Harmonica (Paperback)

W. H. Auden, in his essay, The Poet and the City, (the Dyer's Hand, 1962), starts with a quote by H. D. Thoreau: "There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living.......One would never think, from looking at literature, that this question had ever disturbed a solitary individual's musings."

Auden covers much in this essay, but it's his concept of the modern hero which is relevant here: "the man or woman in any walk of life who, despite all the impersonal pressures of modern society, manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own."

In Geoff Hattersley's latest collection, Harmonica, we have Auden's hero; in fact, a succession of them. These are heroes battling against the complexity, confusion, drudgery and relentlessness of making ends meet.

This collection is appealing on many levels: for its simple language, the way he maps the struggle against these 'impersonal pressures', the optimism you unearth as you read more deeply, and the love of people.

Throughout, Hattersley celebrates speech, whether it is the woman in 'Jumbo' who delivers a killer line to a fat bloke in the chip shop "and he's the one who ends up blushing" or the final lines in 'Splinter', an elegy to his mother, which are such a tender reminder of her voice.

Simplicity can be mistaken for naivety. But the greatest artists are still on its side: Picasso, who claimed to have spent all his career trying to see again like a child, writers like Samuel Beckett and Czeslaw Milosz, architects like John Pawson.

However, Hattersley's work does not sit well alongside the baroque tendencies of much contemporary writing. His is the view of the minimalist; he manipulates the emptiness around words, celebrates the raw materials of poetry instead of creating ornate edifices to mask the emptiness within them.

If we need convincing, let's hear Milosz open 'Preface': "First, plain speech in the mother tongue./ Hearing it, you should be able to see/Apple trees, a river, the bend of a road,/ As if in a flash of summer lightning..."

Hattersley's use of what's around him reminds me of how Peter Reading, James Kelman and Fred Voss tap into the power of disaffection. But Hattersley also has Miroslav Holub's humanity and Yannis Ritsos' delight in the everyday.

Let's return, though, to the struggle, humanity and Auden.

"In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous members, that homo laborans is also homo ludens," Auden writes.

Many of Hattersley's poems in Harmonica make me laugh precisely because they are about these everyday political acts: just the titles of 'Summer Sick Note' and 'Bad Attitude' speak for themselves. In 'The Depth', though, Hattersley explores the cost of these terrible pressures in the enviable lines: "It's the sort of job where you lose/ something, something/ you spend the weekends/ looking for with tired eyes."

Nevertheless, hidden in Hattersley's horror stories, these claustrophobic narratives which build into a novelistic sweep, there is a fundamental optimism. It's manifested in the tenderness of his "Two Love Poems", and a constant seam of humour which runs through the book, like the lines ending the first poem "I was an Unarmed Teenager": "'How do you die/ like a cowboy,' my mother asks,/ 'four-three-four?'"

Hattersley likes having a good time, likes the people who aren't the bosses or the ones telling us how to live. He plays with us and this idea at the end of the book in 'P for Poem' delivering the lines: "Things can only get worse, /I mean better./ Death's boots are shuffling/ on the Welcome mat -/ "I don't need anything right now!"/ I shout."

So let the last word be Auden's ".......The peasant may play cards in the evening while the poet writes verses, but there is one political principle to which they both subscribe, namely that among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honour should be prepared, if necessary to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least."