South Reviews
William Bedford
Collecting Bottle Tops (Selected Poems 1960-2008) – William Bedford; Poetry Salzburg, £14.95
Having recently contributed to SOUTH as both poet and reviewer, William Bedford will be well known to our readers. He left school at 15 to work on the fairgrounds of England’s east coast. After a varied working life, including spells in the City and academia, he became a full time writer in 1984. His novels, drama, short stories, essays, reviews and poetry have been widely published, receiving several major awards along the way – most recently a Royal Literary Fund Award in 2007.
Collecting Bottle Tops draws from four of his five previously published collections, together with a wealth of more recent poetry. In his Introduction, Sam Milne warns us not to be deceived by what has been described as Bedford’s ‘unflinching openness and austere simplicity of style’. Instead, Milne points to Bedford’s keen observation of detail, how the precision of his craftsmanship captures, in a deceptively simple way, the exact emotion of a scene :
Aware continuously of the silence
that moves between us,
you place records with precise care,
and take that stance
which hides your true feelings.
In my chair,
I finger glass,
the slow, transparent moments
drifting to a close,
the record ending as the needle lifts.
(Aware Continuously)
Collecting Bottle Tops spans a lifetime of poetry. Like Betjeman, Bedford is adept at providing cultural references that set his poems in time and place. The café in Blackwells, Oxford is conjured complete with ‘Lemon Drizzle’ and ‘Earl Grey Tea’; characters as diverse as Dylan, Blossom Dearie, Sylvia Plath and John Coltrane act as reference points, whilst certain aspects of London life are evoked by breakfast at a Lyons teahouse. Like Larkin, Bedford seems to want ‘…readers to carry away from the poem in their minds …not the poem, but the experience’. Bedford is particularly skilled at recreating a vanished way of life. His moving sequence, The Redlit Boys, is a sustained elegy for a whole lost culture and the working class roots of his family.
Space does not permit a close examination of such a long and varied collection. Reluctantly, I must leave just a short quotation from the book’s humorous title poem to commend Collecting Bottle Tops to my readers :
Emptied into the yard, the sack of bottle tops
spun like a silver fish on washed down cobbles,
clattered and shimmered like a field of coins…
When my father got home, he danced on cobbles,
racing across the yard in a drunken waltz,
cursing publicans and my deranged collections –
of stamps, of fish, and now silver marbles –
Page(s) 61
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