It’s a great title, though I’m not sure I like it. It gives off a clever-clever vibe out of kilter with the emotionally intelligent content. But first, to declare my interest. I’ve liked Steve Pottinger and his work for years, so what follows has to be seen through a filter of pre-existing admiration.
This is his seventh collection of poetry to go along with the three biographies of Midlands 80s punk survivors like Tezz Roberts of Discharge and Ross Lomas of GBH. If those names are unfamiliar, I wouldn’t be surprised, but they’re nonetheless entertaining reads, and possibly better than the more familiar score-settling end of the rock bio market occupied by better known figures. Fact is, they sell better than the poetry (nothing new there) and they are evidence that all Steve’s work is a labour of love.
His stock-in-trade is softly spoken anger at the world’s injustice, tempered with genuine compassion for those downtrodden masses they have now. In A fat man celebrates his place in the universe there’s acute observational insight that chooses empathy over judgement, whilst avoiding the trap of sounding like Ralph McTell on a bad night. (Millennials, get off Insta and do some research.)
[…] making a decaying orbit
of the high street […]
[…] hunting for scraps,
wolfing molten cheese of a pizza supernova
Postcards from the Fall of Home
Technique-wise, the conversational tone is buttressed by judicious use of repetition, internal rhymes and structural devices like callbacks. This provides the double whammy of poems that sound good in person but still have you re-reading once you’ve got to the end and say: “Wait a minute…”
It might not seem like much, but this matters. Given time I could bore the pants off you with my bollocks theory as to why I think Jo Bell’s poems are better than Kae Tempest’s: the latter is a gifted performer who never leaves an audience short-changed. The downside, for me, is that, once you’ve had that there isn’t anything else. Nothing left out on the pitch, and fair enough. The former’s poems give you the instant hit and then something more to chew on afterwards. IMHO, this is the Holy Grail of Great Poetry.
Though I’m biased by association, the better poems in here, such as Newport, Shropshire. 23rd March, 10.15 am manage this trick of forcing the Poetic Double-Take.
He doesn’t always manage it, particularly in the poems where over-ambition perhaps forces him to try too hard to make the micro-observations illustrate a wider geo-political point, as in On living with a larger, expansionist neighbour. Here, the bold attempt to liken Vladimir Putin to a Neighbour From Hell, sits awkwardly with more small-scale dramas played out in forgotten towns that more gently nudge the reader from the private to the pan-global.
Pottinger’s poetry
It’s clearly a conscious decision to equate the kitchen sink with the epic, but, for my money, he consistently does this more effectively by controlling the tone. In Crown and Sceptre, Friday 9th September, 4.15pm, said tone appears conversational, stream-of-consciousness, almost throwaway but cunningly uses repetition and rhyme in prose stanzas so sneakily as to leave you feeling you’ve had your pocket picked but really don’t mind.
This is a neat trick and not many manage it.
There are loads of fine poets making up the bulk of the iceberg whose tip is occupied by the better-known talents referred to earlier, and this collection is an example of what’s on offer around the circuit. Like the mythical urban rat, you’re probably never more than a few yards from an entertaining evening of poetry in a near-deserted pub.
In a culture where so many try to lift themselves up by punching downwards for vast sums while complaining they “can’t say anything anymore”, it’s always a tonic to dip into the cut-price, high-risk, high-reward world of lesser-known poets who can still find jewels in the pigs’ ears on local market stalls.
