Thinking about the linked poems of The Penguin Book of Haiku (2018) last week led me back to another favourite book in which the everyday habit of verse records a culture: Laurie Duggan’s Crab & Winkle (2009), a year-long verse journal written in month-long sections. The publisher describes Duggan’s diary of life in Kent as a “warped Shepherd’s Calendar for the age of climate change” — and the chaotic weather it quietly notices then is chilling to read again now. A few years later, I reviewed Allotments, a sequence set in the same landscape, for the Times Literary Supplement:
Laurie Duggan, Allotments (Shearsman, 2014)
The recent poetry of Laurie Duggan, like the low-key pubs it savours, is a little-known treasure of contemporary English culture. Duggan — whose Selected Poems 1971-2003 appeared from Shearsman in 2005 — is an Australian poet, which already gives him an effective strategy for remaining incognito here. Since moving to Kent in 2006, he has documented his new life on a blog, “Graveney Marsh”, and through books that resemble blogging in their rolling, provisional art.
The wonderful Crab & Winkle (2009) surveyed a semirural landscape over twelve months (the title alludes to a disused Kentish railway line, now a footpath). The Pursuit of Happiness (2012) gathered fragments from the same exploration of England as a real and imaginary place, a poetic paradox concentrated in its pubs (“in the Sun / where I sing // escaping / plumbing”).
Allotments continues Duggan’s song of public and private spaces, the title also playing on the allotted span of days in a life. There are 100 “allotments” (100 short lyrics) in total, and the suspicion arises that this number points to an ironic, miniature Divine Comedy, with its 100 cantos.
The first poem quibblingly distinguishes “the dark wood” of a pub bar from Dante’s selva oscura, and Duggan casts himself throughout as a man journeying through the shades of “Cameron’s Britain”, a place of “dark shapes beyond the double-glazing”. His imagistic technique derives from the American tradition of concrete notation of collective life pioneered by William Carlos Williams, and latterly continued by Ron Silliman; and Duggan’s self-deprecating, documentary writing attests to a communal view of poetry.
The result is a mixed but very moreish bag, the smallest crumbs of which are sharply salted. “Allotment #39” might be a haiku of the UKIP landscape: “Europe, out there somewhere / old cannon on a cliff / above the cafe”. Elsewhere there is a happy delicacy of domestic juxtapositions: “peripherally, a screen-saver glints / lavender hangs from the beams”. Nothing in Duggan’s “little England” is too small to escape his deftly phrased observation: neither “the smudge of a glass / set down on paper” nor “churches precarious / above chalk cuttings”.
[Laurie Duggan returned to Australia in 2018. In the same year, Shearsman published an expanded Selected Poems: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Laurie-Duggan-Selected-Poems-1971-2017-p102842082. His Graveney Marsh blog can still be enjoyed here: http://graveneymarsh.blogspot.com/]
Some Flowers Soon is now on holiday until late August.
how much of it “adds ups”?
a buzzing insect enters then leave the room
— Laurie Duggan, “August”, Crab & Winkle