Review - Harry Man - Popular Song
Harry Man is a poet, editor and translator, he was born in Buckinghamshire, grew up in South London and lives in the Tees Valley in the North East of England. His work has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, New Welsh Review, Poems in the Waiting Room, Magma and 3:AM among other places. His poetry has also appeared in anthologies, journals, academic publishing and on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. His poetry has been translated into eleven languages including Arabic, German, Macedonian, Chinese, Slovak, Turkish, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian. His website is here.
I bought this collection after hearing Harry Man read at Words on the Wall in Hexham. I was interested how the poems would translate from the spoken form to the page, as I had enjoyed the reading.
Popular Song is a collection that never settles into a rut, where you never get a sense of regularity of pace, rhythm and style. The poem’s subjects don’t settle down either - lockdown at the supermarket is followed by journeys into space, environmental issues, childhood memories, all couched in imagistic, often surreal, language. Sometimes what would be a fairly standard poem about the boredom and emptiness of the 24 hour supermarket during Covid becomes a dreamlike, surreal, poem - as if the way of coping is to talk to the produce and have it respond:
Naked as a pork steak in a poppy field,
I consider a horse from the future
that charges through the ripped image of a giant’s torso,
in her hand a crawfish en route to extinction
swings in and out of pandemic airport emptiness.
There are astronauts’ dreams, a weird mix of earthly and stellar, reminding us of our own weird lockdown dreams as our brains processed our new circumstances. The whole collection feels like this - reality is in there, but the strange things that our brain creates in our REM sleep are there too.
The cultural references come thick and fast - Bowie, Glastonbury, video games, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Back on more familiar poetic territory Keep Going and Almost There contain wonderful descriptions of getting soaked and a freezing clear night respectively.
From Almost There:
the particularity of each star’s tiny-bigness,
the fizz of colour, the pre-smartphone era
of dark sky areas like this at the rake-mud
fresh edge of space
There is a lot of like in this collection, but some of the attempts at being different or quirky don’t quite land for me. A poem made entirely of hashtags1, list poems, and four pages where all the lines begin “The moon is”, for example. However, that’s just personal preference and there are also many poems I really like, probably my favourite being the final poem Then.
I walk out into the steep wood, and blearily
through the muck and owls I clamber up
without a torch, but in the quite blue light
that the moon reflects on us, I reflect on it.
Popular Song is published by Nine Arches Press and is available here.
This is a retelling of 1984 in hashtags, and does make an interesting point about Social Media’s pervasive and potentially dystopian influence