This came in the post last week and - in a sense - it had taken twenty years (more or less) to arrive. A long and interrupted journey from a tutorial in Oxford via a houseboat on the Isis to a shared house in Bristol and then years of silence when suddenly ...
Anyway, I'm now in a position to unveil The Walrus who has been an intermittent correspondent on this Blog - Ian take a bow. Here's his first collection and it is delightful (in the fullest sense of that word). It's a book whose very title is redolent of the British Empire and secondhand shops (how rightly they go together). It's a world of condemned arcades and Arcadia, a late 1970s feel when coffee came in mugs not styrofoam. Yet the 1880s too ... fading regalia, end of an era and end of the pier amusements. Or those wet afternoons in Weston in the 1930s, betcha money & Betjeman. A whiff of gas at the back of the chalet & deckchair gaudiness. And, of course, a nod to Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium I’m sure.
There are some major poems ('Chain Letter', 'It Takes A Man' to name but two), poems that I feel outright jealousy towards ('The Prophecies', 'Gods of the Near Future') and 'Windows' which would be the one I'd take to a desert island.
I think this volume is terrific and it seems John Ashbery and Mark Ford do, too. And I'm aware that Peter Gizzi has given it the thumbs up as well. With names like that weighing in you know this is someone to watch.
I was lucky enough to be given my copy. You'll have to buy yours - but you won't regret it.
