A personal note, but relevant: I first picked up this large book at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and began to dip into it, a preliminary reconnaissance. I had an appointment at six with an impatient man, the sort who leaves if you are ten minutes late. When I next looked at my watch, the time was five past six. That is hardly a review, but surely an involuntary recommendation.
The first attraction is small poems that begin intriguingly:
If we are still together, it is because
Of the need to weed the garden.
You wonder what he means and he tells you, in a further nine lines (‘Eleven-thirty’). Brownjohn is much concerned with such precise timings, is a tidy man, the sort who likes to see chairs exactly aligned against tables. You learn this about him as you read, though he seldom talks confessionally, his self is merely one of the many things he observes and mentions, without pretension or strain.
Yet another dentist chalks up a low opinion
Of my courage…
— another inviting beginning (‘On My Recent Birthday’) moves on to larger things, such as unvariable moorhens, genetics, cowardice, and the dentist’s children, who are not moorhens,
. . . they have varied
Like everything made by man, including man.
Witty (sometimes merely playful), surreal (sometimes too much: ‘An Elegy on Mademoiselle Claudette’ eludes me; a youthful fantasy-girl? For once he provides insufficient clues). Angry (‘Ode to Centre Point’ — ‘a vast / Barren phallus of / Egg-boxes / Without eggs’); and his ‘A202’, ‘This coarse road my road’, is filled with dystopic disgust:
It takes out, in cars, arterial affluence
At weekends, returning it as bad blood
To Monday mornings in town. It is altogether
Like a vein travelled by hardy diseases,
an aged
Canal dredgeable for bodies left behind
On its soulless travels…
It is his obsession with time that comes across, time present as well as time past (he writes cheerfully ‘In Praise of Nostalgia’).
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