Poetry, please

Last Saturday I was sitting at the kitchen table ready to go out for the evening, when I heard at the tail end of a radio news bulletin that the English poet Vernon Scannell had died. The name rang a bell. I went to the bookshelf and, yes, there was Vernon Scannell’s Collected Poems 1950–1993, bought several years ago in a charity shop and not looked at since.

I hadn’t heard of Vernon Scannell before I came across his book of poems by chance, or of the publisher. I was intrigued by the paperback’s unpretentious design. On the back cover a poetry critic admitted to liking the poems enough to reread some of them. Someone else was quoted as saying that he was surprised that ‘Mr Scannell has not been made more of’.

Inside, the modesty continued. Vernon Scannell’s two-paragraph introduction to his life’s work was self-effacing to the point of insanity and impressively free from cant. ‘I have included,’ he says, ‘all of the pieces that I believe to be, irrespective of their literary quality, genuine poems, that is to say poems that have been written from a sense of compulsion. I have cut out all those poems which on rereading seem to be quite obviously false, banal or inept, though I am sure there will be readers who will find much of what is included just as obviously guilty of these flaws.’

At random I read a poem called ‘Cigarette’. It began: ‘It tap-danced on the shining silver case/Jumped to his mouth, wagged jaunty from teasing lip.’ I liked him already. I paid the woman and bore the book away.

Looking through it at home later on, I found I’d bought a treasure-trove of frank, accessible, skilful poems made by a man of flesh and blood.