Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

I have always admired artists who make beauty from what comes to hand – thrown-away household items, disused gadgets and paint from the very bottom of the tin. It is from such an array of discarded language that this poet assembles the metalled edifice of his verse. The references however are wide – to pop culture and to the psalms – and there is evidence of his own absorption in the poetry ‘cannon’ of the past 150 years. This is accomplished work: the pieces have settled into their enduring form. Contained in a mere 38 pages, there is massive content.

These poems are assemblages, no more so than in Doilies, a collage of pub remarks wrought together into a fluent whole. I felt though, here and throughout, the author’s presence, an entity quite separate from ‘speaker’ as the source of a poem’s narrated is often identified. Al Hutchins takes us downward, onto a bus and its ‘ramshackle and ransacked upper deck’ to where he is (cold) Shouldered by the indifference and threat of an urban crowd, and to a view of polluted waters and grim ensuing thoughts. A day that should be ‘a vagabond of stars’ turns out to be a ‘hell-hole’; into the ‘prowl and famine of a full house’ comes a stranger, not a ‘well-well onlookers’ but one

… phased to havoc
The shock-heart loitering and the shammy of the blest …

In the main these poems are meditations, where this singular voice addresses us all. A frequent reference is to love, said to

… obliterate
The need of beggar
Need of thief

… love, perhaps what may lead us to a habitable world. A lover or loved-one is spoken to elsewhere. The poem that first charmed me was Hold, set in the west of Scotland, where momentarily there is peace, relief from the ‘mess of rage’ so that

… when I hear the rawlish of the geese crying in the far night
And when I hear the fat rain stall in the engine of the breeze
… all the dark will get to hold us in bright and tawny hands.