Steve Ellis
Review
on The Mersey Sound: Revised Edition
Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten New Volume, Penguin, £1.50; The Mersey Sound: Revised Edition, Penguin, £1.50
On re-reading the Liverpool poets
A grey sponge of drizzle swabs the Mersey;
a soft young soul roams along the bank
or watches from a bus, composing
unwithstandable Invitations aux voyages
to developing city schoolgirls:
'My poetry-boat waits on the wave
weighed with hampers of fish and chips;
don't forget the vinegar, Marianne.'
God, the excitement of it at seventeen!
The future seemed a chain of bras
deliciously yielding their contents,
culminating in that dark-haired One;
whom I was always planning to meet
in all-night parties' misty dawns
by meadow-flanked streams; she rises,
a Biba nymph, and our conjunction
is the climax of peace and truth.
I remembered this apparition last night,
reading of others dreaming it:
men for whom a wet bus window
might frame any masterpiece
in townscapes transfigured by love;
love never quite tempted to embark,
though softly nasal songs of jam butties
promised new earth,
Jam itself between the sliced decades.
Page(s) 70
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