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Happy Cos I’m Blue by Matt Nunn
(Central Books, £7.99) 100pp.
Available from www.centralbooks.com 


Poet in residence with Birmingham City Football Club, Matt Nunn is a man with the colour blue dyed into every line of his writing. The Blues can mean many things, of course, and for a Birmingham City supporter like Nunn the mix of depression, disillusionment, bawdy humour and team colours can stain his take on the world at large like a cobalt sock in a whites wash. “This is for all the times you’ve said No, not ever again// only to repent when you feel that gut August feeling…/ that this year, yes this year, is going to be our year” he writes in ‘B.C.F.C. 1875 – For Bloody Ever’, while ‘Football Is Mankind’s Finest Misery’ continues with the first line “and to be a supporter is to travel a long long road”. For the less football-inclined there are cynical love poems such as ‘The Poet As A Sad Bastard’, the despairing ‘Thinkin’ Bout Chucking Myself Beneath The Wheels Of A Moped’ and ‘There’s Fluff On The Landscape’s Stylus’, in which Nunn returns “as the seasick skipper/ of nostalgia to where the land dive-bombs/ into a shallow bath”. The style occupies a productive, if sometimes rather too knowingly tabloid, hinterland between page and performance. The language is energised, even compressed to the point of incoherence at times, but it’s a point acknowledged in ‘Swearbox A.K.A.’, where Nunn finds “notions of absurdity absurd in themselves”. It’s a collection that makes you hope its author finds a more effective internal editor one day, as the invention on display, harnessed to greater focus and a purpose beyond confirming the ideas and experiences of its intended readers, could produce great things, things that might stretch us as well as prompt a nod of recognition at the absurd qualities of the urban and media landscape. For now, though, if titles like ‘Lager Is Bigger Than Jesus’, ‘The Bishop Who Built His Breasts With Lottery Cash’ or ‘King Kong As Ozymandias’ (and lines such as the latter’s quite marvellous “and the arse almost falls out of the flyover”) push your buttons, Happy Cos I’m Blue might well oblige you to concur with David Morley’s introduction, in which Nunn is compared, not entirely without good reason, to Mayakovsky and Whitman, and implies that not being wholly convinced reveals a “ruled middle-class nature” unable to appreciate “the vomit…demotic and glorious futility of a Saturday night in England’s second city”.