magnums we eat privately like sin - keith richmond
“Today we are reduced to the prime numbers / of budget cuts and contingent staff”, notes Allison McVety in her poem Head Count. “It’s about percentages, market share, the maths / nothing remains to be decided – the door’s / already turning, turning people out to grass.” McVety lives in Berkshire and works for Microsoft in Reading. While her first collection of poems, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007), mined the past (and her dreams of gold barges oaring their way to Avalon”) on its way to the shortlist for the Forward Prize this new collection revels in the present.
McVety was born in 1962 and brought up in Manchester at a time when according to Extra Curricula, David Essex was living it large in the dreams of teenage girls “and we all see Purdy hair as the answer.” In Modern British History According to Mr Flint, they get the industrial revolution, the Peterloo Massacre and the general strike in class while “at home time poverty / kept us company on the bus.” She recalls Alain Delon, “Six rows back / at the Odeon”, “Panorama, the 9 o’clock news on BBC”, “her Platex, as yet / unfumbled” and, in Two Mugs, “Corned beef chunks and tinned spaghetti / over a primus stove on the concrete floor of our / new home.”
She remembers the women who drank “spilling out of doors and out of dresses, / off their heels with gin and dragging hard on Players” and writes of “Magnums which we eat privately / like sin” and movingly of the days when “the scars ran the lengths of their lives.”
McVety has a good eye and a good ear for the rhythms of life and love and her best poems – such as In Little Black Dresses, Whit Walks, The Train Drivers View and Back Yards – are hymns translating to glory the everyday struggles of ordinary people.
And that, of course, can mean mainlining on disappointment. In The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra she recalls “Sitting in the panelled hall for Wednesday’s Assembly, / to the right of Sharon Booth.” They are she says, twinned by negligence. “I know her bow arm only for the lies it tells to Mr Payne.”
She concludes: “For all I know, things are still the same today – Sharon busking / at the Hallé while, across town in Gatley, I mime Happiness.”
Published in Tribune 21 January 2011