Marsden Bay by James Kirkup (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99) (From The Northern Echo)

Marsden Bay by James Kirkup (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99)

12:31pm Tuesday 13th January 2009 in Search By Harry Mead, Columnist

CURRENTLY living in Spain’s Andorra region but previously resident in America and, for a long period, Japan, James Kirkup has an international reputation as a poet to go with this multi-continent background. And yet his native North-East – he was born in South Shields in 1918 – still pulls.

In this latest collection he remembers how his father, obsessed with the football pools, sat marking the fixture lists in the South Shields Gazette and Shipping Telegraph
with his carpenter’s
Flat chisel-point indelible pencil.

A North-East New Year is also recalled:
And where is that dark-haired midnight visitor
come on the stroke of twelve to bring
a good new year, his trouser pockets
Filled with lumps of coal…?

A strong vein of retrospection runs through the collection. Sometimes it is mixed with introspection, as in these lines prompted by re-reading his own early poems:
It is like looking at old
sepia photographs of childhood
so much innocence, fresh beauty.
Yet within my heart and soul
I know there is still that core of truth
undefiled, inexhaustible well of love
for life and all its manifestations…

Britain’s first-ever poet-in-residence – at Leeds University in 1952 – Kirkup has won numerous poetry prizes and in 1997 he was invited by the Japanese emperor to read at the palace. How splendid, therefore, that this distinguished poet’s work is still published in the North-East.

But where is Marsden Bay? Not geographically, but in the collection.

For though a dramatic Victorian painting of the bay appears on the cover, no poem celebrates the bay or even mentions it. This could be taking poetic obscurity too far.