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Review

Too Far For Talk, Tony Lucas, Stride. £4.50

Tony Lucas is good at painting scenes in his poems, and after reading a few lines you can see and feel what he’s talking about:

He, in a awkward coat, balding
with side-burns, has let her buy the drinks,
and she - big-boned, with up-swept hair, suede boots,
- is telling him about her awful Christmas.

     It’s easy-going stuff, and I mean that in the sense of the relaxed rhythm and selective but accurate observation, and it tells a story. An urban story, usually, and one poem, ‘In the next Dark Ages,’ neatly mocks our contemporary tastes by setting up certain ‘objects of desire’ as things to be collected by a future generation. It’s an interesting idea, because it criticises the current and yet suggests that it may be looked on as a ‘golden age’ in a few decades from now. There’s a concerned social conscience at work:

In the next Dark Ages - monks and
scholars of new righteousness will scorn
the degradation of our taste, yet file
rock music and old films within their libraries

     Elsewhere, the city world of riots, casual theft, crumbling buildings, and street-corner encounters, comes alive in the poems, They’re never despairing, though, and if the picture is sombre it’s still very vital. I recognised the places Tony Lucas writes about, even though I may not have actually walked down the same streets. It’s a real world and one that most of us live in.

 

Page(s) 68

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