Walking companionably with ghosts

KEN COCKBURN casts an appreciative eye over Alan Morrison’s new collection that mixes anti-fascist poetry with outstanding portraits of poetic heroes

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THIS is the 14th collection by Alan Morrison, a poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, and the second with Indian publisher Cyberwit. The cover blurb notes the book “is concerned with the resurfacing of fascism and the normalisation of racism across the 21st-century West.” Some poems describe cultural figures caught up in 20th-century wars, others the anti-migrant protests of 2025.

Like Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Morrison uses an extensive vocabulary — colportage, menhiric, vexillogical, thaumaturgists and ouroboros are all here. They’re used not to baffle the reader, but to reveal the world by describing it accurately. Again like MacDiarmid he weaves in extracts from other texts — books, newspapers, TV interviews — underlining the collective nature of the endeavour.

The collection opens with more personal poems, referencing ailments — sciatica and tinnitus — which cause heightened, indeed painful, sensitivity. A Cornish Night, its 25 lines a single sentence, evokes his late mother walking alone and with her son. It anticipates other poems where the poet walks companionably with ghosts including the London Irishman, Blakean radical and flaneur Niall McDevitt. (Morrison’s obituary of McDevitt appeared in the Star on October 9 2022.)

The book’s longest and strongest poem is Grim Fingers, about poet Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). Gurney suffered his first breakdown in 1913; paradoxically his war service offered relief from mental torment, with “bombs his aural / Beeswax balm against persecutory voices.” An isolated figure, here he is placed among companions, both those from his own time and the dead with whom he felt affinity. It’s a poem both narrative and reflective, providing a good biographical outline and showing great sympathy for its subject’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

Old “Rosey” is a portrait of the Anglo-Welsh artist-poet David Jones (1898-1974). Like Gurney, in the trenches he found “A scraping respite from the clutter of his domestic mind / & volatile nerves.” The poem’s title is taken from Jones’s own nickname for his mental illness, contained within neuROSIs. Morrison writes sympathetically of Jones’s Catholicism, admiring “faith made tangible by object.” Long lines and sentences create momentum and intensify the poem’s emotional and spiritual impact.

A portrait of T E Lawrence (of Arabia), another man who flourished during his war years and floundered thereafter, is less satisfying. Lawrence’s self-isolation doesn’t allow for the connections Morrison makes between his other subjects and their peers, and his flirtation with fascism gives less to admire.

A number of shorter acrostic tributes to figures as varied as Rimbaud and Tony Hancock hint at, but lack the space to explore in any depth, the complexities and contradictions of these characters.

The presence of these many men, memorialised and acrosticised, makes the absence of women more striking. This is especially true of the poem for actor Richard Burton, which highlights many wildnesses and weaknesses, but women and the sexual urge are not among them.

Women — collectively — are most strikingly present in The Moving Rainbow: On the Bryant & May Matchgirls’ Strike 1888. Handling white phosphorus caused jaw deformations, and low wages meant most were malnourished. Nonetheless, they knew how to create a “public spectacle,” dressed “in wide hats with giant feathers / Of shouting colours,” and their campaign was ultimately successful.

Later poems bring us up to date with the Freedom Flotilla’s disgraceful treatment at the hands of Israeli forces — “no punishments spared / For those who still navigate by moral compass.” The poems Torched August, and A Plague of Flags, express heartfelt horror at anti-migrant protests but lack a focus for sympathy, which is one the strengths of Morrison’s writing.

The title poem closes the book on a downbeat note, with laughter seen as surrender: “& after least resistance, a fair bit after, / Fascist attractions are met with English laughter”. Surely there is still a place, and more need than ever, for satire – laughing at, not with, those “attractions”? One hopes that in Morrison’s next collection there is space for Count Binface.

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