The good way home

Tim Murphy reviews 'Popular Song' by Harry Man (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Popular Song, the debut collection from Harry Man, draws inspiration from more diverse sources than most poetry books, and its remarkably broad thematic range is matched by a high degree of stylistic variation. While there are some stand-alone poems, more typically there are clusters of poems on a subject or overlapping subjects such as the poet’s childhood and family, working supermarket night shifts, the COVID pandemic, space travel, technology, futurology, pop culture, and the natural world, particularly from the perspective of trekking and camping. 

The style of poetic address also varies and ranges between the traditional and lyrical to the experimental and sometimes abrasive. Several of the childhood poems, for example, adopt a conversational tone. In ‘The Last Words of a Love-Sick Time Machine Pilot’, the time-travelling but dying poet chats with his brother about using keys hidden under a mat to “[unlock] the trap of our parents’ old Astra / its afterwords of petrol and spent Silk Cut packs”, and then offers a “few tips” to his sibling. Man takes the scenario of a dying person’s last words and twists expectations of pious reflections or admonitions to instead offer advice of purely a worldly kind: to “ask Susie Whitlow / on a date”, for example, and:

don’t leave for Dover without matches,
put a couple more quid on Little Polveir
at the Grand National this year, still
slip the winnings into the lining of Mum’s Dorla purse
like you were planning 

‘The Gists’ is the first of several pandemic poems, and the tone of these poems captures something of the stresses of that time. After “shelving the red Fanta, the Relentless, the orange / profiteroles, finding my own yoghurt-stained brand / of insomniac’s euphoria”, the night shift-working poet addresses his waiting partner while “trying / not to crush the stay-at-home exemption letter that if / pulled over I’ll have to give to the Cleveland Police”. An “All in this together / 2020” badge and “pandemic airport emptiness” feature in ‘Naked as a Pork Loin Steak in a Poppy Field, I Consider a Horse from the Future’, while ‘Reading Tennyson During the Midnight 30 Break of the Night Shift’ refers to how 2020 and 2021 “both subduct and cling / to each other’s work-from-home”.

Popular Song draws inspiration from more diverse sources than most poetry books, and its remarkably broad thematic range is matched by a high degree of stylistic variation

A very different landscape emerges in ‘Ground Truthing’, one of several poems that touch in some way on either technology, space travel, or the future. The poem’s title is explained in the notes as the process of confirming measurement and orbital observations on the ground, and here Man demonstrates impressive attention to accentuation and rhythm and offers an appealing fluency. He imagines “the noise of the fan in my helmet” as a backdrop to watching “whirlwinds of iron oxide / dance across Solis Planum through / the lengthy terracotta afternoon” and noticing how “geysers bellow sigmoid streaks // across Tharsis”. ‘Things to Consider in the Design of Your First Space Suit’ includes a similarly impressive account of the danger of “space exposure”:

In fourteen seconds you pass out
from oxygen-loss, you’re able to 

see the Earth – it is so . . . expensive,
so hard to act without your lungs. 

Beyond the cold, the spiralling Milky Way,
you will outgrow the size of yourself. 

‘If Xanadu Did Future Calm’ includes references to some recent technologies and others that futurologists predict will be in use before 2050, all of which are explained in the notes. 

As future plans reverse the harm
neutrinos go superheavy
where our universe shakes hands
with one immeasurable by man,
   becoming a Big Bang singularity.
Holographic fields print with sound,
bring artworks home for us to talk around
and bioadhesive sonogramming pills
prevent the unseen blossoming of disease.

Most readers will notice that this poem alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, and Popular Song also contains the Wordsworthian ‘“I water-skied lonely as a clownfish”’. Meanwhile, ‘Love Letter’, is explicitly ‘After Ed Sheeran’, and rock stardom features again in ‘The Moon Is a CD of Bowie’s Greatest Hits’, a light-hearted but overly random anaphoric piece. 

Both ‘Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World’ and ‘A Short Glossary to Russian Code Words Found in Ukraine’ are somewhat technical list poems that include translations in the footnotes. Each seems to be something of an academic exercise and this makes them feel out of place. The same goes for ‘#1984’, which lists more or less title-related hashtags such as these:

#qualitytime #winstonsmith #airstripone #post
#civil #revolution #england #hateweekdays
#oneroomapartment #instafood #syntheticmeals #class
#miniluv #accompanied #secret #victorygin
#microphones #cameras #follow #lifestyle
#identify #inform #topbodychallenge #regime
#officials #criminalminds #parenthood #dignifylife
#aesthetic #ministry #work #minitrue

Man explains in the notes that ‘Arnie’s Poetica’ contains quotes from eight Arnold Schwarzenegger films (“Get your ass to Mars! Isn’t that what you want? / What’s up alien with the shitty Fit Bit? Nobody to go with?”) and was first written for students to demonstrate a sestina app that he had built for them. ‘Arnie’s Poetica’ is a sestina, so the app works, but the poem does not add any quality to Popular Song as a collection. 

Readers of this review who have noticed Man’s penchant for long and somewhat alienating titles may still be surprised by ‘Who Dares Challenge Me? The President and CEO of the Company that Emits More CO₂ than Any Other in the World’s Statement on Third Quarterly Earnings Translated Using the Language of 90s Cult Boardgame The Legend of Zagor’. The poem uses said language to introduce the company’s “evil wizard-like magical earnings” and contains this pretty accurate, but not particularly poetic, synopsis of corporate ideology: 

Despite economic uncertainty, our blood-curdling
commitment through global underinvestment
proves we can roll in the high hundreds consistently
and grip a silver dagger over this once-peaceful land. 

The several technological and futuristic strains in this collection ultimately give way to a renewed and powerful nature-based lyricism in the closing pages. In ‘Pressing On’ the trekking poet and companion steer clear of a mare’s “dual roses of breath” and “gossamer clutches of bird-widowed / junipers” are described vividly in terms of “the dripping coal of their startle / of branches”. ‘Keep Going’ includes a pitch-perfect account of rainfall “[filling] your / eyebrows, [fattening] into your eyes” and tells how the trekkers’ torch “[blinks] back to life / and the mizzle is strafing, turned to snow in the beam”. 

The several technological and futuristic strains in this collection ultimately give way to a renewed and powerful nature-based lyricism in the closing poems

In ‘Almost There’ a cairn is built on a night so clear that it recalls “the pre-smartphone era / of dark sky areas”, while ‘Pitching’ opens with the kind of scenario many trekkers and campers will be familiar with:

leaning down, the previous weather’s water that was
hidden somewhere in my hood, snakes
icily down, squidging into the back of my ribs. 

‘Then’ is a particularly strong closing piece in which the poet speaks of reflecting in difficult times in “the steep wood”:

I know the glittery pulp of mud will end
at the leaf-shadowed path you find by foot,
the path towards all wishes laid like stones:
the wind has spoken, and the stars say so too,
there I’ll find the good way home. 

The correlation of “[finding] by foot” with “the path towards all wishes” is very attractive as is the delicate elision and unobtrusive alliteration in “the wind has spoken, and the stars say so too”. This seems to me to be better poetry than some of the more experimental and ludic work in Popular Song, but Man’s expansive stylistic approach – the book’s publicity speaks of its “jukebox” quality – may appeal to other readers. Overall, while it sometimes feels uneven and is unlikely to be popular with everyone, this is an inventive and challenging debut. It will be intriguing to see if Man seeks to retain the expansive jukebox effect in his future work.

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Tim Murphy is an Irish writer based in Spain. He is the author of four pamphlets, including There Are Twelve Sides to Every Circle (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2021) and Young in the Night Grass (Beir Bua Press, 2022). His first full-length collection is Mouth of Shadows (SurVision Books, 2022), reviewed by Richie McCaffery here.