Old City, New Rumours - Edited by Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens Reviewed by Tim Roux In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, or rather his character, Marco Polo, declares that a port approached from the sea is of a very different character from the same port as approached from the land. Being brought up in Hull in the 1950s and 1960s, I remember that you could drive into Hull down the Anlaby Road and have no sense of entering anything other than yet another Northern industrial red-bricked city until you either drove onto one of the docks or were assailed across the city centre by the gut-infested cloud from the fish meal factory on days when it was about to rain. What opened up the general concept of Hull as being a full-blown port to the casual passerby wishing to scurry to Holland or Belgium via North Sea Ferries was the creation of the Clive Sullivan Way, a testament to about the only black person ever to have lived in Hull. To have predicted pre-1970 that Hull would become some kind of literary Mecca would have been to invite about as much derision as you would have attracted if you had said that Hull would be found riding high for a week or two at the top of the football league. Up until then there had been three nationally respectable literary figures - Andrew Marvell, Winifred Holtby (South Riding) and Frederick E Smith (633 Squadron), topped up with a couple more who would not readily have been associated with Hull at all, but nonetheless were - Stevie Smith (as noted here by Maurice Rutherford in The Hull Poets - And Pigeons) and Dorothy L. Sayers. The person who opened up the possibilities of Hull to literature, as Clive Sullivan's memorial opened the city up to the impression of the Humber estuary, was Philip Larkin who incidentally laid the foundations for a strong poetic movement to be nurtured inside the gates of Hull University when he became its Head Librarian. Twenty-five years after Larkin's death, there are now closer to one hundred published authors, poets and dramatists associated with the city. In the same way that Marco Polo described the perceptual paradox relating to how you approach the city of Venice (an urban jewel with which Hull has rarely if ever been compared), so you could say that there is a matching dichotomy between how Hull writers approach the issue of Hull. The authors, who are mostly untouched by Hull University, have increasingly been focusing upon the unique nature and atmosphere of Hull itself as a backdrop to their novels. The poets, on the other hand, who have mostly passed anointed through the gates of Hull University, have typically had a loftier Olympian purpose, gazing across Holderness and the estuarial mud of the River Humber towards transcendence, as Ian Gregson describes it in his introduction to Old City, New Rumours. You don't get much transcendence down the Hessle Road that I have ever noticed. It has usually been more about survival in a Crow Town, as Margot Juby neatly coins it in one of her poems in this collection. I know the work of some of the thirty poets here better than others, especially that of Tony Flynn, Ian Parks, T.F. Griffin and Frank Redpath, and on that basis the editorial team of Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens has done an excellent job selecting some of their tastiest morsels, such as Tony Flynn's award winning Seeing Voices , Ian Parks' Lazarus, Frank Redpath's Story Time, and three stunning poems from the generally somewhat masked and waxed T.F. Griffin - The Canal, The Climb and Winter Sun . I obviously cannot discuss two to three poems from each of thirty poets here, even if I were competent to do so (which I am not), so I will just mention a few which particularly hit me as I read them the first time. I was keen to get a glimpse of Christopher Reid's work which I hadn't come across before and loved both Ink and Chorale for the oblique but vivid mind pictures he paints there. I think it is very difficult to write anything about 9/11 which is in any way fitting to its subject, but Grace Nichols' A Statement from the Empire State Building has a graciousness of its own. Douglas Dunn's The House of the Blind is startling and informative (I now know how Braille came to be invented), and both Sam Gardiner and Roger McGough have intriguing tales about a ring (A Ring and An Apology respectively). I also nominate Tom Paulin for his use of the verb 'to squinch' and the noun 'a geg' in A Single Weather and Tony Petch for his clever ruminations on the form of the sonnet in Two Poems. And there are even some poems about Hull, such as Grace Nichols' Outward from Hull (yes, I have certainly made that train journey a few times) and David Kennedy's The Hull Emigration Platform (I suppose it's about Hull). However, my prize for the most apposite poem in this collection goes to Maurice Rutherford's View from Hessle Road, where he turns a Hessle Road shopping trolley around on His Eminence Pope Larkin himself to record a grim and head-scarved backstreets housewife carping 'Oozee?', although I still reckon that Larkin's Hull poems are as elegant as any, and his description of Hull folk as 'a cut-price crowd' rapier sharp. Well, having failed to make fourteen friends and succeeded in making sixteen enemies, I think I'll stop on the note that this collection is of a very high standard indeed, and a huge improvement on the original Rumoured City which I once described as a 'chorus of Eeyores' but, sorry, for all that it is rarefied and varied in individual voice and structure, it just isn't as plain explosive as The Slab series collections, alchemised by another Hull-based poet Peter Knaggs, which has long rocketed itself into the lyrical heavens, tragically not even leaving a vapour trail visible behind it. No matter, to come a close second in the face of competition as tough and gritty as that is nonetheless a fine achievement and well worth the savouring. I shall be dipping back into this collection for ever on, and I will be alternating such dips buttie-like between two slices of The Slab. Links: www.a63revisited.com

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