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Dirty Work, Angela Kirby, 2008, Shoestring Press. £8.95 ISBN  978-1-9048868-3-9

“here is a shrewdly observant
eye and a wit which engages,
making the work the proverbial
page-turner”

Perhaps Angela Kirby’s Dirty Work may never be short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize but if there were an equivalent one for ‘poetic humanity’ she would surely be in the winners’ enclosure. This book draws on the experience of many years, experience that has informed wisdom, wisdom that has refined compassion – here is a shrewdly observant eye and a wit which engages, making the work the proverbial page-turner.

Kirby’s language is simple and direct but this does not mean that it lacks subtlety. Miss Burnthwaite’s Gazebo has the same self-revelatory approach to her subject as Browning does in My Last Duchess whilst her homage to Julia Casterton succinctly captures the immense grief felt at that poet’s death. The very landscape itself, which Casterton knew so well, seems to be in mourning. Tiny flowers are “instead of a wreath” and scattered on the sea “like birds, like butterflies, like words.” This final line of Julia’s Doves neatly encapsulates Julia, her book, her life and her love of language. A lesser poet than Kirby would have been more verbose and would have touched us less.

Kirby changes register with ease. She longs to offer judicial advice to the miserable woman seated opposite “look, loosen up a little, / don’t let on, don’t / let them see, nobody / loves a loser”. Kirby’s ear for the colloquial never fails to capture the social context which it portrays. However, she is also capable of adroitly turning a straightforward description of, say, a country fair into something more darkly probing “…where now is the joy? Where is it?” (Threlkfeld’s Bull).

Kirby’s subject matter incorporates her Catholic upbringing from schoolgirls entangling a young priest in his own arguments to the hilarious confession of an older woman, brought up in purity, but “there wasn’t a lot of call for purity / around our way – so in the end / I gave it up and now look at me”. This could be the same woman who bends easily to sex, for sex and age are comfortable bedfellows in Kirby’s philosophy, the woman who frequents jazz clubs, parties on the Circle line and is both cared for and carer.

Humanity shines through each poem whether it is towards the old man longing to fondle the shop girl’s breasts only to be buttoned into his coat by a niece, the partying daughter who ends up at midnight in casualty “the vomit-crusted O/ of your mouth // …the only message you have for me” or the elderly mother whose every personal need has to be met yet whose dignity as head of house is maintained as Kirby “lean[s] forward to / receive her kisses, her God bless” (Unlacing My Mother). This work will move you to laughter, joy, compassion or, in the case of Old James Gatty Clings Onto Sleep, tears. Perhaps not a book for the Eliot but a bedside bible to guide us through the vagaries of life.