Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

If the title, with the cover photo, together refer to a group of dwellings on a housing estate, it is a good starting-point for the reader. But interpretation of ‘Close’ should not stop there. ‘Close’ to the lives narrated in these 41 poems are our lives. In the manner of Black Country prose writer Michelle Mclean – Pay Day & Other Teabreak Tales - we frequently come up hard against what we never suspected in our neighbours! These are lives sometimes trapped or at-risk, frequently unlived to the full, but rarely disappointed. Those who live in the Close are a tough, amiable bunch, never missing the chance to laugh at the absurd. The woman at maisonette number 7  ends the catalogue of goings-on and vice she’s observed from her window:

In truth, my blood pressure has shot up a notch
since I was asked to co-ordinate neighbourhood watch.

Elsewhere, there is a sense of bad luck turning to good. The street cleaner on the council car park  finds ‘an empty “Clear Blue” pack and later the ‘broken bits of white plastic’ indicated a pregnancy test that has disappointed. Yet in Margaret of the Fox Earth,

Deep in her belly she feels
the quickening.

Equally, the woman on the top floor of the low-rise flats is high on second chance, following the fitting of a pacemaker, hears

the transistor radio
of her heart, which though out of tune
still pumps out poppy beats. Live, love life, do.

The place-names apart, this is a landscape recognisably Black Country, with its canals, diverse population and urban tragedy. Purshouse finds incidental beauty, whether the young woman on the bus conceived as a mermaid, where

the exact blue of a chromis fish…
is lit with yellowy-green streaks
like sunlight reaching down into a reef.

Identifying a different kind of beauty, returning to her mother’s, the girlfriend of the man at 13a  decides to clean the stylish British Knight baseball boots that he has defiled. These are poems ‘about life, about death’ but most of all ‘about carrying on’.