England’s Dreaming: House Anthems By Ralph Dartford
The British class system that Tony Harrison spent many productive hours ‘banging his head against’, sustains, if not in the rigid hierarchical structures that had begun to creak by the time Richard Hoggart’s seminal post-war study,
The Uses of Literacy, appeared, then in food banks, overflowing gaols, and masochistic political alignments. That Harrison was widely vilified for anachronism even as long ago as the mid-eighties – his critics maintained that the bitter dialectic of
V. was a foul-mouthed rant against divisions that no longer existed – does not defray the poet’s sense of an emergent sociocultural crisis, precipitated, at least in part, by monetarist economics, unemployment and anomie. Moving on four decades, the replacement of the working class by a subsistent underclass is a measure of inequality, but by a new economic metric, of indifference.
When Harrison used the word ‘Uz’ in guttural repetition it was to declare an affiliation to family and to the class of his origin in the language of his Leeds forbears. And if his personal sense of identity has not withered, the glue that binds people to place and to collective purpose has come unstuck in a landscape of geographical mobility, hand-to-mouth poverty and rampant populism.
‘Uz’ takes on the mantle of irony in the contemporary reading: towards the end of Ralph Dartford’s sincere and open-hearted paean to his own disordered life, raking over a working class childhood of hardship in Basildon to a contemplation of the present in a monochrome West Yorkshire that he now calls home, we find, in the poem ‘Brass’, a wasteland where ‘us’ has lost its brazen and proprietary ‘z’, and become devalued by enervation. Dartford reinforces the irony with alliteration, a different form of repetition:
‘Twice and thrice, that ‘us’ has become
hopeless, hapless and ice cold homespun.’
Dartford’s poems are littered with the detritus of redundancy and decline: the ‘war-torn bingo halls’ and ‘pregnant rubbish bins’ of sharp memory occupy one stage in a timeline that fetches up in forsaken streets where ‘brass bands / have stopped carousing’, and silence prevails. To no small degree a by-product of Thatcher’s Britain, Dartford’s tableau is suffixed at every turn by a piece of music that makes meaningful accompaniment to a contemporaneous state of mind, and whose deeply personal significance is secreted, like pulsing echoes, amongst the synaptic connections of memory. The poet’s capacity for clarity of recall is astonishing, but never hyperbolic – Dartford has a near-autistic compulsion to relay the truth of experience: the textures of a broken life are reassembled by an effort of will and perseverance, in poems that might yield redemption in a writer more afflicted by religion.
Beautifully realised, Dartford’s sonnet, with its spare inventory of grief, and gentle assonance, concludes with an isolate couplet of rare powerThis poet’s England is profoundly secular and gloriously faulty, but a sense of the spiritual sustains in the emotional interstices of the poems, the heightened, often lachrymose, moments that touch on the sharpest of memories. The funeral home in which Dartford’s brother lies is a pre-fabrication of taste – ‘the flowers are chemical, the doves bleached pigeons’ – but the facsimile is incidental to the sense of loss, as the narrator reflects, very movingly, on time’s compartmentalising transience: ‘He is gone, / and tonight alone, a deep ticking will quicken into our private / rooms, cutting time into slices to be served on other clocks.’ (‘Other Colours, Other Clocks’). Beautifully realised, Dartford’s sonnet, with its spare inventory of grief, and gentle assonance, concludes with an isolate couplet of rare power:
‘Come Christmas, we’ll know this for sure.
How we followed his star. Our feet red raw.’
To shamelessly cannibalise Harrison again, Dartford’s narrator couldn’t squeeze much more love into the sonnet. The act of love is a pilgrimage, a paean to a brother who, if the prefatory note to
House Anthems is any guide, ‘was the finest of Englishmen’, in the best, non-nationalistic, sense.
The book’s title compounds, as it also distils, the connection between music and the familiar landscape of home. The family, to whom the poet is clearly indebted, completes a triangle of meditation and commemoration, ranging over the terrain of childhood and adolescence and into the ‘pigeon-grey’ Bradfordian present. The binding nature of the contract is, for better or for worse, compelled, as the consolidated familial voices of ‘The Mourning Prayer’ might suggest: ‘
You really have no choice.’
And the wider Essex ‘family’, the battle-hardened post-war mothers – ‘they were wounded when they were young’ – whose restless invention conjured histories of love and loss and unwanted GI pregnancies in a picaresque working class hinterland. Dartford’s articulation of a, sometimes anecdotal, past is a joy to witness and everywhere thronged with the material accoutrements of an age. ‘Any Old Jerusalem’ pursues cause and effect with the relentless vigour of an emotionally-engaged social anthropologist, its free-flowing tercets animated by telling rhymes and contextual suggestion: the Terry and Julie of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ make a profoundly fitting presence in a poem that looks and feels, in hindsight, like a hymn to a lost age, and the poem is aptly concluded with Barb Jungr’s hypnotic and slow-tempo ‘Love Me Tender’:
‘And Julie wondering how to make ends meet.
As she pushes the roundabout, rocks the swing.
Beans and bread in a plastic bag, snagging on Terry’s ring.’
Terry and Julie make several reappearances in a partly real, partly imagined, East London: first, in the rollicking, rhythmical, Betjeman-esque drama of high jinks in church in ‘The Ballad of St. John’s Square’, and again, moving forward temporally into the post-Thatcherian prose-poem of ‘Fodder’, a diptych whose urban axis inoculates the upwardly mobile Terry and Julie of am-dram and small sherry diversions, against the discord of the wrong side of town:
‘Not far away, outside a lighted house, in a road in this town she should never be in. A Bacardi breezed girl with Winehouse hair lifts her skirt for a line of coke, the promise of love.’
The presence of binaries is commonplace to a poet for whom the personal is resolutely the political. The girl with the ‘Winehouse hair’ is one symptom among many of a witheringly applied age of austerity, and if we are inclined to find no connection between the application of measures of hardship and social consequences then Ralph Dartford’s poems are correctives to indifference. The sense of personal grievance is everywhere counterbalanced by an intrinsic humility that extends to others, and sometimes the bleeding heart of supra-national responsibility is transfigured into a symbol, a timely reminder of pain and poverty that has often been administered with brutal complacency. The fine, waspishly ironic and Blake-ishly simple epigram, ‘18th Pale Descendant’, deserves no less than reproduction in full:
‘With this rusty nail
she’ll carve us a tattoo.
A coloured rose
for Albion’s crimes.
She’ll bloom it right here
on our shoulder blades.
Let it weep
from time to time.’
The Smiths’ ‘The Queen is Dead’ could not add a more prescient footnote to the poem: bitter experience of a time, and an era, infect this tortured vignette with an unforgiving demand to not-forget.
The funeral home in which Dartford’s brother lies is a pre-fabrication of taste – ‘the flowers are chemical, the doves bleached pigeons’ Dartford’s life has come full-circle in no small degree, and in no small way owing to a compulsion to make amends. The grounding that has enabled the triumph of concision that is ‘18th Pale Descendant’ is the culmination of a mental effort that has taken the poet to prisons and mental health units in the north of England in order to help repair, in others, the damage he has personally experienced. No blind-sider of the truth of addiction, Dartford recognises, from first-hand, the uphill struggle faced by users and addicts and the spiral of crime into which they, almost without exception, fall.
As prescient as Jacob Marley’s ghost, the wraiths who huddle outside the magnificent, formerly civic, Bradford building that now houses Waterstones, and in which Dartford has worked, point a figurative finger at the general inertia. With measured economy, the poet infuses beauty and extreme irony into the two quatrains of ‘A Bookseller Unlocks’. Eschewing retribution for the ‘language and needles’, his narrator posits a species of hope in what books might yield, if only the political will for proper rehabilitation existed:
‘Inside, these unlit pages
could bake them cakes,
instruct the rules of golf,
send them all to Mandalay.
Or ignite to keep love warm.’
What we infer, here and elsewhere, is a sincere thirst for reform. Reserving the greatest irony for his deliberately isolated final line, Dartford conjures an ambiguous interface of suggestion in the frame of a single image: the process of ignition is necessarily double-edged, conferring the ‘warmth’ of wisdom and love on the uninitiated, as it reminds, too, of the destructive hysteria of book-burnings in which the turmoiled Bradford of a generation earlier was complicit.
Often, the poet reverses the telescope to reveal the detail of addiction and hopelessness: a desiccated landscape of flinty skies and flintier users observed with the insight of experience in the terse ‘Arrowhead’, or the detached litany of a secure unit – ‘I distribute Mirtazapine, Tramadol, Methadone / to the rapists, murderers and others’ – whose tone is overturned at the melting-point of recognition, where the heartbreaking isolation of migrant displacement is rendered in another form of inventory:
‘“Eighteen days walking through the desert.
Sixty men. Women, children and dogs.
Eighteen days and eighteen dead.
Starved, dehydrated, slashed or shot.’” (‘Jumping Trains’)
And if the unsubtle exposition of the long-form sestets of ‘Act!’ are their unlikely salvation – the poem’s narrative of time and place builds, in its immense drama of working class history, a subtextual picture of the poet and the man – then, ‘Ways’ is a recapitulation of home, family and friendship in the service of a grateful present. ‘Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ makes an apt accompaniment to a poem, and a book, of love and thankfulness:
‘A glass of time, a scented candle. A prayer in their names –
etched into the palm of my shaking hand thrice again.
A flame always flickers its death, the hot wax rubs my memory.
Stevie sings into eternity as the audience falls from the gods.
Love weighs true if you balance faith long enough.’
House Anthems is published by Valley Press (2024)
More information here.