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A Strange Arrangement: New & Selected Poems by C. J. Allen (Leafe Press, £8.95) 99pp.
Available from www.leafepress.com


Nottingham poet (and – declaring an interest - Staple reviews editor) Clive Allen gathers together a small selection from his three previous pamphlets with a substantial body of new work in this entertaining book from Alan Baker’s Chilwell-based Leafe Press. One of Allen’s favourite poetic tactics is to describe the ordinary so bluntly that its peculiarity is exposed, as in ‘The News And The Weather’ with its opening declaration “too much has already been said// about the spring” and continues with a kind of anti-poem in which “ripples of sand/ on the beach [are] like something/ or something else” and “the wet-linen/ colour of almost every cloud/ in literature is, frankly, boring./ It is time to address other things”. Among those alternatives to the clichés of poetic tradition are ‘The Clown’s Resignation Letter’ (“Defeat// may be comic, but it is defeating/ all the same. If anyone knows/ about timing, I should. Life is fleeting./ I am enclosing the nose”), the “skating away/ into coughs and crackles” at ‘The End Of Side One’ of a vinyl record  (“petrol-shimmery,/ like a crow’s wing”), and ‘The Sunday Afternoons’ of the 1960s and 70s, “the era of going next door to use/ the phone, the age of half-day closing, an epoch/ chroniclers feel could be more than adequately covered/ by a footnote”. Like several other poems, the effect here is often of a looser-limbed, better-humoured Larkin, more sympathetic to Modernism, but still busily expressing a preference for superhero comics over “literature or life” in ‘Heroes’, and noting of ‘A Hill In Lincolnshire’ that attaining the summit is “a long way to walk/ just to stand/ looking out// on the fields…”. We sense an essentially romantic sensibility striving to keep its feet on the ground, perpetually undercutting its own fanciful inclinations. ‘Bicycles Round A Tree In West Yorkshire’ ends with “an earthly paradise of rhubarb”, ‘Praises Of The Hare’ with the protagonist noting that “I trawled the lint out of my jacket pockets./ I waited in the unimportant rain”. ‘The Hop’ and ‘The Victorians’ are inventive catalogues of obsolete dance names and historical trends, ‘The Future Body’ a more openly lyrical reflection on physicality and memory. Perhaps the general tone can be summed up in the opening line of ‘A Postcard To Martin Stannard’, where Allen pleads with his fellow poet and critic for a bit of help: “I’m writing regarding my head. Do you think anything can be done about it?”, before claiming - in ‘Autobiographical Stanzas’ - that “my life is so ordinary/ it disappears. Consequently/ I am not a poet. Perhaps// this is what makes me interesting”.