Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Some lives contain more injustice than others; this poetry considers the past without bitterness. Injustice is a single theme in a life lived fully, including: the recollected love of a mother, a partner and a son; the discovery of music; the celebration of the beauty of Birmingham’s city centre; and a gently humorous recalled visit to likewise-Caribbean relatives in Tipton, whose ‘bare-knuckle verbosity’ of dialect he cannot understand, but loves along with the oss in the neighbour’s garden. Tipton is a ‘lost city / quintessentially Black Country’.

There are other, tougher things, like separation and bereavement, and the painful/joyful encounter with a birth parent. I would have liked to hear McFarlane on age, because he belongs to my own generation, but that’s an unlikely subject for him. These poems are written with a young man’s vigour. There is engagement with zeitgeist and social movement, as the bad seeds sown by Enoch Powell in the town where McFarlane grew up – wither and die, just as a new city is born.