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Review

Port of Entry, Geoff Hattersley, Littlewood Press. £4.00

I reviewed an earlier Geoff Hattersley collection some time ago and remarked on his talent for incorporating the colloquial and anecdotal into his work. In this new book, which is something of a selected poems, he demonstrates that he’s one of the liveliest of the younger northern poets, with a style which laconically deals with the ups and downs of aspects of contemporary life:

Five of us sat in the back of an old transit van,
huddled for warmth, drinking hot, steaming tea
from plastic cups, smoking cigarettes - though
fingers brittle as ice made rolling impossible.

     The tone is down-to-earth, ordinary, and provincial, though I’m not using that description in the negative way that some might. It seems to me that most people’s lives are provincial. And Hattersley has a knowing suspicion of grand theories that many of us would share:

Last night they planned
the socialist revolution,
seemed sure of its success.
This morning they wonder
which dumb proletarian
will clear up this mess.

     It isn’t deep thinking, but it rings true, and the language of the poems is correspondingly common in the best sense of the word. You can hear a real voice in it. I enjoyed this book. It’s bright, bitter, brittle, sometimes sad, and always readable.

 

Page(s) 69

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