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Simon Darragh’s first major collection includes the poem ‘Winches’ which won the Peterloo competition judged by Anthony Thwaite in 1993. Thwaite has been quoted as liking poems that are “well made, carefully arrived at, decently understated”, and it is not hard to see why he gave the thumbs up to this particular gem.

     ‘Winches’ is full of descriptive energy as the narrator puzzles initially over “pyramids of rust, like washing mangles/ spaced along the shore at Hythe” until the flash of insight as, some time later, he observes “one man haul/ a fishing-boat up shingle banks, inch by grating inch”, leading him to notice how “the mind might seize and rust, need weeks of work to free/ the grinding gears.... how, once caught the ratchet locks...”

     Whilst the conclusion is similarly well wrought and he rarely bargains with the muse for the sake of clarity. He likes his rhymes. His work is, predominantly metaphysical and serious but sometimes he belies a cutting humour bordering on cynicism. In ‘Situation Wanted’ he writes, romantically to a Ms S, applying for the position “should a vacancy arise/ in that department... of “Gazer in your Eyes; / Supplier of the Secret Smile and Sigh”.

     Darragh also takes the mickey gently out of his own vocation in ‘Is your poem really necessary?’:

But is it really kind

to take defenceless language
and stir it to a riot
of hopelessly mixed metaphor no reader will
                                               feel better for?

Why not just keep quiet?

Darragh is in danger of driving himself into a Larkinesque writer’s block with blasphemy like that!