Two new mountain bikes chained to the fence,
three horses lean over, bite at the tyres,
get the chain between their teeth,
eat most of a saddle and a handlebar grip.
Boggle Hole Youth Hostel and someone
has written ‘welcome to BOGGLE HELL’
on the bottom of the bunk above this one
in red felt tip and shaky writing.
A gang of bikers comes in late – a bottle
smashes outside the door then it’s quiet
but for the talking, distorted, muffled
through the wall, apart from that voice…
After breakfast a tractor tows a boat
named Freedom into the sea. There used to be
smugglers here and someone wrote ‘LULU’
four feet high in the slipway’s wet concrete.
Freedom is oil-grey, just below the horizon
when a dog tears along sideways, its tongue out,
tasting the salt on the wind, and, in the first
drops of rain, a boy draws a donkey in the sand.
CLIFF YATES
Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2015)
If you do not know Cliff Yates’s work, you could worse than start with Frank Freeman’s Dancing School, from which ‘Boggle Hole’ comes. Reading them is a bit like watching the best kind of slapstick comedy: each gag is inevitable, hilarious and sad all at once. In his poems you see the wooden plank on the shoulder of one man as it spins around, misses his friend as he ducks out of the way then catches him in the face on the return circuit.
What Cliff also shows us, and this is what give the poems a special kind of resonance, is the following shot where you can catch the same man scrabbling around on the floor, looking for a contact lens, perhaps, or perhaps just scrabbling around on the floor. Cliff does not moralise or attempt to persuade us what this might mean.
‘Boggle Hole’ is funny, and lyrical and a bit sad all at once. I do think it displays Cliff’s unique way of looking at and experiencing the world. I think the established trope to describe an oblique take on experience is now “surreal”. This is not quite true of Cliff, since his poems are not voyages into the unconscious, even though there are unusual juxtapositions to be found (horses chewing at bike tyres, a donkey drawn on the sand).
In his own way I think the view of England that Cliff portrays is as distinctive as those created by Hughes or Larkin:
There used to be
smugglers here and someone wrote ‘LULU’
four feet high in the slipway’s wet concrete.
It is a vision of in-between places, where nothing much happens or promises to: where the horses snack on bike chains, boats are called Freedom, dogs run sideways, and the seaside donkeys are virtual.