Good biting poetry with a political bent using a black comedic style.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

For release at this month's BC meet up.

Picked up at meetup last night. Will go on TBR pile for now.

I hope this book makes someone's day. If it's not your kind of read, journal it, pass it on and join in the fun of watching books you have touched travel the world!

Released as part of the Bookcrossing Anniversary Convention in Mainz, Germany, 2019

I don't read much poetry and have never heard of Tony Harrison but there was something about this (very slim) volume that appealed to me - so maybe I'll find a message in there somewhere.
(Now I've said that, TH will probably start popping up everywhere.)

So, Tony Harrison is apparently a well-known poet; having lived outside UK since 1971 he somehow passed me by.
This short collection follows themes political and social - the Iraq War, Bush and Blair, foot-and-mouth disease, cancer, one set in Florida, others in Greece. There is an underlying bitterness, things he has obviously not been able to "let go" since WWII.
I did not like his habit of using 's all the time as I had to stop and think whether it was "is", "has" or a possessive. A way of saving a syllable but so frequent as to be annoying.

Another quibble is that when writers scatter phrases in foreign languages in English texts, they (or their editors) never get it right. The spelling "über al" comes from the old German "Uns hât der winter geschât über al" which, in the modern German version that Harrison gives, should be "Uns hat der Winter geschadet überall". Oh, I am such a nitpicker.

Of all the poems, I quite liked Florida Frost despite its despondency. And also the part about Freddy Flea in the first section of Reading the Rolls, a pungent poem veering towards the scatological. It made me think of a boy who was at school with me, Georgie Flear; he lived in a house that I'm sure had many rats festering under the floorboards.

But on the whole, I felt depressed after reading this: feed me with some joy!

for the meetup