Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Shelley would have read this book with approval. As would Dickens. And that other great 19th-century observer and radical Many Anne Evans, aka George Eliot. Its effect is to elevate those lives that offer no promise at all; nevertheless to see in them a sturdiness, and care for others when they themselves are not cared for. This collection searches for the root of social solidarity. It confronts the attempts of the powerful to deceive and divide us. It raises in us a fire equivalent to that of the poet. This is not the smouldering bitterness of resignation. It is the laughter and anger of those who know their time will certainly come.

Pottinger presents us with an enclosed world of ‘tiny tattered town’ where yobs, drunks and property developers are unrebuked by authority as they take over, respectively, play-areas in parks, family pubs, and the last remaining green space of a built-up landscape. The first of these, the yobs, are presented with some understanding of the origins of their mindlessness. With the last, the property developer, there is no such tolerance, of his mendacity and false logic. Karaoke at the Horse and Jockey  though, for all the limited horizon represented by the pub and by the singer ‘after a day spent on the booze’ there is quality in the act; her ‘murdered’ song is an expression of ‘her hope, her pain’, a perception that ‘for those few minutes / she could be anyone’. If those few minutes could only be extended to a lifetime! So too the process worker in Black Country Lunch Break  who, in solitude by the summery, verdant canal, realises

I’m nothing special, a simple man
one of the just-about-managing
but moments like these
they make my heart sing.

Though elsewhere, life is seen to demand more from us than appreciation, important though that may be. Enough considers the option of withdrawal from life, of quietism where you will tend vegetables / grow old by the heat of a fire / lose yourself in books / and the view from a window. While at the beginning the speaker’s had enough of the daily grind, by the end there is resolve, to roll up your sleeves / and set to once more.

Pottinger’s truths are told through unambiguous poetic language, rhymes sparingly but dextrously used, and the clean rhythms of natural speech.