Review - Ian Parks – Selected Poems 1983-2023
Ian Parks was born in Mexborough in 1959. A poet and academic, he is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and The Selected Poems of Harold Massingham. His versions of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Strix, Poetry (Chicago) and the Folio Book of Love Poetry.
On a personal level Ian is the founder and massive part of our poetry group Read To Write in Doncaster, where he provides knowledge and support to over 40 writers.
As I discovered when writing my review of Ian Duhig's selected poems, it's difficult to cover all the aspects of, let alone the details within, the dozens of poems in this collection. The selection includes poems from multiple prior collections as well as some new ones, so I'll try my best to cover something from each.
Having built a formidable reputation as a love poet, Ian has of course included many of those here. The poems often look at very detailed but brief moments in time that enable us to see love in a much bigger context. In Kingfisher (from Love Poems, 2010) the moment in question is walking along a river and seeing the
fleck of perfect blue
that flashes its design across the day
His descriptions of places are, as with all his writing, concise, yet they place us in the location he wants us to be to reveal what he intends to say to us. From Winter City (published 1998):
Streets led down to a tidal river
rotting hulks, the Customs House,
a rail bridge curving over
which I crossed.
And later...
a map of squares and alleyways,
floodlit statues, stone arcades;
the high room where you sleep alone -
The turn in the poem alters it entirely, and we get to know what is really happening.
As we reach 2006 and his collection Shell Island, the first poem picked from there is one of my favourites. In The Great Divide, we see how our identity is buried within us and how hard that is to conceal, again filled with minimal but very effective images:
and everywhere a sense of failing light
streaking the uplands, making a theatre of them
as it did – the unrelenting grimness of the north,
its chapels, pitheads, slag heaps, union halls,
processions through the darkness, millstone grit
His family history of mining, and upbringing in a mining community in Mexborough, is never far away. In the collection The Cage (published 2008) echoes of his father, and by extension the whole history of mining and a working class upbringing, reverberate. There is little direct political rhetoric in Ian's writing, but politics is never far away either and it’s clear, without ever becoming over emotional, where his loyalties lie. In The Wheel, Orgreave, Strike Breakers, and Miners, the cause and effect of the catastrophic changes that occurred in Mexborough and other mining communities is clear. But the wider political landscape is not ignored; the poems are rich in the cultural history of the working class in Britain and beyond, stories of resistance, of pain, of success, of failure. This culminates in the tour de force that is Elegy for the Chartist Poets, an unusually long poem (for him) that concludes the section from 2017's Citizens.
The Chartist poets whisper in my ear
Don't let us be forgotten, set us free
Written in iambic pentameter couplets, this is an eloquent, at times angry, at times melancholic poem that never loses its central purpose to open the “unmarked graves” and let the voices of the Chartist poets be heard. As a side note, it is also technically superb, but you don't notice that because the poetic skill is used to help the poem, not the other way round.
The new poems are interesting; there are love poems and some of his well known themes in there but the landscape is quite literally changing and this is starting to be reflected in the poems. The mining town he grew up in is vastly different and what 'working class' means has been radically changed. We know the issues are still there, some things have improved but in many ways they are worse. Shooting Stars looks for some way to rid ourselves of the recent years of relentless 'progress' that stops at nothing and is destroying everything. Jesus of Mexborough (a rare rhyming poem that is actually written as a song) exposes the way politics has changed such that suggesting anything remotely socialist, in its true sense, sees you abused and chased into an underpass.
But I'll finish with Horse Fair, which dug right into me when I first read it and still does. The poem describes a moment at the horse fair where there is a boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator's lost son.
He had you off by heart:
the freckle where your shoulder met your neck,
the calf-lick on your crown,
his hands, his eyes the same.
The ending is devastating – the whole piece is beautifully written, putting us right there and doing as much as it can to feel what the narrator was feeling. It can never quite do that, of course, but it gets us very close. Right there is Ian's skill as a poet, and why his love poems are so subtle and relatable.
In the forty years spanned by this collection you might expect to see some changes in the writing within the poems, and you do - but you have to look quite hard to see them. The same voice is clearly there, but the writing becomes sharper, even more focused. And it was never verbose to start with.
This is a fine and beautifully presented collection that warrants, and in my case has had, multiple readings. Ian and publisher Bob Horne have put together a truly representative selection, and in the new poems, gives an indication that there is more to come.
Ian Parks, Selected Poems 1983 – 2023, is published by Calder Valley Poetry.