ON JEREMY REED’S ‘COLLUSIVE
STRANGERS’
By David Hackbridge Johnson
(Please scroll to the bottom of
the page and click ‘older posts’ to find articles on Andrew Duncan, Denis ApIvor,
Jerome Rothenberg, Avrohom Leichtling, Frances Cornford, Iain Sinclair, Javier
Marías, John Gawsworth, and many more)
Poet, novelist, flâneur of London, of Paris, of
minds stretched to breaking point in hostile cityscapes and underground dives,
Jeremy Reed, is now in his sixth decade of writing. The word is out the
his renegade status is to be renewed with the publication of a selection of old and new
verse, Collusive Strangers, published
by Shearsman, with an excellent introduction by the editor, Grevel Lindop.
Reed has a season ticket as poète maudit of Soho
backwaters – his initial poetic vision, passed via a cup from which Blake and
Rimbaud supped in equal measure, has helped sustain a fecundity hardly matched
by his peers.
Curious to note – I first thought of Reed as a
nature poet, even a sea poet, taking the air on Jersey where he was born and lived
until a young adult – this mainly due to the fact that By the Fisheries was the first book of his I read. Yet upon
moving to the mainland he was able to transpose the sight, sound and salt of
marine-orientated life to the suitable interval required for city dwelling – becoming
the beachcomber of Charing Cross Road and Old Compton Street, the florid muse
of the original Patisserie Valerie, to be found poemising in purple ink on
foolscap sheets amid the hissing of coffee machines and the iridescent glow of
jam-toppings on cream cakes. If the purple isn't exactly imperial it
might denote an affinity with the high priests of decadence – Wilde, Dowson,
Count Stenbock, even Ronald Firbank for his late decadent prose, as hilarious
as it is razor sharp – Reed’s uncanny incisions into observations are Firbankian
in wit. Englishness as of the shires is banished, academe shunned; what
he sees as the dry parochialism of much mid-to-late twentieth century British
poetry is anathematized with unashamed vituperation – hear him on Philip Larkin
and Andrew Motion if you dare. Aside from Blake and Rimbaud, his work is
moored by friendships struck with Kathleen Raine and David Gascoyne, both poets
suffused with the real presence of a world beyond the material. There is
a further transposition – for there is a conjuration of the nation's capital
that is more Parisian than one might guess. Reed seeks the London
equivalents of the ateliers of impoverished artists, the vast Thames is
bottlenecked into the more intimate Seine with its bridges traversed in a few
dozen strides from one side to the other. There is also an attempt to
trace and retrace that part of London that existed before the big money
makeover that has seen the East End invaded by office blocks and whole quarters
of niche retail abolished – most notably Denmark Street, formerly the place for music retail, now a
remnant drowning in CGI slabs of stick-on bricks and plate-glass. Reed
wants a London infested with the very smell of the rooms at 34 Howland Street
where Verlaine and Rimbaud fought, scrounged, loved. He makes gay bars
and small-hours dens sing with Parisian liqueurs, the faces of lost revellers
illuminated in the ‘green fairy' glow of absinthe. This is Iain Sinclair
territory but he doesn't have the monopoly – Reed is a lyric antenna picking up
the sawn-off lives of pop divas, doomed poets, rent boys, drug-dependent
savants, and reassembling them – he ventures less directly into the slipstream
of psychogeography with its evoked political bent. Whereas Sinclair often
takes a reading from within the maelstrom of his obsessive walking, Reed wants
a certain tranquillity before his voices utter – although to be sure, there are
poems revealing a sense of desperate attempted flight from city demons.
There is no nostalgia for a never-lived past, since Reed’s work has a
directness of feeling that is as up to date as a pop hit, yet one capable of
achieving classic status; his tracks can be remixed for each new generation,
whether it be the fashionista poseurs of Carnaby Street or the dead-ringers for
Comte de Lautréamont. Reed's poetic machinery is never running on empty even if
the lives he enshrines are. Ultimately, a tenderness sings from his
words, best felt at readings of his work, either solo or with the hypnotic
synthesizer backing of Itchy Ear, the other half of the duo The Ginger
Light. Reed, together with Adrian Clarke and Gavin Selerie are the finest
readers this reviewer has heard – Reed the most flamboyant, extending his
sibilants like a cross between Marc Bolan and a kitsch Egyptian priest from a
Hollywood history epic – he is in fact an extension of the snake-like patterns
of the synth-wash. New Romantic glitz meets that rougher-hewn sense of
danger all too easily realised in the nightmarish pop of Alan Vega and Martin Rev
of Suicide. The Ginger Light give the full Reed experience, which is
imbued with high rhetorical flights into lyricism within the trance incantation of the whole. Petals and room-spray might be sprinkled over
the audience who are invited to the ritual. Treating this elaborate performative
stance as mere camp devalues the poet's unspoken but heavily implied message,
that all types of lives and living have worth, however far from accepted norms
they might lie, forlorn, occluded, shunned. And furthermore, that the
emotional connectivity of beings is something forged in spaces felt out by
Blake, Raine, and in the surreal terrain of Gascoyne. This might push
Reed into religion but doesn't really, unless it be that of the like-minded,
clinging to the ruins of a city ravaged by vacuous capital projects and hoping
for redemption through poetry. This means the opposite of Auden's poetry
that ‘makes nothing happen’ and gives Reed's work a ringing optimism even as he
elegises the lost. His is a demi-monde
twilight that can still smile as mascara melts down sallow cheeks.
I'm particularly happy to see a generous
selection from Jeremy Reed's 1984 collection By the Fisheries. His nature
poetry can be as organically convoluted as that of Edmund Blunden but there are
always jarring human elements that ruffle the surface of otherwise placid
waters. From the title poem: ‘I stand fishing that pooled serenity // for
mullet, and watch sunlight make a star / on the shards of a broken gin bottle.’[1]
And how about this from his poem ‘Conger’: ‘A conger’s world is tubular, it
means / seeing things thinly through a gun-barrel / from the point of view of
the bullet-head / that's primed to fire, the fist-sized, clam-tight jaws // more
deadly in their lock than a bulldog's.’[2]
This is as muscular and powerful as any of the animal poems of Ted Hughes. And
then there is ‘The Storm’ from the same volume: ‘A wasp's vibration in a
gorse flower, / that orange flame belling the wings’ motion, / was how it
seemed miles distant, the tremor / of a needle-head dropped from a great height
/ into the uncorked bottle-neck we cooled / in a sea-pool’.[3]
This has many of Reed's characteristics: colour, a primary igniter of his muse,
tiny motions of things, suggesting that Reed's poetic eye is microscopic, and
always the idea of tension in movement between the things described and the
images within which they are encapsulated.
Of course, we want Jeremy Reed for his
kaleidoscopic and pinpoint forays into the heart of fashionable London, where
his hyperrealism brings the most garish colours directly before one's eyes. This is poetry to be read with sunglasses
on. From ‘Edith Grove’, a poem from his 2006 collection Orange Sunshine: ‘Max factor eye-shadows,
a blue, a green / left open on the basin, Quant powder / skid-marking the rim
with a dusty sheen… // Nobody loves you when you're down and out.’[4] The glamour and associated hopes of a good night
out, end in the discarding of a painted face in a sink – and the lonely
soundtrack kicks in.
Reed's poetical and musical icons can find
themselves altogether in a poem like ‘Swinging London’ from the same collection,
regardless from which century they belong: ‘The Waste Land’s synchronised to
catchy pop, / Eliot and Hendrix panned through one speaker. / Kit Marlowe waits
at the 14 bus stop.’ And all this triggered by a poem that begins: ‘Two
gay boys slip out of a Soho loo.’[5]
Here is sex, pop, drugs, fashion and metaphysical poetry all rolled into one
with no respect given to chronology – centuries can be concertinaed into the
narrowest alleyways of Soho as glorious anachronisms rub together.
Despite the surface sheen, or one might say glitter, of many of these poems,
they are the opposite of shallow in that they plunge the reader into a
psychedelic vortex of colours, ideas and people. Reed digs under the surface hyperrealism – lying
beneath is his tenderness for the voices he captures, voices often of
long-lost people, their lives curtailed by drugs, cancer or mental
illness. If a manically swinging London is a kind of asylum, Jeremy Reed
has access to everyone's notes.
From his beautiful 2007 volume of elegies, This is How You Disappear, we have poems
that commemorate Asa Benveniste, Mary Absalom, Paula Stratton and John
Berger. There is an even finer elegy, again to Paula Stratton, from an
early volume that was lost to sight and then miraculously found. It is ‘Junkie Tango Outside Boots Piccadilly’
and there are a few stanzas from this much longer poem on display here.
The book from which it comes, Black
Russian, Outtakes from the Airmen's Club 1978-79, was only published in full by Waterloo in 2010.
Readers should seek this out at the earliest opportunity. Grevel Lindop, regards ‘Junky Tango’ as one of
the greatest 20th century poems. And with achingly painful lines like these,
who can blame him?: ‘Days in bed, without / medication, while a brown-eyed
night wind / felt in the ash tree for your body's parts: / waited for the
distribution of bones.’[6]
Reed must be the most painterly poet writing in
English today. He has the aquamarine
tints of David Hockney, he has the acrylic splashes and swipes of Howard
Hodgkin, and perhaps most talismanically of all, there is a sense in which some
of the London poems are viewed askance by Francis Bacon, who we find in the
title poem of Reed's collection Piccadilly
Bongo from 2010: ‘I recognized as the louche Grand Guignol / of pigment,
the gangsterish, street-wired / Francis Bacon, taking time out / as a quizzical
spectator / leaning above the subway gate.’[7]
Here is poetry that mixes the urban flâneur’s nonchalant stance with a sense of
imminent violence, the setting of the subway gate an indication that getting
out is always an option but one not likely to be taken, since too many thrills
and temptations await the solitary walker of the capital. Reed writes as
if an absinthe-tinted elixir of Baudelaire had been preserved in a phial, from
which he regularly takes sips as he spins the city deliriously around the axis
of a late-night bus stop.
I first met Jeremy Reed literally at floor
level as we squinted at rare volumes on the lowest shelves in the basement of
Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road. We met quite often subsequently, most
especially for the readings On Blake Steps organised by the late Niall McDevitt,
that fierce protest poet but warm, gentle man. Did something go out of
the scene with Niall's death? Lockdown
severed many ties and Jeremy has been little seen in public recently. One hopes that he is writing, adding to the
extraordinary body of work created over a more than 50 year period. Collusive Strangers is a testament to
his endless creativity, his love of words and his deep empathy for the many people
that populate his poems. I can't imagine
there will be a more compelling or essential volume of poetry published this
year.
©David Hackbridge
Johnson 18.xi.2024