Adrian Green is a former small press editor who has published two other full collections, Chorus and Coda and All that Jazz and Other Poems. He is a trustee of the Jazz Centre (UK), and ran a traditional jazz club in Southend. He has a real facility for writing poems about music, and jazz in particular. It’s an enviable skill. In ‘Out of Chaos’, an early poem in his new collection New Blues and Other Poems, he writes knowledgeably of chords, chorus, coda and cadence, and how it all begins to make sense:

 

     Waiting for that resolution

     the shift into rhythm

     from an aimless wandering

     as though no-one had told the band

     what tempo, key or chords

     they should play, until

 

     the drummer hits a groove,

     listeners relax, heads nodding,

     shoulders swaying

     to a measure they could dream to

     as they recognise the theme.

 

There’s a Thames estuary flavour – and I mean that in a good way – to a number of these poems, not least one celebrating the late, great Wilko Johnson, formerly of Canvey Island band Dr Feelgood:

 

     he owns the stage,

     talks through the verse

     and rolls back years

     in the middle-eight

     with that toe-heel shuffle

     and staccato charge

     across the floor

             (‘Wilko at the Railway – Roxette’)

 

‘New Blues’ tips its hat to the heritage sound of the Feelgoods, as it celebrates notes that “whisper through / marshes and the estuary mud”. That same estuary mood/mud often permeates the Other Poems in the collection. ‘By the Thames, Thinking of Spring’ celebrates a day when there are “neither dredgers nor/ quarter-mile monsters//nor the dirty British coasters/ with gravel bound for Greenwich”. ‘Passing Time on a Seafront Bench’ reinforces this sense of place:

 

     I trace patterns, runnels,

     mudpools, eelgrass shadows

     darkening the littoral, and closer,

     drying on the beach, the curling swirls

     of sand expelled by razor clams

     in hiding from a dehydrating breeze

 

Addrian Green also has plenty to say about poetry itself, including ‘Poetry and the Open University’, which offers this tantalising and little-asked question, “wondering why/ the women who would come/ and go/ talked of Michelangelo”. Why, indeed? There is also, for once, a poem about the death of Ted Hughes, rather than the legions of ones about the demise of Sylvia Plath (yes, all right, I kind of know the reason why): “This was the day / Crow fell from the sky.” (’28 Oct 1998’).

The final poem in the collection, ‘Sir IDS’, is perhaps an odd choice, though clearly felt strongly – an attack on the Essex MP and Tory MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who was for a brief, almost unnoticed time leader of the Conservative party. It’s written after Dylan Thomas’s villanelle ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, and has the alternative refrains: “Do not be gentle over that dark knight” and “Rage, rage against the lying of the right.”

Sir IDS’s offence? The former work and pensions secretary “cared nothing for the disadvantaged in their plight / But sent them to the food banks day-by-day.” Political poems can become dated very quickly, it’s true. But maybe “the lying of the right”, after 13 years of Conservative government, has a certain timeless quality. Let’s hope for a happier new year – and meanwhile feel some empathy for Adrian Green’s appreciation of music and outlook on life.      

 

Adrian Green, New Blues and Other Poems, Littoral Press, £9

Available directly from the author email adrian@greenad.co.uk  or from The Littoral Press