TOM DUDDY’S poetry, as expressed in his collection The Hiding Place, published by Arlen House, is greatly concerned with the way humans interact with each other.
In ‘Table For One’ the narrator talks about how his order for Caesar salad and sea-bass is “taken down/and acted upon like no other words/you’ve spoken all week.” In ‘The Good Host’ he tells us about a host of the old fashioned variety “in whose humbling/and slow-darkening house/you cannot help but rest”.
In a similar vein there is a fine poem about an interaction with someone collecting for charity, ‘The Street Collector’, whose smile may or may not be that “of the fraudulent collector/they’ve been tracking all summer//on the radio phone-ins”.
In ‘The Rights of Man’ the poem starts with the narrator asking a question he already knows the answer to: “How’s your mum? I ask, as if I didn’t know,/as if the sight of him had not brought to mind/the tumbling heights of fuchsia, the weave/of matted grass that was the lawn”.
Duddy’s poetry doesn’t go in for the special effects beloved of some poets with so little to say they have to say it all the more loudly. Sometimes the poems seem quite ordinary at first reading, but his lines have a habit of lodging in the memory.
My favourite of this impressive collection is ‘The Talker’s Country’ in which he again revisits his theme of the things we say and the things we never could.
CP Stewart is a Yorkshire poet whose collection Considering the Lilies: New and Selected Poems is published by the Galway-based Wordsonthestreet.
He is one of those rare enough poets who is also a gifted communicator. Like Duddy his poetry focuses on everyday particulars, but Stewart is more of a populist, more conscious of the audience for whom he is writing.
The short poem ‘The Blessed’ ends with the lines: “I pick my way/through a dissolving world”. In the moving ‘Made in China’ he finds his now grown up son’s plastic sword “in that space,/between the hedge and the summerhouse,/where the ladders are kept and some jerry-/cans of diesel.”
In ‘The Telephone Call’ the poem opens with the line “I dig out the photographs” and ends in pretty devastating fashion “Faces.//The list grows longer./Endings known./Deaths – date and manner.”
Ultimately Stewart errs on the side of optimism. ‘And Still the Daily Gift of Days’ finishes with the lines “My wife grows lovelier, and wise.//Some days I write a little/and it is taken up.//I love and am loved.//It is almost enough.”
If it is possible for a poet to be a cross between the broody Ted Hughes (also a Yorkshire man ) and the witty Liverpudlian Roger McGough, then CP Stewart may very well be that poet.
