Reviews

High Performance

by Luke Wright

Nasty Little Press, 2009, 32pp

Philip Larkin’s first car was a 1964 Van Den Plas ‘Princess’: a heavy poor-man’s Bentley, aspirational, British-made, poorly-designed and quickly obsolete, wide and ostensibly confident on the outside, but much smaller and less comfortable on the inside. He would somewhat nervously pilot it around the country roads outside Hull, flinching and cursing at farm vehicles, and glancing from time to time at a sign he had affixed to the dashboard exhorting him to ‘THINK!’. Like dogs, cars begin to look like their owners; or is it the other way around?

Maybe its because I drive a Mondeo
and have started wearing trousers that fit
that I’ve realised that we do not die
with our affectations; if anything we live.

(‘Mondeo Man’) 

Beloved of psephologists and travelling salesmen, the Ford Mondeo has become a cipher for trousers that fit, for a semi in the Essex suburbs, two kids and a wife, for aspiring-middle-class, aspiring-middle-brow, middle-of-the-road Middle Britain in the first decade of this millennium. Luke Wright recognises that he is in many respects bang in the middle of this middle, and much of this short and entertaining collection deals with his coming to terms with what this might mean. He mines the boredom of a suburban upbringing to comic effect (‘Camping Dad’), and when he comes to the bright city promise of London to seek his fortune on the stage it is with the offcomer’s welcome scepticism mixed with an equally welcome starry eyed enthusiasm (‘A Poet’s Work Is Never Done’; ‘Mr Blank’; ‘Another Grotty Holiday’) – never cynical, his targets, who more often than not include himself, are treated with wit and affection even as their pretensions and blind spots are laid bare.

The most immediately engaging pieces trip along with a cheerful energy and brio that make a sensible occasional sacrifice of strict rhythm or syntax in favour of putting on what is a very entertaining show: some of the poems seem to have been translated almost verbatim from Wright’s acclaimed live work, and they do not lose very much at all. What makes them worthwhile in the context of a more varied collection is the occasional spike of satire or social commentary: when Camping Dad ‘feels uneasy about fun pubs / credit cards, shopping malls and Grazia’, or the Arts Council-junketing poet shouts ‘What glorious fun! / Its draining being a drain on the nation’s resources’, the joke that yields a laugh in performance can yield a bit more nuance on the page. Wright’s ambivalent relationship with the culture around him, indeed that has created and sustained him, appears in a shift in tone and an eye for an image that sometimes brings a surprising punch.

Larkin never really had to contend with the unpleasant business of performing in public, and his influence is as such most obvious in the shorter, slower pieces that make up the rest of the collection. There is one direct debt: ‘Mr Bleaney (pre-visited)’ is an ironic re-imagining of Mr Bleaney as a kind of dissolute party king who would become the subject of an incomplete ‘cautionary tale’ by the ‘old cynic’ himself. The rest of the debt is less obvious, with poems reaching towards a bittersweet wistfulness that is evocative of adolescent, late-90s summers (‘Loughborough’, which owes something to ‘High Windows’; ‘The Launch’); or, more tellingly, spin out from a train of thought or a particular event to some sort of epiphany, or at least a growing up (‘When Instant Coffee Just Isn’t Instant Enough’; ‘Stansted’). For example, in the last lines of ‘Family Funeral’:

One cousin gives another a friendly shove
and I can’t believe that it has taken
me twenty-seven years to realise
it’s not the death that makes us sad, it’s love.

(‘Family Funeral’) 

The writing is by no means smooth, but occasional apparent clunkiness such as here is in fact quite powerful with the emotion of the occasion giving some licence to the concluding aphorism. This of course not so much nods to Larkin as gives him an emphatic yet friendly shove.

Like the Van Den Plas Princess, the Ford Mondeo has bland styling, modest legroom and lofty aspirations beyond its possibly dull reality. And just as with their choice of car, in a curious way Wright is similar to Larkin: dealing with the banality of the world and the confusion of its changing; the inevitability of loss, of aging and decay; reappraising one’s identity as a result; and occasionally coming up with some really great, funny lines. High Performance is a slight but enjoyable ride, and it will be interesting to see if we are taken any further in the future.

 

Rating:

Reviewed by Will Carr

Comments (0)

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website