Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews Tramp in Flames by Paul Farley

Philip Larkin’s unique success as a poet was to make an original blend of influences, from Yeats to Betjeman, seem native British tradition: poetic breakfast tea. The average semi-ambitious poetry collection is still modelled on the mix that Larkin popularised for a post-war readership: thirty or so poems, largely in regular stanzas, with the odd formal experiment or piece of free verse to show the poet’s inventive side, and a pair of longer meditations to show his responsible one (the poets who most solemnly conform to this template tend, for whatever reason, to be male).

Larkin’s voices in fact developed coherently from lyrical experiment in The Less Deceived (1955) to monumental statement, pastoral and satire in High Windows (1974), via one collection embodying this happy medium: The Whitsun Weddings (1964). But the Collected Poems easily blurs into one long volume in which similar proportions obtain, thanks to two constants: an everyman lyric persona and scrupulous quality control.

Unfortunately, most latter-day Larkins imitate only the former. Paul Farley, born one year (or possibly, nine months) after The Whitsun Weddings, is already onto his third collection in a decade with Tramp in Flames. ‘Automatic Doors’ finds him bemoaning the electrification of the public entrance with an echo of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’ (‘When I see a couple of kids / And I guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm / I know this is paradise // Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –’):

When I see some kids springing the gallery doors
I lament the great revolvers.

But while Larkin’s still-shocking opening modulates into a mute vision of ‘sun-comprehending glass’, Farley’s goes down the long slide of nostalgia: ‘we were time travellers / fast-forwarding ourselves into the future / before we were thrown out, into an era / of never even having to lift a finger.’ All ‘High Windows’’ sharp complexity about youth and age, real and ideal, is collapsed into a sepia vignette of lost innocence.

Farley has found a niche as the poet of a generation whose common culture is childhood and its trivia. Tramp in Flames’ title poem is calculated both to shock and appeal to such readers:

Some similes act like heat shield for re-entry
to reality: a tramp in flames on the floor.
We can say Flame on! to invoke the Human Torch
from the Fantastic Four.

The response is deliberately inadequate. However, the simile finally found to re-enter the human ‘reality’ of the scene falls short of seriousness in a different way: ‘a pool forms like the way he wet himself / sat on the school floor forty years before’. The story is imposed as simply and sentimentally as the social classification ‘tramp’: from poor wet boy to poor burnt man.

The problem with ‘Tramp in Flames’, and Tramp in Flames, is this narrow assumption of common ground. Essentially, ‘we’ are a collective extension of the Paul Farley persona, a working-class boy who finds himself middle-class in middle age, thanks to an interest in poetry. This fate is described most unhappily in ‘Philistines’, a sestina written by someone who writes ‘sestinas in Word for Windows’ and wonders about the mental lives of menial labourers: ‘Do they see a world we miss, squeegeeing our windows?’ The ironic point seems to be that poet and reader can see this world, imaginatively – ‘of call centres without windows / where Post-Its stick like shit to shoes’ – whilst still keeping it materially on the other side of ‘windows [that] hiss tight shut’. Yet the conceit is won in defeat: you have to be the reader Farley says you are in order to appreciate the insight.

Larkin’s typical lyric vantage point might be criticised for its too ready transcendence of ‘residents from raw estates’ (‘Here’, The Whitsun Weddings). But it was also his ability to depart from the demotic that made him so widely popular (‘and not just in England’, as Seamus Heaney has wisely noted). At his best, Larkin is a stranger poet than his prosaic persona, drawing on deeper traditions of verse. The final line of  ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, for example, recalls an Anglo-Saxon ‘maxim’: ‘Now / Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.’

By comparison, the only tradition a typical Paul Farley poem recalls is that of its professionally-Northern, post-Larkin peers: Armitage, Harrison, O’Brien. Even at moments of wonder, its diction clings defensively to the kind of colloquialism (‘a sky brilliant with stars / a few degrees out of whack’) that Larkin always balanced with unashamed high-style (‘Chaldean constellations / Sparkle’).

The strongest single poem in the book may be ‘Brutalist’, another challenge to the comfortable reader to imagine underclass life, this time in ‘cellarless, unatticked’ tower-blocks. Its rhyming quatrains achieve the bleak observational concentration of some of Farley’s early poems (in The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1999)) and a conclusion of real poetic compression: ‘The final straw / will fill the fields beyond. Now live in it.’

But readers looking for more imaginatively complex engagements with twenty-first-century Britain should try more ambitious kinds of volume. I recommend Simon Smith’s flicker-book sequence Mercury (Salt: ‘A white “YOU” printed across my red tee-shirt in arial’), Michael Haslam’s ongoing rhyme of the post-industrial North, A Sinner Saved by Grace (Arc: ‘Racing round the chilly warehouse lets us sweat’), and Peter Manson’s tragic-comic experimental miscellany, For the Good of Liars (Barque: ‘Solidity transit, I suck Artex’).

Tramp in Flames, Picador, £8.99, ISBN 0330 44007.

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.