The writer of this collection comes across as one sensitive to, and uneasy with, the cultural implications of the form he has chosen. Poets, he believes, are not cool people: ‘No one understands them. / They are inordinately proud of this’ (‘Poets’). Poetry, he tells us, is ‘embarked on largely by men and women labouring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both’ (‘This Poem is Certificate 18’). In ‘Trees’ he invokes poetry reading as illustrative of the narrow futility of human existence: ‘Look at you. You’re reading poetry. / Outside the spring air is thick / with the seeds of their children.’

Throughout the book, Haddon positions himself strenuously amongst ‘us’, the normal guys, distancing himself from the pitiful ‘them’ of ‘Poets’. This appears most simply in the coercive pronouns the collection is littered with. The effect of these will often be merely bizarre, as when the reader is corralled, by the poems’ address outward, into identifying with meaningless scenarios: ‘When you have jumped the logging trains / across the Hendersons and eaten // stray dog roasted on a brazier …’ Elsewhere, the pervasive ‘you’s, ‘we’s and ‘us’s create something more insidious, an insistence that we’re all the same really, that we all share the same (limited, rather clichéd) world-view.

‘Silver Nitrate’ is sub-Larkinesque in its proffering of the kind of responses we can all identify with, its playing on a tension between ‘us’ and not-us:

The dead seem so authentic …
with their folk-songs and their knowledge of mushrooms.
But they were just like us, vain about the trim
of their moustaches and their Sunday shoes.
They, too, had the dream about the dark house.

But the vacuous portentousness of that last line is all Haddon’s own. If I am a little surprised to be told that I (like everyone else) am vain about the trim of my moustache, then I am offended by the implication that Haddon is privy to my dreams: whatever I may think, he knows that everyone has had ‘the’ (note the definite article) ‘dream about the dark house’.

‘Thunderbirds are Go’ deploys a similarly trite nostalgia. After five stanzas hymning the excitements of 60s children’s TV (‘We filled the sky with our vapour trails’), it ends with the revelation that the real world isn’t like that:

Now everything is real. This bungalow. The early train.
We mow the lawn and smoke a cigarette
and sit here waiting for the call that never comes.

That ‘We’ is particularly unsteady. ‘This bungalow’ should imply situation specific to the speaker: thus the ‘we’ would refer to him and a companion. But the activities ascribed to this partnership belie this: joint lawn-mowing, joint consumption of one cigarette, seem bizarre. This ‘we’, then, must, as so often in the book, reach out to implicate the reader: Haddon is patronising his audience with the information that they too are trapped in suburban desperation.

Nostalgia for children’s TV is a cliché of middle-class identity formation. The book’s general penchant for paraphernalia betrays a circumscribed outlook, underwritten by a consumer-culture emphasis on enviable but unindividuating possessions or experiences. The first poem’s evocation of the marvellous variety of life falls back on the seductive speak of upmarket restaurants, listing ‘Red mullet with honey’ among its epiphanies. The voice that comfortably bandies brand names (‘the tailback dissolves, I put the Golf / in gear’) is not one to which I warm. This is the first slim volume in which I have come across heated towel rails twice.

All of the above is off-putting, but wouldn’t in itself damn the poetry, if Haddon could draw on, say, the authority of Larkin’s technical gifts to underpin it. Unfortunately, Haddon’s self-presentation as ‘just one of us’ extends to an eschewal of serious engagement with poetic technique. He likes ideas for poems (a skit on ‘Certificate 18’ poetry, or a canine monologue that ploddingly deploys every dog-related cliché Haddon can dig up) but has little apparent interest in language except insofar as it is the necessary vehicle for such ideas.

The dedication of ‘Lullaby’, for example, announces its genesis in a neat thought: ‘for Edith (1908–2003) and her great-grandson, Zack (2003– )’, but its execution is inept. All a lullaby purports to do is soothe, yet the first stanza’s clumsy scansion (‘Starlight, star bright / Lie in this cradle of night / and sleep tight’), and the grating ‘ize’ rhyme-sound of the last, prevents even this. The bathetic lineation of the following stanza from ‘The Model Village’ places unsustainable weight on words which, from a more skilled writer, I would have imagined deliberately chosen for their utter banality:

a world where games of football
can be won
and lost

Haddon is inept with the formal properties of language; he often doesn’t fare much better with meanings. The interrogation of stock phrases has been a poetic staple for the last 50-odd years: it takes a remarkably impervious cloth-ear to allow stodgy idioms like ‘never quite rang true’, or (of the writing process) ‘sweating to give birth’, to stand unchallenged, their literal meanings discordantly unaccommodated.

‘Great White’, about the terrifying fascination of sharks, contains the arresting image of ‘that photo’ (of course, that photo) ‘of the fisherman from Cairns, / his belly opened like a can of plum tomatoes’. It is unfortunate that, in the subsequent, last stanza, as Haddon aims to evoke the primal fear that sharks call forth, his weakness for airy generalisation leads him to express this as ‘what’s inside us all’. Could the infelicity be intentional? One can imagine a different kind of poem, which could incorporate the sardonic reminder that, whatever myths we create around ourselves and our deep-rooted fears, ‘what’s inside us all’ is, on an important level, simply very similar to ‘a can of plum tomatoes’. But the tone of ‘Great White’ has, up to this moment, shown such solemn lack of self-awareness that if irony is intended, then it jars uncontrolledly.

Such lack of tonal control is one of the worst faults of the book. And it doesn’t always seem, as here, accidental. The poems’ frequent, inexplicable tonal inconsistencies, their switching irresponsibly between moods just, apparently, because they can, display a casual disregard for the desirability, for readers, of stable positions, amenable to sustained interpretation. This blithe indeterminacy must be what occasions reviewers’ praise of this volume as ‘packed with interpretative possibilities’, their admiration for the way ‘mood, tone, diction all fuse into an extraordinary bud of meaning … waiting to unfurl into whatever shape your mind will choose to give it’. Excitement over such readerly freedom is probably what prompts the enthused call, ‘Mark Haddon should join Simon Armitage on the school syllabus’.

I cannot think of anything less advisable. Young people should be allowed to learn about poetry from practitioners who are in control of, and have some respect for, the function of their work in creating meaning; not from someone who would debunk (and whose work belies) the idea that poetry is anything special at all.

Mark Haddon, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, Picador, 2006. £7.99. 0-3304440-03-9

© April Warman, 2006

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.