber men as readers of poetry, and (judging by the newsletters and emails I receive from poetry publishers) as writers too.

France's article is detailed, and contains a sorry catalogue of evidence that I needn't reproduce here. The picture it paints is of a culture – endemic amongst the more traditional publishers and critics of poetry – that's stuck in a patriarchal, 1950s-esque mindset and hasn't actually noticed that society has moved on. It's the literary equivalent of WH Smith filing their science and politics journals under “Men’s Interest” while “Women’s Interest” is restricted to magazines about baking and knitting. And this bothers me intensely.

As a (male) writer of poetry, I often instinctively use a female narrative voice – or else try to explore the male response to issues that traditional thinking would categorise as “women's concerns”. A Long Way to Fall, the title poem of my recent collection, revolves around a terrified father-to-be coming to terms with impending parenthood. At the other end of the scale, my prize winning Separate Taxis reflects the guilt felt by the partner of a rape victim for not being there to prevent the abuse inflicted on his female partner.

These days I read far more female poets than males. The three local poets I've most vigorously championed in York are all women. And when I've judged poetry competitions, the poems I've selected as my First Prize winners have to date all been written by women. If this reflects a bias on my part, it isn't a conscious one; poems are submitted to competitions anonymously, after all, so I have no idea of the gender of the writer.

Am I reading (and writing) “women’s poetry” then? I don't think so. As far as I'm concerned there's no gender label on good poetry. It's just poetry, and should be celebrated as such. As last week's event showed, a poem about a tapeworm can be “women's poetry” every bit as much as one about childbirth. But if Angela France is correct, there’s an outside chance that my fascination with the female poetic voice may just explain one or two of the bad reviews I've had when submitting to the more, shall we say, highbrow journals...

Discrimination exists. That seems unarguable. But to play devil's advocate for a minute, it can cut both ways. I can remember one rather snide review of Oz Hardwick's excellent collection The Illuminated Dreamer, in which the (female) reviewer took great umbrage at the sensuousness of Hardwick’s imagery. The subtext of the review appeared to be that only women had a right to write sensuous poetry, and that for a male poet to do so was somehow in bad taste. This seemed to me to be imposing a rather warped extreme of feminism onto a collection of poems which had nothing to do with the politics of gender identity. The poems in question were about love, no more and no less.

So should female poets (and those like me, who aspire to match the great female poets) give up the female narrative voice altogether? Should they write only material with which condescending male critics are comfortable (about cars, or football, or abstract philosophy perhaps?) Wouldn't the world be a much duller place if they did? Much better to shake up the establishment altogether. These sneering male critics are pompous arses, and the best way to deal with them is to deprive them of the oxygen of attention. They are only arbiters of taste because the establishment allows them to be.

So here's to a new establishment – or maybe better yet, no establishment at all. Here's to sisters (and brothers) doing it for themselves: writing and promoting work that actually speaks meaningfully about life, to those who are crying out for it.

Review: Fosdyke and Me, and Other Poems, by John Gilham (Stairwell Books/Fighting Cock Press, 2010; ISBN 978-0-906744-33-8)

York poet John Gilham's Fosdyke stories are well known around the open mic nights and folk clubs of the city. They have been brought together in a collaborative venture by two of York's small presses, alongside a short compilation of the author's previously published poetry – much of it successfully placed in prestigious journals including Acumen and The North.

I hesitate to describe the ten Fosdyke tales as poems, because they're not really poems, except insofar as they have been laid out in an eye-catching, verse-like structure on the page. They could just as easily have been presented as prose without losing any of their impact. The tales have echoes of the Paddy Kelly sagas of Brian Jacques, relocated to West London and reshaped for a post-watershed audience.

Fosdyke, like Paddy Kelly, occupies a space somewhere between fiction and autobiography. His world is a vanished one: the world of Boys' Brigade football and church parades, Young Socialists dances and second-hand Hillmans. Fosdyke never wins a football match, never gets to second base with the local girls, and spends his life "wait[ing] for something to happen." Whether a real-life Fosdyke ever actually existed is immaterial; this hapless hero personifies the aspirations and failures of a generation.

We first meet the teenage Fosdyke and his biographer on the playing fields of West Middlesex, where they "paw the ground like nervous thoroughbreds" and "look threatening behind our NHS specs", though "our legs, I seem to remember, developed all the elegance of a new-born giraffe" (from Fosdyke and Me). They are life's underdogs, only really getting one moment in the spotlight – or rather on a soapbox at Speaker's Corner, surrounded by

"All the black power guys and the hell fire guys and not yet the women's lib guys cos this was the sixties;
And the Communists and the Nazis and the flat earth people and not yet the gay rights people cos this was the sixties;
And the CND people and Bertrand Russell (cos this was the sixties);
And an old woman with an umbrella who heckled everybody and waved it in your face and said we were rubbish."
(from Me and Fosdyke Do Poetry)

Subsequent poems take "Fosdyke and Me" on a road trip to the Costa Del Sol, through university and marriage and into middle age, "trying to sell things we had no faith in to someone who didn’t want to know" (Me and Fosdyke Go Repping).

This is effective, atmospheric writing. The greyness of a 1960s Britain where free speech and the sexual revolution have yet to arrive is beautifully evoked. There is poignancy in the failures of our heroes, and a delightful music to the narrator's long litanies of disappointment:

"That was the night we found out that this town had a policeman and he was very fat and very greasy and wore a moustache and dark glasses even at night,
That he kept an Alsatian and that they both hated the English"
(from Fosdyke and Me On Holiday).

There is a distinctly masculine tone to the whole Fosdyke cycle. Granted, the protagonists are hardly "alpha males". They spend their lives overshadowed by more powerful women – mothers, sisters, wives, Stella the waitress on the Stirling ring road who has sex with Fosdyke on Tuesdays. The female characters in the story are earthy, but unfathomable – a mystery to be worshipped at a distance, wooed with second-rate poetry, and eventually won round with promises of honeymoons in Filey. Fosdyke's frustrated romanticism is equal parts Roger McGough and Adrian Mole:

"For oh how we wanted to lie in bed with a girl on a sunny morning
And make poetry out of used tea-bags and last-night's stockings hanging over the radiator
Like all the other poets who wore long scarves and cord jackets and had girlfriends with long hair and short skirts to be their bed-sit Muse"
(from Me and Fosdyke Do Poetry)

But I have to confess that I have no idea how a female reader, approaching this collection for the first time, would respond to these poems.

The poems which make up the second half of the collection also have an element of nostalgia about them. These are poems of reminiscence. Their starting-point is the author's memories of a family growing up: the places where his children were born (Auden's Centenary), the beach where they learned to skim stones (Skimming), the butcher who supplied the family’s meat (Mr Hoffman). Or else they are wistful, gently surreal reflections on "what might have been": the train driver's admonition to "take all your longings with you" (Announcement), the debris remaining from the wedding reception that never was (the beautiful Packing Up).

But what makes these poems really noteworthy is the way the author connects the microcosm of domestic life with the global reality of a Europe discovering its freedom in the years following World War 2. Mr Hoffman, a beautifully constructed modern sonnet, is a perfect example. Its concluding lines are pure domesticity, yet there is an urgency about its call to reconciliation:

"So, to respect the enemy we beat,
we went to Mr Hoffman for our meat."

The sense of brotherhood between former enemies is a strong theme throughout the collection. In A Small Village in Germany, Gilham rediscovers family links "long sundered, / our fathers and grandfathers pitched against theirs / in trenches, or in Normandy..." Unexpected kinships are also found in an old army field hospital (Ghosts), in "the flatness, the dampness, the melancholy" of the Flemish landscape (Herring Bone), and at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC (The Family Name).

Gilham's reflections on the legacy of a war fought 70 years ago have an extraordinary contemporary resonance. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Of Course, It Goes On, which for me is the high point of this collection. In the mundane little details of lives lived in defiance of tanks and terrorists, Gilham offers a timeless reflection in the tradition of the greatest war poetry:

"Out of the rubble we crawl with our violins,
our scraps of poetry, our cooking pots
and shopping bags; starting now
to rebuild what makes us human,
defying the teeth, the wolves of war."

This, declares Gilham, is "the affirmation: / this is how we say / that you who love war / cannot destroy us."

The stark difference between the Fosdyke cycle and the other poems in this collection make this book, for me, rather puzzling. The Fosdyke stories, by and large, are so utterly different to the more "poem-like" poems in style and subject matter that the two halves of the book sit rather uneasily together. I couldn't make up my mind whether this was a strength or a weakness of the collection. On the one hand, Fosdyke has an immediate accessibility which is likely to appeal to many who might be wary of shelling out for a conventional poetry collection. On the other, the quality of the poems in the second half of the book is such that I feel they really deserve a focus of their own.

The author provides a bridge, of sorts, in the mid-point of the collection with the very last piece in the Fosdyke cycle. A Dream of Fosdyke is a much more melancholy piece than its companions. It reads almost as a sort of inverse Dream of Gerontius:

"Poor Fosdyke, by whom I measured my own failures, precedes me now into the dark,
Already gone beyond the frustrations of consciousness..."

But there is light at the end of the tunnel:

"When I woke up I went down the pub with Fosdyke and we watched the 60th anniversary of Dunkirk, and Dad's Army, and England losing 5-nil to the Faeroe Islands on penalties.
We remembered how we won the 1966 World Cup,
And how we were in Soho after and we all loved the Germans and they loved us...
Then we sang and danced in Trafalgar Square until it got light and me and Fosdyke took the first tube home."

These glimpses of hope more than outweigh any rough edges around the earlier Fosdyke tales and make the whole collection a moving and compelling piece of work which repays reading again and again.