The setting is the Potteries: Tunstall, Stoke, Hanley. The era is the 80s/90s: Ind Coope, Chevette, Vauxhall Viva, suede blouson. And the speaker is a painter – but not the sort that commonly appears in poems. He’s a blue-collar employee doing public-sector contracts: he’s painting council house doors, play area equipment, a police station and schools. He’s indoors six floors up, outdoors ‘crouched before miles of park railings’, in the paint-shop with a ‘throat-seizing reek of turps,/ linseed and propane’, planning the works do, waiting for the rain to stop and, after knocking-off time, ‘prancing through town’ in a ‘peach shirt’.
He describes the workmates, gaffers and clients of this world with its hierarchies, micro-aggressions and destructive playtime (chucking bricks at old TV screens); its pride in doing a job well and defensiveness about how it’s undervalued. The men in it can be fussy, grumpy, kind, anti-social, pettily dictatorial, and sometimes really sad. But as much attention is spent on things (the epigraph, notably, is from Francis Ponge): the de-icer, stir stick, lump hammer, paint kettle, downspout, spindle, tenon saw, stales, cleat hooks, galvanised conduits, gimlets, awls, swivel pegs, stringboards, cable-pins… There are whole poems about things like a garden gate, a bench, an offcut, a ceiling crack, and an unfaded oblong of paint where a sign’s been removed, all detailed with an artisan’s precision and practicality (‘that panel pin/ waggled loose in the beading strip’, ‘the leaves of a hinge/ coupled by a pintle’), and enriched with vernacular and vocational words: mung, clagged, cross-bracing, chamfered… Here’s a complete poem (‘Lid’):
The job’s to lever it open,
get straight on with what’s in the tin.
But what clings to its underside
needs to be scraped off and added,
could make the difference.
On the one hand, there’s the credible, matter-of-fact, demotic voice. The spareness. The hint of allegory. The hint of Robert Frost. And the strong possibility that there’s never before been, in all of literary history, a poem entirely about removing a paint lid. On the other hand, you can imagine the blokes within this book going, ‘You get all those Arts Council grants for that?’
Philip Hancock’s style is the familiar one that we might call Mainstream Workshop: the present historic, the pronoun-drop, the asyndeton, the understatement, the judicious excision of adverbs, of opinion, of conspicuous audio-effect, of flash. In his hands, it’s good writing that suits both the craftsmanship of its speaker and the emotional reticence of its social milieu, but Mainstream Workshop has been ubiquitous since the nineties and it’s getting hard to make it exciting. This poet’s distinctiveness lies rather in his major subject-matter, and his success says a lot about who poets and poetry readers still are. Which is? Well, they do have backgrounds of increasing diversity, but they continue to grow up to be teachers, lecturers, creative-writing tutors, librarians, publishers – or at the least have graduate-, university- or artistic-type jobs. As individuals, that’s great. But big-picture-wise, it means that whole occupational continents remain poetically unexplored. I guess, besides Philip Hancock, there are Fred Voss’ poems about his lifetime as a machinist, and Paul Tanner’s from his as a supermarket worker. Any others?
It should be said, incidentally, that the work poems here aren’t the full picture. There are also fine pieces about childhood and, later in the book, about DIY. But it’s always the work poems that (we) critics go on about because they’re the most unique and valuable. For what it’s worth, I was engaged, entertained, impressed and learnt a lot about painting and decorating. And now… I’ll get back to my university job.
Guy Russell 29th August 2024
