Imagined Corners by Keith Armstrong ISBN 0-9548691-0-9 £5.99.
It's sometimes argued that rhyme is backward-looking: poetry of the modem world has something of the time's flux and lack of regularity. All the same, there are seven rhyming poems in this collection, Keith Armstrong's first since 1990, and the last thing you could accuse him of is being reactionary, in any sense. Woody Allen once quipped that in an Ibsen play someone always opens a window to let in a breath of fresh air and everyone dies of influenza. Armstrong's poetry is the window opened to let out fetid air and everyone feels their lethargy evaporate. Although he's been writing and performing for over thirty years, he's still a marginal figure. Shame on the poetry czars! But it's easy to understand: his thirty years of writing coincide with the rise of tight-gutted reaction in a slick and mendacious Tory party hitting the crest of its final wave of power, the systematic strangling of infant joy in the Labour Party and a consequent generalised atomisation and pusillanimity in which simple enjoyment of life has become an offence against decency and parading wealth, power and ignorance the order of the day. In such an atmosphere, the joyous, subversive, delightful, unpretentious, funny, anarchistic free spirit which underpins Armstrong's work is likely to elicit calls for the bell, book and candle. All the more reason to read this book. It will cheer you up. If you are old enough to remember Britain before it fell under the malicious spell of those who believe to catch a bus if you're over thirty is proof of failure, it will remind you of gentler, sweeter times. It includes a poem called 'All Rich People Are Parasites'. Even celebs, I guess. This is from An Oubliette for Kitty:
And who can teach you a heritage?
Who can learn you a poem?
We're lost in a difficult, frightening age
and no-one can find what was home.
Simple but very clever. The first two lines could be spoken by Lear's fool, the second two by Lear himself. This stanza is typical of Armstrong straightforward, clear, wearing its learning and wisdom lightly. Yet there is a great deal of thought and of precise emotional response behind these lines. They are also surprising lines, and what else do we read poetry for? The hollowed out sense of history that drives the idiocy of the heritage industry is neatly caught, the creative solecism of learn you a poem is both funny and striking, and the final line sums up our current disorientation and its tragic consequences. The poem repeats the lines:
The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city
and old scars are all over the place
and the fourth stanza begins:
There's this dirt from a history of darkness
and they've decked it in neon and glitz
I think it needs to be stressed just how far out of step Armstrong is in insisting on this emphasis on history. There was a moment (the years between the General Elections of 1983 and 1987) when it became accepted wisdom that the history of 1945 to 1979 was a mistake and its sensibility to be definitively discarded. Armstrong, however, keeps alive a way of thinking and feeling by which we are all supposed to be embarrassed . The effect is that in place of the empty, near-manic, self-congratulatory but superficial and compensatory sensibility of modern culture, Armstrong gives us a sense of what we have lost, how we have gone wrong and reminds us of the dirt and darkness beneath the neon and glitz. He does so in poems that are technically achieved, funny, witty, touching, and sufficiently various for there to be something to light up every brain which responds to poetry. The final three-page, seven-part poem includes these lines:
This is a time for love
if ever there was one.
A joy that will lift
the concrete
off our bones,
free the song from our throats,
release the words from libraries..
He's right isn't he? There have been lots of worse times of course, but ours has a peculiarly sickening feel because we have the knowledge and the means to live much better and yet we repeat the old mistakes.
One way to make the world better would be to give poets as good as Armstrong their due. That he isn't a nationally known writer is just silly. This book should be on sale in every Waterstones in the land. Think how much you spend on your car, your holiday, your mobile phone. This is culture and it's only six quid! Buy ten copies and delight your friends.

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