Conflict and Contemplation: A Manufactured Thrill and Quiet Promise
VICTORIA KINGHAM
The name of Henry Normal is well-known to audiences that frequent literature festivals, Radio 4, and late-night TV comedy. Normal is also responsible for a raft of quality comedy output from Baby Cow Productions, including such gems as Philomena and episodes of The Mighty Boosh, Marion and Geoff, and Alan Partridge. This is the latest of 17 poetry collections. Though performing country-wide, he is a cherished member of our local creative crowd.
Tim Barlow is also known and appreciated in the local community, in which poetry occupies a surprisingly prominent position. This is due in part to his own promotion of a popular monthly open mic session A Load of Poets, usually at 1200 Postcards in Queens Road. His work was included in the recently-published sell-out collection, Poet Town. The first published collection of his own poems is entitled A Manufactured Thrill.
Both collections are, of course, written to be read aloud in public. Broadly, they rhyme, are not more than a page or two long, and are designed to be spare. The majority of poems speak directly from the author’s mind: there’s no displacement, no conscious objectivity. The format does not instantly imply depth.
But both books are propelled by humour, and humour is usually layered. It’s not easy to understand a double entendre, for example, without living within the culture that enables it. So it was interesting to read through both these books, once for entertainment – they’re both hugely enjoyable reading – and then again to appreciate how the verse works.
BARLOW AND CONFLICT
Tim Barlow’s poems, despite the carefully casual language and whimsical rhyme, carry at the heart of nearly all of them a kind of anger: the anger that comes from the necessity of compromise; the tension perhaps between what’s desirable and what’s respectable. Of the British pub, for example, he says he “found within the hostelry’s embrace/my unquiet, wand’ring soul’s true resting place”. The intentionally old-fashioned phrase recalls Victorian poetry, Dickens, Christian hymnology, perhaps Conan Doyle. The ‘hostelry’ inherits some of its connotation from coaching inns in the 14th century. And this inn is active, embraces the subject and his soul, cocoons him from the outside world.
While all this is implied in his description of the pub, Barlow goes on to protest at an unnamed ‘they’ – the government, the authorities, the world of capital? It isn’t usually specified – “beware! Of killjoy rulers up there… they tax us and dictate precisely where/a citizen may smoke a cigarette”. The conflict appears again and again in his poems as part of what, on the surface, is light humorous comment. There’s a (highly justified, imho) condemnation of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (which isn’t nearly as cosy as people seem to think): “so beware of AI, my brothers and sisters; /it will ravish us virtually to the pulse of transistors… and one day, perhaps, civil partnerships/will take place between humans and microchips.” Not by accident is this book called The Manufactured Thrill.
Then there’s the excellent poem ‘Shrinkflation Christmas’ in which brand-named goods (always funnier than generic ones) are endowed with verbally corresponding characteristics – Matchmakers are like matchsticks and “Snickers have been snicked”. All funny, and all true. “They’re ripping us off… but for you and me/it’s an economic shafting”. Again the unnamed enemy, capitalism in this case, is lurking and thwarting.
NORMAL AND CONTEMPLATION
Henry Normal’s poems are often briefer, aphoristic, equally full of references to common artefacts and popular culture, but less conflicted. Some are light and witty – a whole series of ‘Epitaphs’ for example depends entirely on verbal cross-references. A favourite of mine is ‘Epitaph for a cruciverbalist’ – “Here lies my neighbour/A crossword puzzler of great renown/He was one across/but is now six down”. But there are probably 50 or more:a clairvoyant who now knows exactly what’s coming next, and a florist who once cut flowers but now pushes them up.
Clever and witty, but there’s an underlying preoccupation with the nature of Death. Throughout Normal’s poetry runs a contemplative thread that doesn’t so much rail against the dying of the light as see the whole thing as an inevitable intimation of mortality. In one way or another both poets refer frequently to the aging process: they compare, through self-reference, the idealistic rage of youth to the grudging acceptance of later mid-life.
Both collections are quintessentially British – it’s difficult to see how either author’s work would translate into any other language, dependent as it is on the beautifully unstable nature of spoken English, in which any 8-year-old can appreciate the mechanism of a knock-knock joke. Both sets of poems revel in the twists and turns of verbal dexterity, of meaning, of intertext, of subtext, of joined-up thinking, while retaining at their core a reluctantly-tempered idealism. They are small gems of commentary within their particular economic, social, and political sphere. Go out immediately and get them.
Henry Normal: A Quiet Promise and Tim Barlow: A Manufactured Thrill, both published by Flapjack Press, are available online and at all good bookshops. Also see instagram.com/aloadofpoets, henrynormal.com, and timbarlow.co.uk
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