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Mackerel Wrappers by Martin Cook
(Happenstance, £4.00) 39pp.
Available from www.happenstancepress.com

A sprightly nostalgia informs the anecdotes of Martin Cook’s debut pamphlet, drawing on a life engaged in careers as diverse as military service, marketing and social work, an odd combination few could stake a plausible claim on. The title poem regrets the passing of newspaper as the historic receptacle of choice for fish and chips, eating his mackerel “from a grease-proof wrapper/ in a polystyrene tray” while noting that even the Romans “used old poems/ (or even discarded prose)/ to wrap a fish”. ‘Liberace’s Autographed Tip’ concerns a signed £5 note that Cook’s wife holds up “for admiration as though/ it was by Fabergé”, acquired “in those long ago days/ when a fiver was a fiver/ and more than half our rent”, and -having spent it on “groceries and booze” – finds that “when a quarrel starts/ you remember his fiver/ after forty-five years”. Many poems sketch portraits of characters such as ‘George’, a dying export manager with “eyes the texture of lichen/ below grey-ash of his forehead” and a jaw like “a withered gate,/ its bottom hinge rusted away”, or ‘Mildred’, whose “duck-egg eyes/ could turn you to stone/ while her scrawl of grey hair/ imitated asps”. Sex rears its head in ‘Suburban Music’, a light take on marital routine in which “our sagging bed receives us/ with an amicable creak./ Amorous gymnastics take place/ every other week”, and ‘Zabb’, a revisiting of a bawdy tale from The Thousand And One Nights in which a man prays to Allah for an increase in genital dimensions: “his wish was granted/ for his zabb was a marrow between melons/ and the Joy of his Life cowered away in terror/ at the immensity of it, and begged him to wish again”. Returned to his old size, “the Joy of his Life called it My Flower of Perfection/ and they explored possibilities for the rest of their lives”. Mackerel Wrappers won’t change the world, but it’s the print equivalent of having a few pints with a stranger happy to spin a few yarns about an eventful life.