Tears in the Fence 84 is out and I have a review of The Literary Business by Peter Finch
(Parthian, 2025) in it. More of that in a moment. This issue is shot through with the elegiac: the lives of JH Prynne, Jeremy Hooker, and Ric Hool are remembered. A review of Frances Presley recalls her recalling (re-calling) of Gavin Selerie and Anthony Mellors. (As I type these names I realise I knew them all. See below.) But these are just first impressions.
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In my review I comment: ‘I know I will return to the book for further reference.’ And I will again, but the first effect of the book, after I'd filed my copy, was to notice the poetry of John Tripp. As I say, responding to Finch’s chapter entitled ‘John Tripp’: ‘John Tripp helped Finch’s early publishing, and with that arduous reviewing [in the editing of Second Aeon]. He otherwise exhibited “excess, diatribe, antisocial drink-driven outrage, minor larceny, insulting conduct”, but was a fine poet (making the final Penguin Modern Poets even though ‘his work is now fading fast into the dust of the last century’). Finch matches his account with two fine memorial poems of his own for “JT”.’ This sent me hunting, not for the man himself (a picture of him in a sombrero accompanies the chapter, and he bears a considerable resemblance to comedian Roy Hudd, even in the photograph below!) but for the poems.
I bought his Selected Poems published by Seren in 1989, three years after his death. I wasn’t disappointed. The mood is often grim, the Wales he commemorates is a rainy land that imperialism has scraped the veneer from, though he time and again recreates events of Welsh history in imagistic form, and not Welsh history only: ‘young men skewered and skulls smashed-in by butts./It is Flint, Culloden, Connemara.’ The tone is elegiac (that word again), bitter, but never hopeless (unless he’s talking about himself, but that’s self-dramatising). Despite the ubiquitous rain (‘There is downpour, always,/ as the carriages inch into Newport’ the first poem opens!) the familial home offers: ‘In summer a shock orange sunball/ shatters the trellis.’
‘The
Lost Girls’ is a meditation upon ‘maids and skivvies’ abused by their
employers; he presents one: ‘the thrust of an empire behind him,/ the
confidence of rich stags’. I particularly liked the final contribution, ‘Living
Under Thatcher’, a sequence of 10 poems: ‘The old man asks for free burnt
crackling/ off the cold pork, and is refused.’ That seems the apposite image
for the era. There’s more to say about Tripp (the poems about David Jones,
about Turner, about other writers, about the Second World War) but I’ll leave
it for now. And recommend others to discover (or re-discover) his work.
My
previous review for Tears (and poems) are referred to here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/02/one-review-and-two-poems-in-tears-in.html
(I have been a long-time contributor to the magazine, as a creative writer, but have recently taken to writing reviews, which I enjoy, and which I regard as pretty important to the life of the poetry scene, as I say here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-tears-review-of-philip-terrys-dantes.html
I appear in the book for Ric Hool, mentioned here; there is also a video of one of his last songs: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/01/tributes-to-ric-hool-included-in.html
I
remember Gavin Selerie here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/08/remembering-gavin-selerie-and-his-laugh.htm
