'Aveley Lane' is one of my personal favourites from Whatever You Do, Just Don't, so I’m delighted and grateful that Rob Selby should have chosen it as a sample poem from the collection for publication today on Wild Court. You can read it via this link. I do hope you enjoy it!
The Yorkshire Times Poem of the Week
is ‘Farnham Library Card’ from Whatever You Do, Just
Don’t.
Thanks to Steve Whitaker, the Literary
Editor, for his choice and insightful words about the poem. You can read it by following this link.
Three or four years ago, I knew I
wanted to write about the footballing heroes of my childhood, those
lower-league footballers who triumphed and failed before my eyes, who evoked a
sense of masculinity that was hugely different to today’s view of men, whose team
generated a sense of belonging among the local fans. In short, I knew I wanted
to write directly about Aldershot F.C. footballers of the 1980s, but indirectly
about far more. However, I didn’t know how to go about putting such a group of
poems together. And that was when I read Stanley Cook’s excellent poetry for
the first time.
Cook wrote two separate pamphlets on
the back of his time working as a schoolteacher, Form Photograph
(Phoenix/Peterloo, 1971) and Staff Photograph (Peterloo Poets, 1972). In
each case, he created a set of vignettes. The first batch, of course, were
pupils, while the second were teachers. He generated these portraits of
individuals within a specific context, building a wider picture of society through the implicit dialogues that were generated among the poems, accumulating his effects via verbal collage.
On reading Cook’s poems, I admired
them immensely and suddenly realised I could adapt his technique to my
footballers. And rather than using a photo, I was drawn to the team sheet that
appeared on the back of every programme, and thus ‘Starting Eleven’, the second section in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, started
to take shape. Thank you, Stanley! I’d like to think you’d enjoy my poems too…
The first review for Whatever You Do, Just Don't is in, and it's terrific! I'm very grateful to Christopher James for his scrupulous, in-depth feature on my collection for The Friday Poem. Here's a brief snippet, but you can read it in full by following this link...
Stewart is consistently sure-footed while navigating rocky emotional landscapes. He shows a craftsman’s touch for form, deft handling of syntax, and an ear for half-heard rhythms and cadence...There's a grace and an empathy at work here that make these poems slip deep into the heart, the mind and the memory...
Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is
organised into four separate sections. Some readers might label them mini-collections,
but that would be to view them mistakenly as separate entities that don’t
establish dialogues with each other.
Ok, you might say, so what do poems
about Aldershot Town footballers of the 1980s have in common with poems about
life in rural Spain, for instance? Well, quite a lot now you come to mention
it.
The main nexus is the chafing of belonging
and estrangement. In the commuter belt in South-West Surrey and North
Hampshire, where most town centres look alike, have similar shops and chain
restaurants, where people don’t put down anchors but move around to be closer
to a new job, there’s no doubt that the second half of the 20th
century saw a loss of community, of identity, which was pretty deeply felt by
the time I was a kid in the area during the 1980s. In that respect, lower-league football
had become a significant factor in generating or recovering communal identities.
By supporting their local team, people belonged. And that was
definitely what attracted me to Aldershot Town.
Not enough, of course, because I ended
up leaving southern England for Extremadura, where I found a profound,
established sense of identity in small towns such as Almendralejo and
Villafranca de los Barros. In retrospect, that feeling of belonging was what
made me stay, even though I would never quite be one of them, always a
foreigner.
This dual perspective runs through
Whatever You Do, Just Don’t and knits its sections together. By straddling two
countries, two languages, two societies, I can’t 100% feel at home in either, but
my perspectives on them both have acquired extra nuance, additional layers. In
these poems, Sunday tapas and siestas in deepest Extremadura might even remind
you of a nap after Roast Topside or Brisket in Knaphill or Croydon in 1979 or 1982…
