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The first thing that
strikes a reader of Hoyoot, Tom
Pickard's latest offering, is the immense breadth of a collection that is
articulate, rich in their detail and refreshingly free from airs of
pretension and affectation. The title of which derives from a piece of choice
Geordie slang meaning alternately 'to make redundant', 'throw coins from a
bridal car' or to 'expel revelers' and effectively dictates the tone of a
sprawling collection that represents a career spanning a little under half a
century. Poems within range from the caustic 'First Fuck' which crafts a
lyric from erotic odyssey in the dole queue and harks back to the imagist
movement:
split she was
lay there two ways
shagged we had
and breast apart
...
fucked we had
and pissed happy glad.
to the pared
down traditional 'Ballad of Jamie Allan' an embittered and unambiguously political musing on an eighteenth-century
gypsy musician who lived on the English-Scottish Borders and died in Durham
jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse and abandoned by the dukes
and earls who had patronised him prior to his capture:
They said no jail could hold me
at the age of twenty-five
but now I am past seventy
and chained up to my lies
In their construction, Pickard's poems bear a stark resemblance to the direct
expression and structural simplicity of the Mersey poets but resist the easy
cynicism that was characteristic of their earlier work. When Pickard draws on
contemporary subjects and on his own history in the impoverished northeast
one is aware, despite his inherent humour, of the full range of human
experience and emotion - as here from
'Next Door's Bairn':
waking at four to your
cries
I've grown to expect you
with wall shaking trucks
that simple cry of need
awake, hungry, your heart
opens
and is filled
One might consider these poems, in their anger and reactionary power, to be
reminiscent of those of Tony Harrison - the two certainly have their
similarities, Pickard's dialect poetry in particular denotes a rare freedom
as here in 'Scrap':
Kick ees heed in
geroot yi twat
stick it on im
kick ees pills
boorim in the nakaz man
wipe ees face wi ya raza
smash the get
or here, in the more restrained 'The Daylight Hours':
A hev gorra bairn
an a hev gorra wife
an a cannot see me bairn
or wife
workin in the night
But there is little quibbling existentialism and less of a sense of
self-aggrandising in Hoyoot, the
poet masters his doubt and produces a dramatic and self-assured read.
The
real success of Hoyoot is that every reader, if they are truly
honest, will encounter poems that jar with them, appear pointless or that
they find outright offensive. Pickard's poems act as a foil against Paxman's
belief that modern poetry has 'connived at its own irrelevance' and that
poets now exists only to address other's within their exalted circles. These
are poems for all, which transcend the class system and function outside a
library or literary degree and, unlike much published work of our era, do
more than perpetuate themselves. No matter your views on the sentiment
expressed in the contentious 'Who is the Whore of Armageddon?'
Who sucks milk from baby
mouths?
Whose breath is bilious
with unemployed bombs?
...
Whose legs are knotted
with varicose veins
from standing on the
necks of health workers?
...
Whose tongue is gang
warfare on a global scale?
Whose grammar is a tattoo
of paratroopers
tap-dancing on teeth
...
Whose television is
programmed by corporations
in government business?
one cannot deny that his poetry is closely observed. Whether he is using his
art to give form to anger or tender and familial moments, Pickard's
unapologetic free verse and economy of style gives a sense of organised form
to life. Those readers who come to Hoyoot with an open
mind will find much to excite them.
©
Phillip Clement 2014
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