New Famous Phrases
Daniel Hinds, Broken Sleep Books, £12.99

SINCE Smokestack Books closed its vital operation at the end of last year, after a prolific two decades, there is now a gaping space in the publication of working-class poetry. Broken Sleep Books is one established press which specifically specialises in publishing working-class poets. 

Daniel Hinds hails from Newcastle, has been published in numerous notable journals, won prizes and acquired various commissions, and Famous New Phrases is his debut volume. Two different critical quotes accompanying the book each using the term “word-hoard” (from Old English “wordhord”) to refer to Hinds’s distinctive vocabulary. One in particular is “brae” which is a Lowland Scots term for the brow of a hill. 

A stylistic feature I instantly noticed and appreciated (as well as related to from my own poetic practice) is Hinds’s capitalisation of first letters for each line of verse, a practice which has long been abandoned as outdated in the majority of contemporary poetry, but which arguably still has its place as an emphasis for the lyrical line and as a clear visual demarcation from prose. Whether or not this is a reinvention of “line-initial capitalisation” as Professor David Morley claims in his quote for the book, it serves as a rivet to Hinds’s cadent verse and also emphasises his clear stylistic descent from the aphoristic lyricism of Prufrock-era TS Eliot. 

And on the evidence of this substantial and accomplished volume, Hinds’s poetry certainly deserves the epithet Eliotic, not to say Poundian. The Train Goes Backwards is an imagistic two-liner which recalls Pound’s In A Station Of The Metro: “Peeled faces look down, don’t notice the tunnel;/ The dry white ghosts of plants scream against the stopped pane”. There is also a deep seam of Classicism to Hinds’s poems, which also recalls Pound and Eliot. 

There are too many striking images and turns of phrase to feature here from what might prove the prophetically titled Famous New Phrases, but here are some examples:

“We looked up to them, those gods in cockle/ And sea bone suits” (The Pact Of Water); “Hoaxed on browning leaves,// Curling, like a monument to burnt parchment” (Nine Spilt Yolks); “While I slept, my words caught in a willow hoop of ink.// Wake to a collection, two pamphlets, and a fat memoir” (Keeping Watch); “The old man’s whistle cut short/ Before it could cool the broth on his upraised spoon” (The Corona Prince); “The tight grief kept unspoken at the back of his throat/ Like centuries of uncoughed phlegm” (The Expectant Occupant); “The goblin scratches a pick on the curls of his teeth” (The Goblin); “The dark strokes of her eyes a shadowed doorway/ To other worlds” (Lady Of The Rock); “The vapour from his mouth plumes like the hovering souls” (Aneirin); “There are the shapes of sphinxes in the waters” (The Banquet Of Penelope); “Horn, a scimitar blunt to wounds” (The Grey Rhino); “Tickled by the soft stroke/ Of sea slick plumology” (Scraps To Daub A Siren’s Lips).

Hinds has an impressive talent at the aphorism that mark him out as an Eliotian poet in more than simply style: “The urn and ash remain a man./ The greyest of men”, “The bones of his family propped around him like thick/ Invitations posed on a mantle, or atrophied antlers, mounted” (The Expectant Occupant); “A city is a soul that lives on after death” (Philip Pullman’s Graduation); “He plunders his own life, like a confessional poet” (Untitled, The Fourth Monster).

“An old headmaster, the lines of shadow under his eyes/ Like the subtle curl of a feather’s black rachis,/ Whose subject has fallen from the curriculum/ Like his god from his kingdom, says the words,/ Weighs out the Greek gramarye on his tongue.” (Twice The Man)

And from The Magi’s Camel, preceded by an Eliot quote from Journey of the Magi: “The fat god squats between back braes...// The murmur of cloth, creaking leather and dry lips”. This poem has much of Eliot’s The Hollow Men about it. 

There are also occasional echoes of Dylan Thomas: “Only the sight of a horse without rider, white and old as starlight”. One can hear Eliot again in “I have seen invertebrate sea beasts scuttle/ And crack the chitin of their shells in her wake” (Siren’s Throat). 

Ted Hughes is heard in: “Three eagles observe, crouch, and strut their talons,/ Clack fingernails on the warped stones, moult feathers” (The Footman). 

But it is primarily Eliot that Hinds uncannily echoes in both style and tone: “‘I’m the damned pallbearer.’/ He rubs a cracked nail over an aching shoulder.// He rests the wooden chute on his slick black suit./ Through the crematorium grate waits a nation of ash and smoke” (The Young Mariner). And again: “Bones grown on a mutant crop, sucked dry/ And discarded like comrades in a Cyclops’s cave” (The Dream of Methuselah). 

Hinds deploys consonance and assonance consummately: “Of arms, she lets the slick suntan grease/ Ease the passing” (The Crying Of The Gulls); “A splash of adamantine shuttle and white starlight” (Ode To Apollo 11); “... and sweep the rheumy mist/ Of Camlann from my new ancient eyes” (Keeping Watch); “Let the scriptured weeds grow, without stricture” (The Expectant Occupant); “Snatches of songs long marinated on the tongue, and the sting of apple” (The Dream Of Methuselah); “From the prow, arm outstretched I hold aloft the sigil/ Of a thin string” (Lady Of The Rock); “Like the upthrust silken waxen skin of Arthur’s selkie” (The Footman); “Can fill a low trough groove dug by long prowling” (Lioness and Portcullis).

Daniel Hinds is about as uncannily Eliotic as any contemporary poet gets, but his poetry is scored through with its own distinctiveness, precisely judged lyricism, and often astonishing aphoristic grasp. 

New Famous Phrases is an unusually accomplished debut collection.