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Everyman Street – Julian Colton; Smokestack Books, £7.95

In Everyman Street there are mostly whites, shop-keeping browns and no blacks.

In Everyman Street there are clichés galore – over forty in a quick count – and only one recognisably poetic line, that I can find: “A black ripple of silk metal in the dawn sun” (The Bypass).

In Everyman Street is a brutalised Under Milk Wood: no ripeness of language, all matter-of-fact. The tone is not simply streetwise though – there is unfaithfulness, corruption, betrayal and murder, yet room for tenderness, redemption, twists of fate, irony, acceptance, even a kind of ecstasy in unexpected places.

In Everyman Street the most straightforward family is the happiest. A couple in their pensioners’ retreat street fare less well. The husband’s deadly heart-attack traps the wife a country’s width from her real home. And the local headmistress’s lonely husband takes a menial shop job, gets bashed by the local gang, and hangs himself.

In Everyman Street, justice of all kinds, including poetic, is in short supply. Illicit and unexpected sex (with a variety of consequences) is uppermost among the goings-on. Jealousy is surprisingly sparse.

In Everyman Street, Anwar the Pakistani, whose store is in competition with the local big boys’ interests, and in no time he’s hitting it off lustily, if not permanently, with the policeman’s wife (and the local mafioso’s daughter), provides the thread holding the narratives together. The policeman’s colleagues give Anwar a good duffing over and strap him naked to a nearby church tower. Elsewhere though Anwar manages (not to add to the clichés) to get away with murder.

In Everyman Street words are slapped on the page as fishmongers used to slap on the haddock, but the overall effect is not that raw. Wryness, an appreciation of compromise in the human condition, leaven the take-it-or-leave it style. Clarity and empathy win the day.