3.5
Collected Poems
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesCollected Poems Reviews
3.5
“Recommend the later edition, which includes the uncollected poems and Summoned by Bells.
It surprises some how much I like Betjeman; Larkin was onto something when he said that talking about him was the quickest route to a literary punch-up. Some still dislike (though not, please note, detest) him for his image and the squibs that cater to it - the Tory grandee cycling through the shires and gurning at everything ‘north of Trent’; the kind of man who thinks ‘cad’ is the highest insult.
His poems matter because they don’t outlaw feeling. They are clear and they are precise, right down to postcodes. This probably the only collected poems that includes an index of place names as well as first lines.
The poems are also funny (‘How to Get on in Society’), and cutting (‘Five O’Clock Shadow’). Camp poems about beefy hockey girls sit next to poems about religious doubt at a friend’s cremation.
Rather a lot of the poems are about illness and death - ‘Inevitable’, ‘Mortality’ (where the ‘first-class brains of a senior civil servant / Are sweetbread on the road today), ‘The Retired Postal Clerk’, which captures the triteness of grief perfectly. The best example in this vein is also, for me, Betjeman’s best poem - ‘Devonshire Street W1.’”
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