Transparent Words - Review

Down in Liverpool

A new CD of Music and Poetry from

Jim Bennett

Reviewed by David Bateman

Jim Bennett is very much of that generation of Liverpool poets who adopted the directness and spontaneity of American beat writing and adapted it into a peculiarly English - and Liverpudlian - mode of expression. Avoiding the pitfall of becoming "a three-chord guitar-player | singing about some place | he's heard about in other people's songs | but never seen," (as the narrator puts it in Down In Liverpool), his poetry is staged in the recognizable Merseyside landscape as it changes along with its characters.

Jim is a very effective reader of his own work, with a voice slightly reminiscent of that of Brian Patten, which helps to make this CD better than your average studio poetry recording. As well as the 27 poems, there are also four songs. Though I'd often seen Jim reading out his poetry, I'd never ever heard his songs until the rough mixes of this CD. It was a surprise, and a very pleasant one. These are modern English folk pieces, well-sung and with some neat finger-picking, and the influence of Andy Roberts is very clear in Man On The Moon.

I first saw Jim Bennett performing around 1996, with the Dead Good Poets Society in the Everyman Bistro, but he'd been around and doing poetry, to-ing and fro-ing between Britain and America, ever since he'd first started reading out his poetry back in the sixties. Somewhere In Liverpool looks back from its standpoint "thirty years on | from the days when | the long-haired rough-spoken poets | wandered into O'Connor's | and screamed their poems | above the bar-noise."

Several of the poems take this retrospective approach. The title piece, Down In Liverpool, is a darkly powerful poem which gains from repeated listenings. Its alcoholic main character is ageing without ever having properly grown-up. He wanders messily through life, unable to see that he's destroying his wife, and at the same time projecting his own decline onto the city around him, for example onto the Dicky Lewis statue, "the phallic symbol of Liverpool, | now looking limp | and dangling like a dead fish. | There's so much of us in this place." Any guilt is side-stepped: "Today I will get drunk before I start to remember | whatever it is I'm trying to forget."

Shops are a recurring image: the Lewis's statue becomes a symbol of impotence; and in Rooms, the couple looking at shop-window furniture show-rooms come to see them as a sort of idyll of a pristine world: "that place that smelt new | when it was new | ... | before the room began to smell of us."

Elsewhere, in both Problems With Bags and Trouble At Tesco's shops become the scenes of small crises. The latter is darkly witty in the detail of its portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia; and in case I've been giving the impression that these poems are all doom and gloom, it's worth mentioning that even the darker pieces have their moments of light, and that there are a good number of lighter and more optimistic pieces on this CD, including the very funny Dogs.

A Poem For You is a love-poem in a straightforward 1960s Liverpool style, with a conscious bow to Adrian Henri's poem, I Want To Paint. Unseen, an autobiographical poem about surveying the mess left by burglars in the flat of his recently-died mother, emerges as a surprisingly optimistic piece in its unplanned facing up to what really matters and what doesn't.

But considering all the grimness brought forth in this CD to do with getting older, three pieces stand out in their different attempts at reconciliation with ageing. After talking angrily of the changes since the 1960s poetry scene, Somewhere In Liverpool evokes the idea of the past as something that survives in the present, "Somewhere in Liverpool | where we are poets | and we are scousers | and it is still | the summer of love." The song, Just Like The Old Days, has its chorus, "We made love in new ways | Just like the old days | When love was something fresh and new," and at first uses the old standby of having its events in "a dream," but then allows this to become a reality on waking. Here the hankering for the past at last becomes a celebration of the present, as happens more directly in the poem, Like The First Time, which is also one of the very few poems to mention parenthood. Here, in a sleight of word so quick it's almost gone before you've noticed it, Jim allows an ambiguity on the phrase "time passes," so that it refers both to growing older and to making love. There's hope for old goat yet.

David Bateman, July 2000