You may have come across James Dick as lead singer of the Red Propellers, a band who recreate New York urban dystopia for the UK, all angular riffs and grooves, drones and chimes, underpinning incantatory, sputtering stories full of lowlife, love and sweat.
Keeping Time is a new book of writing, the third in a trilogy of skinny tall stapled pamphlets (I think it’s A4 folded in half lengthways) containing Dick’s what – in Lyrics 2 – is subtitled ‘words songs noise poems’. The texts showcase Dick’s continuing freeform and loose-lined associative and imagistic thinking from the word go. The second poem, ‘Not Holding the Centre’, starts with a ‘young server at the food shelter’, then comments on the price of admission to visit the graves of Karl Marx and Brian Jones in Highgate Cemetery (‘tombstone blues’) before the narrator is subjected to Spotify hyping
the new pop singer
auto tune at the core
a dead ringer
a dead ringer
for the one before
Verse two offers us a face off between someone ‘in her / Top of the Town / polyester dressing gown’ staring down a ‘grimacing / facially inked / skinhead / swaggering the pavement / towards her’ before moving on to someone’s ‘elderly grandparents / growing skunk’ and a ‘hate crime spree’ in the shopping aisles. We are instructed to ‘debunk stereotypes’ but also told the shooting incident is ‘Modern Tide Filth’.
The third verse introduces us to a figure ‘dressed all in black’ (well, they would be, wouldn’t they?) who is
a god of adolescence
an angel of exile
a poet of words
a poet of action
and an example of pain being transferred into beauty, before the poem moves to a series of instructions to the reader: to ‘pursue the obscure’ at ‘the edges of everything’, become ‘a voice a face / for the dispossessed’. Either they or us, perhaps everyone, is ‘not holding the centre’, and we should embrace those edges.
This fragmented group of ideas and characters is typical of Dick’s writing, as is his narrator’s sometime intervention and comment and the occasional use of repetition to emphasise a line. The repetition can be more annoying on the page than when sung, but is also used to good effect in many places, for instance in ‘John Lennon Postage Stamps’.
Here the flicker of images gives us an open fire, a cardboard coffin, ‘the sun and the moon and the stars’, as well as the surreal idea of Saint Francis preaching ‘to the birds / live at the Five Spot’. We get another verse riffing on ‘H & jazz / jazz and H’ before we return to Saint Francis and the fact that
karma is instant
karma is instant
karma is instant
Here, the repetition is contradictory. If it was instant it wouldn’t be happening three times, so the idea is not only reinforced it is, along with the karma, at the very least delayed.
Elsewhere the poems in Keeping Time spend a lot of time in or outside cafés, being astonished and amazed by how unusual and original people are, whether that is a
Woman
on a mobility scooter
shouldering
an Elvis Presley tote bag
weaving in and out of
pedestrians
off key
singing One Night of Sin
, ‘a man with a tiny dog / on his shoulder’ or an encounter with an unnamed woman reading The Rainbow which, later in the poem, triggers the memory of ‘a shaft of moonlight shining / on her hand holding his’. These images are less successful when presented in isolation, as in a closing page of ‘Western Haikus’, but mostly Dick is adept at moving through ideas and images at breakneck speed before allowing romance or cynical aside to intervene. Dick is keen on resisting the permanent concerns of ‘Adulation and money’ and the creation of ‘a walled country / whose democracy / is / slipping / slipping / over the horizon’. These earthy, clever poems, feel like part of the resistance.
Rupert Loydell 15th September 2025
