Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

There’s a poem in On the Track where the central character, traveling south from Scotland, awakes to find the train has stopped at a station: “Good God, Preston! I worked here once, it felt like slow death”, he says to his companion...

At which a man rose promptly, hefting his case
From the rack, scooped up a rainproof hat,
And then announced, eyes blow-torching my
                                                                face,
“Some of us like it here, you southern prat.”

That kind of down-to-earth way of dealing with a situation is typical, as is the use of dialogue. It gives the poems a feeling of immediacy, even when Lucas is writing about people he knew in the 1950s. The reader seems to be there, watching the exchanges taking place between the young Lucas, part-way into the academic life, and the forthright characters he encounters when taking vacation-time jobs. They match the Marx he reads by opening his eyes to the ways of the workaday world. But the lessons are drawn easily in the poems, though the heroism of everyday life is always there. A man on a building site suffers the loss of his best friend and his young wife, and Lucas sums up the effect on him:

“Each of us finds solace in work well done.”
But some aches last, some things are past a joke.
“The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost wrote.
But Harry, that amiable man, has no choice
Now except to work, down tools at five,

And go alone into his empty house.

It’s poignant and all the better for being restrained. Likewise with a moving sequence about the poet’s father and how his death forces Lucas into re-appraising their relationship. The details - of a meal the father once made, a final visit to a favourite pub, the funeral - add to the low-key transmission of grief.

     Another sequence, built around a visit to Romania, mixes poetry and prose to good effect, with Lucas catching the voices, not just of the locals but also of English visitors like a woman who buys old furniture to sell at vastly-inflated prices in London, and a diplomat who doesn’t seem sure that the overthrow of the dictator was a good thing. The streets were clean in the old days, he says, and the trams ran on time. Lucas lets the reader draw his own conclusions.

     I enjoyed this book. There is a deep humanity running through it at all levels and a happy determination to get to grips with the messiness of everyday life.