Coming to a Street Near You by Mike Watts
(Night Press) Reviewed by Peter Knaggs
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At 116 pages, 62 poems, here we have it, the hot debut from one half of the Write to Speak
duo, Coming to a Street Near You.
There are a clutch of writers at the moment; Martin Hayes, Dan Fante
and Tony O'Neill and they write poems, good poems, you don't see them rubbing shoulders with
Don Patterson and Jo Shapcott and it's unlikely that you would happen upon their work in Poetry Review.
Mike Watts shares something with this clutch of writers; they write everyday simple poems, poems that you could show to the postman or milkman and they'd get it, they'd like it.
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Yes, these poems are simple, but they are successful. This is because they have guts and sensitivity; these are poems from the pool room or the football ground, relayed in a chatty anecdotal way. The poems are accessible, but just because they are easy to read it doesn't mean they were easy to write.
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Everything of the Wild West frontier town exists in Hull and Mike Watts is a good Klondike of this material - whoring, drinking, mugging - there is real gold dust here.
Candid and unapologetic, Mike Watts stands up for a voice not heard that often in contemporary poetry, that is the voice of the white working class. It is a laddish book, there are poems about shagging or not shagging and nuddy books, there's something intrepid, charmingly brazen about them.
While it is laddish, I suspect that this is the stuff women want to know about, this is how men, well this one at least, think.
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It's the stuff of life, women, poetry, footie, what else is there? Beer, oh yes, that's in there too.
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The book has truly great moments. My favourite poems were Now She's Gone and Bookshop Millie, pointing Mike Watts out as actually a great love poet. Add the terrific The Decline of the Fishing Industry, which is a love poems for his son, and it becomes inescapable that here is an intelligent writer, sensitive to the human condition. If Mike Watts wears his heart on his sleeve, he's got soul tattooed inside his arm.
You may gather from what I have said that I enjoyed this book. I did. But I'm not, (as some may suppose) a member of some mutual backslapping club and as a critic I must point out, as Mike said to me over the phone, 'I'm not Ted Hughes.'
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The cornerstone of Mike Watts poetry, the crux, the r\342ison detre is performance. While the poems do work on the page, a pause on stage or an emphasis or change of tone can greatly lift the poem in performance, it can be missed in a book.
For me, as well, there is a lot of over egging of the pudding, for example in I Confess there's a confession at the end, or Bookshop Millie is a poem about, guess what,? A person in a bookshop called Millie, or Unhappy Shopper is a poem about, you've got it, an unhappy shopper. While all these poems work on stage, in the book, not too much is left for the reader to work out.
Nevertheless, as I said, I enjoyed the book, much more so than some of the ostentatious, torpor inducing collections short listed for the T.S. Eliot prize.
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The world needs more poets like Mike Watts. Coming to a Street Near You
is like the dodgem cars at Hull fair, these poems will jostle you, thrill you. There's a brooding undercurrent of sex and tattoos, mostly though, they'll leave you feeling like you've just had a great deal of fun.
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| What's Happening? |
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| Chill Out |
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