Selected Poems Book

Blake Morrison's return to poetry after two highly regarded prose works--his award- winning memoir And when did you last see your father? and As If, his account of the Jamie Bulger trial--is marked by the appearance of this Selected Poems, a book which recapitulates work from earlier volumes and adds some new pieces. The themes and concerns of the prose works can now be seen to revisit themes from the earlier poems: on the one hand, the sense of the past, family and the particularities of local culture; on the other, an attempt to chart the failures and betrayals of our larger society in its impact on people's lives. Morrison's pessimism shows up in the grain of the poetry, observations of public spaces contrasted and juxtaposed with private moments which, as in "On Sizewell Beach", seem to emphasize an unbridgeable separation of the two--anxiety and powerlessness inflecting the closely observed and detailed glimpses of individual existence. Section III of the book explores misogyny and male culture which centres on the extended "The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper" with the short metrical quatrains of the form, the Yorkshire dialect of its telling and the nervous distancing of the narrative point of view--a collective "mea culpa" on behalf of men is tentatively proffered as a counter to the mythicising pull of the ballad structure. Later poems show Morrison exploring the relationships between men and women in a more intimate way--the feeling of atomisation, of differences that will never be resolved is still pervasive--but on domestic terrain the poetry feels more fluent, assured and evenly sympathetic. Among the final poems, "The Inquisitor" is perhaps the most interesting: a long poem exploring British political secrecy which opts for an ambitious semi-narrative approach, evoking John Le Carre's thrillers as a witty, ironic frame for political rumination, and thereby allowing Morrison to move beyond the pervasive pessimism of the earlier work. These last poems in fact show that Morrison has a surprising range to his verse that is still to be fully explored. --Burhan TufailRead More