It is no surprise that so many of the poems in this anthology, put together by John Rety from the first two years of poems in the weekly Well Versed column of the Morning Star, should cover such a wide field, including many of the political and social issues that have so disfigured and coloured our world over the last decade. It would have been strange if this had not been so. And a number of these poems have the kind of sharp edge to them that probes these issues in the spirit one has come to expect of the Morning Star, where clarity, anger and indignation respond to the inequalities and injustices we are dominated by as capitalism moves into new markets, new spaces, new killing grounds against our deeper needs and wishes.
It is, though, difficult to judge the quality of these poems as a collection in purely poetic terms, because they cover such a wide variety of themes; and if certain pieces stand out for their striking use of language, it is most often the content that takes first place. For these poems are not overtly ambitious. They tell stories, they speak directly of things that happen on ordinary days in the city, in the countryside, to a friend or a mother or someone trying to make his/her life work for others. But looked at as a whole this is a generous and open-ended collection, demonstrating the nature and diversity of individual opposition to the destructive policies we’ve all been struck by in recent years – making it clear that people (and the voices here) do not take things passively, but speak up and speak passionately about things that matter.
Few though they may be, the best of these poems are given voice and form by the rhythms and the formal patterns that are the sign of their authenticity. And even if one finds that the content of many of them isn’t matched by the form, still most of them speak the language of feeling and of quest, of direct human involvement, of resistance and of longing. For it is after all in the nature of things only rarely that content and form, the meaning and the sound, come together to create the electric presence and the energy that is the mark of all true poetry, as one hears it spelled out in Maureen Duffy’s lament on the death of a poetfriend who ‘honed the art of naming /things and places and taught us with your passion /against the grain, how poetry still matters’. (Naming, 45) One senses this happening as one reads through this collection – how words are lifted, raised to new heights, how feeling and intensity of formal structure become fused; for then it is as if, at every level, it is the way the language moves (as in poems by Kathleen Gallagher, Arthur Clegg, Gillian Spragge, Brian Docherty, Peter Campbell, Lucy Hamilton, Dinah Livingstone and Mario Pettrucci, to name a few) that matters, to become a voice that is unimpeachably humane, civilised and civilising, made to last, to rise above the destructive forces we are so deeply negated by, to re-make our world. Of course the Morning Star has to take into account the blunted realities and the brutalising consequences of the world’s politics; but here, well enough versed to reach out to the paper’s readers, is an alternative to all that – the utopian alternative, the world yet to be born, to be realised, built to answer humanity’s cooperative creative needs.
Christopher Hampton was a lecturer for many years at the University of Westminster and the London City Literary Institute. His Penguin Radical Reader was reissued by Spokesman Books in 2006 and his most recent poetry collection Border Crossings appeared from Katabasis in 2005.
Review of Well Versed: Poems from the Morning Star, edited by John Rety (Hearing Eye, London 2009). Pbk. 138 pages. £10. ISBN: 978-1-905082-42-1.