Stereograms Of The Dead by Alistair Robinson (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99) (From The Northern Echo)

Stereograms Of The Dead by Alistair Robinson (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99)

11:38am Tuesday 12th May 2009 in

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Harry Mead enjoys a collection of new verse by a poet with a Northern feel for community.

It’s a very pleasing first “full” collection – 62 poems – by a former entertainments editor of the Sunderland Echo, who now teaches journalism at Sunderland University.

He has a Northern feel for community and family.

Here he is in Sunderland:

Nursing unhappy-hour pints

in sticky-carpet pubs,

we cross the bridge to count

ships we no longer build…

we mourn the dearth of proper jobs,

and death of skills we knew as ours.

Now he’s with his senile-dementia grandmother, holding her hand amid her mood swings and confusion

over who he is, while he remembers:

…how we used to be:

walking down the lane to the bus

stop, us full of dinner,

her smelling of lipstick, and me

wondering if my grandma

was old and beginning to panic

in case she was.

His observation is sharp, from a little-noticed phenomenon of our time...

So many soles lost at sea.

Never uppers, just soles…

to his own distinctive take ...the timeless spectacle of a lark descending:

It falls off its perch in the sky;

like a stunt pilot it tumbles

just to get us nervous

a glissando down the neck of the violin,

then it pulls up just before

it smashes into the grass.

And let’s not overlook Alistair Robinson’s humour:

How serene is the Buddha,

how imperturbable,

even when he’s

sitting in a barrow

with a label round

his neck

in the forecourt

of a garden centre.

* (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99; contacts: PO Box 219, Morpeth, NE61 9AU, redsquirrelpress.com (Tel: 01670-789 031)