Tony Walsh is a leading performance poet with his roots very firmly in the north, whose first open mic gig was in Manchester in 2004. He performed at Glastonbury the following year, and this is his first full collection.

To describe it as simply a collection of poems is inadequate. It is more of a poetry manual, containing detailed biographical notes, a fierce manifesto in which Walsh sets out his personal philosophy about the liberating power of performance poetry and his belief in a poetic community, explanatory notes about his poems, and a long list of other poets that he recommends you should check out.   

Walsh says in his manifesto that “we live our life to rhythms and patterns, we’re hard-wired to receive them”. As you read these poems you can feel the beat. Whole lines are sometimes repeated, often more than once; but repetition can be effective. In ‘A Girl, Like, Y’Know’, a poem about, you know, inarticulacy, he manages to say a great deal with minimal vocabulary: 

 

     And we was all a bit pissed, like

     And we just sort of kissed, like

     And ended up round the back, like, you know

 

By contrast, in ‘Drastic Surgery’, written when Walsh was living and working in the most deprived areas of Manchester and Salford, the language is rich, observant and compassionate, examining the almost infinite variety of complaints among patients in a GP’s waiting room over 23 stanzas:

 

     ‘He can’t get it up.’ ‘She can’t keep it down.’

     ‘He keeps throwing up.’ ‘Is it mean to be brown?’

     ‘I can’t get to sleep.’ ‘I can’t keep awake.’

     ‘There’s heartache and heartbreak and shivers and shakes.’

 

‘It’s All Going Posh Down The Precinct’ is written, Walsh says, in the voice of an old man who feels excluded by inner-city regeneration and gentrification: 

 

     And they don’t serve mild and bitter!

     Just lager and cocktails and vino.

     And you can’t get a brew like you used to,

     just froth that they call ‘Crappacino’

 

But even as he gently sends up an old ‘un’s nostalgia for the “good old days”, you can’t help feeling that he shares at least some of these sentiments, and is reflecting a wary northern scepticism about modern trends. On rare occasions he tries too hard to sound ‘poetic’, as in these lines in ‘Debris’:

 

     Freeze frame reminders

     of perma-frost failings.

     Of half-lives, half-frozen

     with knee-tremble fears.  

 

Here he is in danger of falling into the category of those “wandering lonely as a cloud”, as he describes them in his punchy manifesto. But this doesn’t happen very often.  Walsh wears his heart on his sleeve. In ‘Let’s Make A Love’ he acknowledges that he is open to accusations of composing the “corniest poems” and adds: “But I don’t care!” He reviews a couple’s whole life together, with this moving conclusion:

 

     We must …share the same gravestone. 

     Just the pair of our names shown.

     Forever. When hush comes to love.

 

This is an achievement; it is quite hard to write effectively about love and happiness. It’s equally difficult, often, to capture the magical mystery of music in a poem. The critic in me resists the preacher’s gospel chant of ‘Rock&Roll’: “Do you believe that Rock&Roll / can blow the mind and free the soul?” However, another part of me that still finds himself dancing round the room to Bruce Springsteen, occasionally, says: “Bloody right, mate!” In ‘Why Glastonbury’, Walsh unashamedly links the mood of the festival to a revolutionary spirit once commonplace at festivals in the 1960s and asks:

 

      And why don’t we ask why more? Why can’t things change forever? 

      And so why don’t we resolve here now that Glastonbury’s flames

      Will light a million beacons and ignite the sparks of change

 

The poem progresses to Walsh’s message: “That simple word is LOVE”.

Some of the concluding words in his poetic manifesto could also be endorsed as the core values of Write Out Loud:  “Get along to a local poetry night, and if there isn’t one – or if you think that it’s shit – then start your own. The internet means it’s never been easier to find great stuff, to connect with the scenes and people that interest you … You don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t need to find your path blocked by self-appointed and increasingly irrelevant gatekeepers – just go around them.” Walsh believes wholeheartedly in the empowerment that poetry can bring to an individual, who one day may stand at a microphone and find others listening, maybe for the first time in his or her life. In ‘Take This Pen’, he addresses those who might see themselves as life’s victims:

 

     To the kid they pick on, ‘cos you’re small.

     The kid they kick because you’re tall.

     The kid they trip to watch you fall.

     Poetry is for you. It’s for you! 

 

These lines are at the heart of Tony Walsh is about. This collection is eye-opening in its portrayal of down-trodden individuals that a lot of poetry, and poets, have little time for, and exhilarating in its evangelism. In the end, you can’t help being swept away by its energy and enthusiasm. Greg Freeman

 

Sex & Love & Rock&Roll: Tony Walsh, Burning Eye Books, £10 incl pp