It’s an interesting title. One that turns its back on the sordid and the unconventional but what does its face toward? The answer is local social history. This is very much a volume of people and places that the authors have known.
Tina Cole and Michael Thomas are too experienced to fall prey to nostalgia or sentimentality. Instead we are treated to a series of poems that are clear-eyed, gritty and authentic. Cole's "Intoxication" acknowledges the continuing lure of the artistic world while being wise enough to know that poetry only flourishes if it remains close to its roots. Thomas achieves a similar effect in "Sally Riordan."
Both poems exemplify how each poet riffs off each other. The result is a beautifully textured collection, full of vivid evocations of characters, scenery and a vanished way of life. An example is Thomas’ "Unmapped." A once well-known landscape has become strange to itself and those who used to walk its ways. Memory is in danger of disappearing. The language of the poem is representative of the volume in its precision and invention: "tree-tops net the seasons / in stars of summer blood / and Christmas pearl." Cole’s "Local Vagrant: Dudley 1960s" is equally arresting, the subject's frailness brilliantly and economically conveyed by the phrase "knitted shoulders" while his position on "the ledge of what is now and what / was then" could serve as an epithet for the entire selection.
There’s an element of Lennon and McCartney in the poems of Cole and Thomas; the same eye for the telling detail and a feeling for the oddness of the ordinary. There are also strains of lyricism but these are kept in check and are felt all the more poignantly for that. The fusion of personal life and social history makes this an unmissable read.
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. He has had poems published in Vole, Ekstasis, Acumen and The Dawn Treader. His "Anne Bronte's Grave" was highly commended in last year's Artemesia Poetry Competition.
You can read more about Nothing Louche or Bohemian by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
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