John Lyon reviews We Were Pedestrians by Gerard Woodward

We Were Pedestrians seems a brave attempt to redirect the scatological tradition in English literature from the satirical into the lyrical. 'The Lavatory' celebrates the liminality of the loo:

... a place between rooms
Where we paused between selves.
A place of mixed waters,
Hardly known, yet the route
To it always on the tips
Of our tongues, should a stranger
Ask for it. Any stranger who went there
Might return as a friend.

(Are there perhaps better ways to make friends?) The succeeding poem, 'Flush', gets closer, seemingly addressing itself to a turd, marvelling at how flushing water comes to occupy the 'narrow villa of porcelain// Where you were just moments ago', 'How this spring/ Takes you and takes you whole,/ Busily tidies you.' Where Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Woodward sees microcosms in 'Cow-pats Revisited'. Another poem takes the weight of 'My son's full nappy', reading the contents as we might read runes. The problem with secular epiphanies, scatological or otherwise, is that everything is as important - or unimportant - as everything else. These poems are convinced of their own significance: readers must decide whether they share that conviction, whether they are encountering pathos ('enormous pathos' according to the jacket blurb) or bathos.

This collection seeks to make the world strange and thus fresh and it does so in two main ways: by offering a series of incomplete or puzzling narratives and by means of Martian metaphors and similes. Yet too often it falls into the sentimental or precious. 'A Bouquet' recounts how Interflora had left flowers at a house down the road, the house of a dysfunctional family, more usually visited by 'dealers,/ Creditors, welfare officers, the police,/ A man with an iron bar' and ends in a Wordsworthian missing of the point, wondering

... about the flowers,
If they ever found something

To put them in.
Whether they watered them.
Did they get in the way

Of the television, or the door?
What did they make of them?
How long did they live?

Wordsworthian, too, is a concern with children, a pondering, not to say ponderous musing, over their nappies, loose milk teeth, outgrown shoes and holiday disappointments which has something to learn from the tough-mindedness of children themselves and from the glazed looks of visitors which parents encounter when they pass round snapshots of their offspring.

To excreta and children we can add interest in domestic scenes, desert wars and ecology, all of which confirm We Were Pedestrians as of its time: for all its claims to strangeness, the underlying thoughts and attitudes are at best unremarkable, at worst clichés. Language is not put under any particular pressure in this collection. Hence one is unsure whether the McGonagallism of the following is or is not deliberate pastiche:

We walked all day in our Wellingtons
To see the northern whaling stations.

Our feet were bleeding in their rubber
When we saw the slipways full of blubber.

Men slicing into pouches
Dissecting hearts as big as couches,

Entrails drying on the beaches,
Pink blood foaming in the reaches.

In the town we sensed hostility,
Couldn't even get a cup of tea.
('North from Reykjavik')

In all, too many poems in We Were Pedestrians read like exercises from a Creative Writing class, that educational phenomenon which has already done so much damage to American poetry and which is now afflicting the UK. The ghost of 'And then I woke up' is too evident here: 'She was rich, her money problems solved' and 'And then I was sick' can hardly be described as singing lines. The literary forbears are a little tired too: 'Phoebe', in which the eponymous daughter speaks lamb with lambs, is a cosier version of Ted Hughes's 'Full Moon and Little Frieda'; Edwin Morgan's Cold War visit to Sobieski's Shield is repeated here in time of ecological trouble; and Beowulf has been wheeled out rather too often to provide cod simplicity and authenticity.

This collection costs nine pounds and in that it is not at all unusual. Slim volumes of poetry have become absurdly expensive. It would be good to hear how poetry editors from the various publishing houses justify the way in which - to adapt one of Woodward's least elegant lines - they 'lift the easy money from [our] slacks.'

Gerard Woodward We Were Pedestrians
Chatto & Windus, £9.00

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.