Tag Archives: Neil Fulwood

1948 by Andy Croft (Five Leaves)

Poetry, Review, , ,

Q. What do you get if you cross George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico?

A. Andy Croft’s 1948

Granted, that’s a glib opener for a review, barely scratching the surface of this inventive verse-novel. Let’s dig a little deeper: imagine a complete up-ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston Smith is a journeyman copper, O’Brien his world-weary boss, and Julia so impossibly chaste that there’s barely a suggestion of sexcrime on young Winston’s radar. Moreover, Croft swaps Orwell’s dystopian future for a rigorously imagined alternative history where a Labour-Communist coalition is the ruling party, the Royal Family have made a swift departure for the colonies, and America is threatening economic sanctions. Nonetheless, London is hosting the 1948 Olympics but murder, dockyard strikes and a glamorous Russian agent threaten to disrupt the opening ceremony.

Okay, that’s the Nineteen Eighty-Four part of it. Onto the Ealing: imagine Passport to Pimlico as a film noir directed by Edward Dmytryk or Jules Dassin, all fog and shadows, car chases, dames, handguns, and the occasional cosh applied to the back of the head.

Now take one final aesthetic leap and imagine the whole wacky confection drizzled with humour and served up as a sequence of 150 Pushkin sonnets. Picking perhaps the most obscure sonnet form available, Croft dazzles with his wit and wordplay, a feat made more impressive in that he doesn’t just narrate the entire seven chapter novel in verse: the dedication, contents page and acknowledgements are also sonnets. This is the kind of showmanship that could easily have been too clever for its own good, but 1948 remains entertaining and immensely readable throughout. If you’re a fan of Orwell, Ealing, contemporary poetry, or just plain curious about the kind of eccentric talent that throws all of these cultural touchstones into the blender, this is essential reading.

Neil Fulwood
Neil Fulwood has published three books on film. He is a member of Nottingham Poetry Society.

Division Street by Helen Mort (Chatto Poetry, £12)

Poetry, Review, ,

How to Thrive in the Digital Age by Tom ChatfieldStill only in her twenties, Helen Mort follows up her Tall-Lighthouse and Wordsworth Trust pamphlets with her first full-length volume. The opening poem, ‘The French for Death’ riffs on her surname and establishes a mordant sense of humour that infuses the collection. The humour is welcome; without it, Division Street might have been a hard slog.

The title poem references a street in Sheffield: “You brought me here to break it off / one muggy Tuesday. A brewing storm / the pigeons sleek with rain.” Location and personal experience stud Mort’s work like pins in a map. In ‘Take Notes’, there’s a sense of curtain-twitching parochialism: “… the checkout girl in the superstore / who didn’t look at me, only what I bought. / You pointed out each lit window in town. / Take notes, you said, one day you’ll write this down.” ‘Take Notes’, along with ‘The Girl Next Door’, ‘Thinspiration Shots’ and ‘Beauty’, forms a loose quartet on the nature of female identity and the struggle against objectification and expectation.

Always, though, there’s the sense of place: ‘Coffin Path’, ‘Brocken Spectre’ and the wonderfully surreal but understated ‘Items Carried Up Ben Nevis’ are anchored by the rugged physicality of the landscapes they describe, while ‘Scab’, the collection’s eight-page centrepiece, shows that the scars of the miners’ strike are still keenly felt and a part of Mort’s heritage: “A stone is lobbed in ’84”, the sequence begins: “hangs like a star over Orgreave. / Welcome to Sheffield. Borderland, / our town of miracles – the wine / turning to water in the pubs, / the taxman ransacking the Church, / plenty of room at every inn.” The sequence moves from alternative parable to Jeremy Deller’s 2001 re-enactment of the battle of Orgreave to the blunt interruption of the poet’s university days by the past: “One day, it crashes through / your windowpane; the stone, / the word, the fallen star. You’re left / to guess which picket line / you crossed …”

Division Street is rich in hard earned and unblinkered experience. It’s a rite of passage with not a single duff poem, announcing Mort as a major new voice.

Neil Fulwood