The Liver Bards

Michael Horovitz

COLLECTED POEMS by Adrian Henri

Allison & Busby, f12.95, £6.95

MELTING INTO THE FOREGROUND by Roger McGough

Viking, £6.95

GARGLING WITH JELLY by Brian Patten

Puffin, £1.50

If you like Adrian Henri you'll like his retrospective — a 300-page song of himself from 1967-85. The book opens with 12 quatrains of names to answer 'If you weren't you, who would you like to be?' by liaising some unlikely bedfellows: 'Hinde- mith Mick Jagger Diirer Schwitters'. These have, I suppose, manic intensity and de- dication to their craft in common, with each other and with Adrian. He comes on more often as a fan than a fanatic, but his well-versed mind and inside knowledge of how visual art is made give many of his lines an authority without which some of them might feel only nostalgic, parochial, corny or coy: 'Kurt Schwitters smiles as he picks up the two bus tickets we have just thrown away . . .'. The overlap from his own paintings and collages is emphasised

by reproductions and drawings, adding a surprisingly delicate, more feminine air to the familiar studentish-macho sentiments. `Death of a Bird in the City', for instance, splashes a fast-fleeting flurry of brushstrokes across a full page, facing verbal imagery whose content verges on the melodramatic. But (as if to prove 'Bird lives') it metamorphoses swiftly enough to throw up a neatly fixed-and-spattered kaleidoscope of neo-Schwitters 'paintry': Doors thrown open/Girls mouths screaming/ The last unbearable white bird/Spotlit, slow- ly struggling threshing against blackness! Crucified on the easel/SCHWEPPES/ GUINNESS IS . . ./the lights are going out

. ./A blind old woman with light running from her glasses/seeing nothing./The plaster Christ has got up and is kneeling before the plaster donkey/Buildings are falling silently/ Neonsigns are running like blood/The COCA-COLA sun is setting/The plaster Mary following the star/B.P. MAX FACTOR/To where the Three Kings lay/The last bird has leapt weeping/Onto the neon wheel/Delicious/REFRESHING/Screaming through the echoing ruins of Piccadilly/ Under the bombardment of the night.

Henri is one of a quorum to have applied the lessons of the dadaist, surrealist and beat experiments to Blighty, notably the conviction that anything is potential mate- rial — signs, slogans, newsprint, sounds though of course (as he acknowledges) Eliot, Joyce and Gascoyne got there first. Henri's earlier poems are a particular pleasure to rediscover — that dawn of an aeon of flower-childhood lucky enough to sense how much of life there is to cele- brate. They hymn fantasies, memories, desires, joys and loneliness in anthems at once commercial and utopian, experienced and honestly innocent: 'Without you there'd be no colour in Magic colouring books/no hopscotch on pavements . . They represent an authentic pop lyricism all his and his generation's own. quintes-

`The Liverpool Poets' by Peter Edwards, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery Left to right: Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten sentially English reflections filtered through the bittersweet realism of Scouse wit. Where Schwitters gave new life to discarded bus tickets, Henri picks up a throwaway quip and calls it Winter Poem: `When I'm with you/I'm as happy as the day is short.'

Yet even this might be another literary echo, ie of Fern Hill's 'happy as the heart was long' — of which Vernon Watkins wrote that 'I do not think it poetry or even Dylan Thomas, but Joyce's ghost walking.' Well, if so, and if adaptations like this keep some of the anti- in poetry, or re-Joyceing in Thomas, why not?

It could be said, however (and has been), that traces of boozy or narcissistic sentimentality also led this poet to some pretty sloppy writing, feeling and thinking, and that this has become more rather than less pronounced with the escalation of his widespread fame over the years. His Six- ties 'Fairground Poem' trundles along agreeably enough:

Come here, luv, no money . . .1Just get one in . . . PICK WHAT YOU LIKE/ANY PRIZE YOU LIKE/Roll 'em down and add 'em up/If you come from WIGAN/You can 'ave a BIG 'UN/the carriages bump ahead in mysterious Ghost Train darkness/Screaming at painted horrors/Washleather ghostly fingers/polythene skeletons/hand slides care- fully up warm nylon to warm dampness at top/In the brief intimacy/Then the sudden blinding reality/All out quicklylPay again if you, want to stay on/Bright lights smell of onions doughnuts frankfurters . .

Most of that is as solidly sensuous and `real' as Alan Sillitoe's prose evocations of similar provincial alternations in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — except that the harder-nosed novelist would never have written `the sudden blinding reality' of the 'Time's up' call. The gooey soft focus in which Adrian's flashback is bathed has pulled woolly wish-wash over his eyes: the joyride itself was the blinding illusion. Or was it? Smoke enough silly cigs and now you see it, now you don't.. .

At best, Henri is naive, at worst disin- genuous, vain, overblown. Without him the new British pantheon of genuinely popular oral verse would be immeasurably im- poverished, as is equally true of his `Mersey Sound' stablemates Patten and McGough. Patten's been working hard at kids' books for some time, and his latest is lots of fun whilst pausing now and then to tackle the sort of 'grown-up' themes many children today are as concerned and intelli- gent about as some of their elders and not-necessarily-betters. Thus

There's something new in the river,/The fish said as it swam) It's got no scales, no fins, no gills,lAnd ignores the impassable dam./.. No beak no claws no feathers/No scales no fur no gills,/It lives in the trees and the water,/In the earth and the snow and the hills,/And it kills and it kills and it kills.

With Roger McGough the didactic turn so many poets hanker after (Pope claiming `Not in fancy's maze he wandered long/But stooped to truth and moralis'd his song', Keats trying to emulate those 'to whom the miseries of the world/Are misery, and will not let them rest') comes as a slight surprise, but again, a welcome one. Given his previous book After the Merrymaking, one might have expected an Adrian Henri- like melting into the fairground, but this play with the foreground sparks off more subtle and responsible emanations. The incorrigible old punster still whirls his box of tricks around the stage, but almost none of the poems are dismissable as mere whimsical trifles.

Each of the triumvirate has worked a lot, in diverse capacities, in the theatre, and this has undoubtedly paid off in McGough's case in the way he here pro- jects from the inside various far-flung characters. A number of them are unsym- pathetic, but they're made convincing by virtue of the author's skill, satire, compas- sion and humanity. His account of the famous painting by Millais 'The Boyhood of Raleigh' gives the entrancing 'salty tales/Of derring-do and giant whales' their due, but then swivels to imagine the other boy -

And his friend? God, I'm bored./As for Jolly Jack I don't believe a word./What a way IC spend the afternoons — /the stink of fish, and those ghastly pantaloons!

McGough shares with Adrian Mitchell, Attila the Stockbroker and a few other contemporaries aware of their role as mouthpieces in the public ear, the ability to extend a newspaper report and illumin- ate possible inner truths above, beneath or behind the bare facts. Thus in 'The Jog- ger's Song' he versifies the testimony of a passer-by who, appealed to by a rape victim in Fordham Park, Deptford, instead of helping, raped her himself:

Well, she was asking for it./Lyin there, cryin out,/dyin for it. Pissed of course./Of course, nice girls don't . . ./And tell me this:/If she didn't enjoy it,/Why didn't she scream?

These new books prove again that whilst the work of the Liver Bards may not be as sublime as their (not necessarily thicko) youthful clientele might protest, it is also by no means as vacuous as do their enemies in the would-be intelligentsia often unappreciative because jealous, re- sentful or confounded at the phenomenal and apparently unstoppable demotic im- pact of the lads. Each has a unique personal voice and vision, which is more than can be said for most of their patronis- ing detractors. Henri's is a sometimes repetitious and lugubrious, but often de- lightfully (if selfconsciously) painterly one; Patten's has an almost religious yet street-wise emotional thrust; McGough's is, on this showing, the most complexly developing — still humorous, but less waggish than metaphysical, moral and sharply political.