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This is the time to reach for one of those one line definitions, more beloved of poets than critics. Poetry is the thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck bristle. Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. The first, of course, could be a description of a horror movie and the second could be a tribute to Alan Clark’s Diaries. And it is tempting, at a time when readers are flooded with so much material that most of publishing energy goes into trying to describe (sorry, “brand”) what it is they are publishing rather than respond to it, to reach for a definition that is the simplest, most unambiguous possible.

Poetry is stuff in lines with a regular rhythm that describes a story or an individual state of mind in a manner that is more intense and memorable than ordinary conversation.

By these standards, Alan Franks writes poetry. There is no higher compliment.

He started out writing songs – lyrical ballads, loved, by all those who listen to them, for a wistful, artful, folkish quality that manages to blend the finely wrought artificial rusticity of, say, William Barnes or Hardy in dialect mode, with an urban edge that shocks the reader into attention. One of his very earliest songs, for example, I am quoting from memory here – begins -

Me and my friend Brendan Macready

We used to play at revolution….

And that carefully deliberate demotic (no “My husband and I..” for this author) leads you to a knowing aside about the shared culture of the sixties that instantly clues you in on the fact that the narrator of the song is one of those radical young men who flirted with Marx without damaging his wallet. And, indeed, this turns out to be the story the lyric tells.

Sometimes song lyrics make bad poetry – as anyone who has had the misfortune to read the collected oeuvre of Bernie Taupin can testify. And so it is good to report that Franks has made the transition from songwriting to poetry with triumphantly successful thoroughness. The poems assembled here show a lightness of touch, combined with an awareness of strict metrical form that recalls the Simon Armitage of “Kid” and, though Franks sometimes exhibits his folk roots with obvious clarity and could occasionally be accused of driving while under the influence of Auden or Larkin, many of these poems have a lyric originality that is very welcome indeed to a reader, like this one, who is bored to tears with poetry as standup comedy, poetry as political comment, poetry as dialect boredom and poetry as post Martian pointless.

Take a poem like “World of Wonders” for example. It begins with an 18 line stanza of loosely iambic couplets, with nicely casual assonances, and every single couplet runs the sense across the line endings . So, even when lumbered with the jogging neatness of an AA BB rhyme scheme that might have tempted the author into sub Pope jokes, the poem never lets the story be stifled by the author’s obviously skilled technique. The first full stop arrives at the end of line seventeen leaving us with the mouth-crammed satisfying awkwardness of the stanza end. Which announces, with the emphatic skill of a fairground barker, what delights are in store.

The poem seems to be about a family setting off for a nineteen fifties expedition to a local circus with a dog called Mister Pastry (only those who grew up in the fifties will get this reference but it doesn’t matter if you didn’t and don’t) and a long dead breed of car called a Vauxhall Vanguard. The circus, of course, is not a real circus, but a childhood memory of perfection, marred by the loss of innocence and innocent pleasures.

“….Back

Above the roofs the previous lack

Of high white ramparts re-asserts

Itself and by their absence hurts

The heart.”

What Franks is saying here, as in many other of these poems, is an eloquent witness of a history all too often forgotten or derided or – worst sin of all – brought to life only to die on its feet. I mean, of course, the middle class childhood that so many writers and readers share and that is so hard to illuminate. The fact that he has chosen to do so in these intensely formal, but also conversational poems is something for which we should all be grateful.

Nigel Williams is a writer and broadcaster who was screenwriter of the recent mini-series Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren, which won a Golden Globe.

His article was first published in Markings, a literary magazine based in Scotland with a national readership and reputation Published since 1995, Markings has featured writers such as Bernard Kops, Kenneth White, Don Paterson and Stewart Conn as well as publishing new and developing talent.

The magazine is based at The Bakehouse poetry performance space in south west Scotland. Jointly Markings and The Bakehouse form a lively focal point in the contemporary literary scene, organising workshops and events throughout the year, including the forthcoming festival, The Word 07: Peace featuring Adrian Mitchell, Bernard Kops, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown.

For more information about Markings and its associates visit www.markings.org.uk. To subscribe to Markings and receive issues 24 & 25 please make out a cheque for £14 payable to “Markings” and send it to The Bakehouse, 42 High Street, Gatehouse of Fleet DG7 2HP, Scotland, noting your name and address and that you saw this offer through Times Online.

Photo by Sylvan Mason

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