Rag Argonauts
Alan Morrison, Caparison Press, £12  

RAG ARGONAUTS is Alan Morrison’s 12th volume of poetry. Over the course of that sustained output he has perfected a style that is as comfortable with longer-form poems as it is with shorter lyrics, that encompasses historical and political themes and employs a broad range of references and allusions to foreground the poems.  

The title of the new collection sets us on a voyage that traverses several time periods and locations, during which we encounter various real and mythological figures.  

Early in the collection Hauntology is nostalgic for 1970s Britain with its “anoraks/ & balaclava helmets, the high-backed bikes;/ the characterful, curvaceous cars more varied in shape & colour—like wheeling sweets;/ chilled milk in glass bottles, chocolate bars in paper wrappers, Lucozade in squeaky orange cellophane” but what the poem grieves for most of all is “the future/ that we were anticipating, the authentic/ tomorrow of matt & meritocracy, mutual/ improvement, cooperativeness, progressive/ ideas, transgressive television, Play For Today,/ punk’s political music—all abruptly aborted.”

In Marmalade Lane 1970s Britain is again recalled as somewhere holding the promise of something better to come before the anti-values of Thatcherism had set in with “the spiritual death/ Of perpetual self-interest, the mental Miasma of consumerism, divisive vibes/ Of obsessive individualism.”

Across the Irish Sea no such nostalgia will attend a decade that brought massacres, death squads, human rights violations, torture and imprisonment without trial. 

It is surprising that a writer as radical as Morrison does not touch on any of this given his ability to critique British political structures, the inequalities they perpetuate and the social problems that arise from them.  

That said, in The Heart’s Lightning Recital he does get to grips with the accelerating use of law-fare to curtail protest and close down dissent: “But our right to protest is being torched by authority/ To whom a new Act gives extra powers to arbitrarily/ Decide what is ‘disruptive’ (though protest is supposed to be) & grade types of disruption by ever-shadier degrees.”

Apportioning proscription and punishment accordingly: “You’ll get banged up for hanging a banner from a gantry & distracting traffic—for locking-on to object or body,/ Chaining yourself to railings — that suffragette agency.”

This collection draws on expert knowledge of an apparently inexhaustible range of subjects. Morrison is as comfortable wittily relocating the Athenian philosopher Demosthenes to a Bognor Regis pharmacy as he is dissecting the life and work of WH Auden or creating as substantial a poem as Margate Fragments from Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land — A Biography Of A Poem.  

On our odyssey through broken Britain Morrison also introduces us to fictional characters such as the troubled poet Parry Amphlett, Regina Green — “dying from the hands down” — and Agatha Rag, whose “catarrh-rattling laughter/ Clatters through the high street like a kicked tin can.”

Canonical works of literature including those by Shelley, Auden, Eliot and Jack London serve as the jumping-off points for a series of poems packed with biographical information and academic insights. 

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, Jude Fawley returns home with his wife to find that his son, nicknamed Little Father Time, has hanged himself and their other two children, explaining in a suicide note, “Done because we are too menny.”

In WhatsApp Mr Time? this scene is recreated within the cruelty of a benefits system designed to deny help to those who most need it: “A message is spotted/ too late from Little Time/ a bitterly literal/ interpretation/ of something offhand/ one of his parents/ said in a moment/ of deflated spirits —/ that they were having/ to do without because/ their benefits were capped from the third child up.”

Now, the explanation for this terrible action driven by hopelessness and despair is left through the very modern medium of a WhatsApp message: “impressed permanently like an epitaph/ chipped in stone or/ the abbreviated Latin inscribed on the reverse of an old copper penny:/ dun bc we r 2 menny x.”

Class, unemployment and the benefits system are among the central issues. The link between poverty, mental illness and the intergenerational trauma that can lead to utter despair in the absence of hope is traced. This is, however, counterpointed by the consolation to be found in the uplifting spirits of music, art and literature. 

The scope of intellectual inquiry, the application of critical thinking and the marshalling of biographical and other information are used throughout to create poems of great intensity and depth. These are poems that demand our full attention and necessitate careful reading. There is more than one poem in this collection concerning literary history that would easily warrant a scholarly essay of its own. 

In all, Rag Argonauts is an outstanding achievement that is every bit as ambitious in scope and purpose as it is accomplished in its artistry.