Last week, I attended the launch of Matthew Stewart’s collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press) and Mat Riches’s Collecting the Data. The latter, available here from Red Squirrel Press, is Mat’s long-awaited and excellent debut pamphlet. The launch itself was a joyous and merrily raucous occasion, with readings not only from the two launchers, but also some mighty fine guest readers – Eleanor Livingstone, Hilary Menos and Maria Taylor.

There was a lot of love and affection in the room for Mat and his warm, witty  and well-crafted poems.

Mat has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.

*

Half Term at Longleat Safari Park

We could only watch the rhesus macaque
tear off our dusty windscreen wiper blades.
His partner and kid appeared from nowhere
in the rearview mirror in what I now
know to have been a planned pincer movement
or David Blaine-esque sleight of hand.

And we thought getting in was expensive!
Just think, if they’d had the slightest sniff
of the homemade sandwiches at Mum’s feet
we wouldn’t have left alive, let alone
bought a thing in the café or gift shop.

I think, my child, you learned a few new words
you won’t be taking back to your teacher.
Your What-I-did-on-holiday might raise
some eyebrows. I want to blame the monkey
but it’s not his fault we crossed his domain
—he was trying to amuse his kid.
I can recognise myself in that.

*

You might be asking yourself this: How is he going to analyse a poem which speaks for itself so clearly and eloquently without killing it? My answer is that it will be useful to scrutinise Mat’s ability to write poems which combine his natural gift for comedy with an underlying seriousness; essentially, it demonstrates that Mat, as Matthew Stewart puts it in his endorsement of Collecting the Data, ‘is a specialist in the humorous use of the serious and the serious use of the humorous, channelled through a playful but yoked relish for language.’

The title of the poem helpfully tells the reader where and when the poem is set, with the implication that this is a probably-much-anticipated family visit; but it also assists the poet because the title does enough scene-setting to allow him to dispense with preliminaries in the poem itself and instead open it with two lines of description which plunge the reader straight in. The passive understatement and economy of the opening make it even more frightening: we can immediately sense the family’s helplessness while the macaque sets to work, with an unspoken dread of what might come next. And what does come next provides a clever mirroring of the mother, father and child trapped in the car: three monkeys matching three humans. That the mother and child macaques are glimpsed ‘in the rearview mirror’ serves to augment the feelings of claustrophobia and terror at being surrounded by wild creatures seemingly intent on violence.

It’s interesting and a little disconcerting (for me at least) that the word ‘know’ is not placed at the end of the fourth line, which might have been the obvious choice, but at the start of the fifth. I did wonder whether that was dictated by syllabics, in that the first five lines each have ten syllables. Whatever the reason, it bestows additional emphasis on ‘now’, as if to say ‘we can laugh about it now’. The over-precise ‘to have been’ – as opposed to the duller alternative of ‘was’ – polishes the comical exaggeration of the stanza’s final two lines, and also gives a pleasing half rhyme between ‘been’ and ‘Blaine’ (which is echoed later in the poem by the full rhyme with ‘domain’). That the magician reference is to the preposterous David Blaine adds a certain something. Note, too, the shift from the first-person-plural to the singular in order to supply the hindsight commentary.

The middle stanza begins as boldly as the first, with that rhetorical statement ended by an exclamation-mark’s flourish. The pronoun returns to the familial ‘we’ so as to resume the sense of being besieged. That sense, though, is nicely undercut by the punchline-like bathos of the last line. The word ‘slightest’ echoes the earlier ‘sleight’. Perhaps the fact that their (of course) ‘homemade’ lunch is ‘at Mum’s feet’ is a consequence of trying to hide the food from the macaques’ view.  

The naming of the mother as ‘Mum’ at this point belatedly, but neatly, indicates that the address of the poem is either towards the poet-persona’s child or the family trio as a whole. This enables the poem to widen out in its third stanza into a subtle and delightful first-person-singular meditation on the family unit and, more specifically, the father–child relationship. The reader is further entertained by the implicit swearing and the extension of the comedy into the hypothetical. It’s noteworthy that the verb construction in the second line is in the future tense and not the past; compounded by using ‘might’ in the third line. Does this mean that this reminiscing about the trip is happening during the same half-term holiday?

The poem closes, as it must and beautifully, with a more explicit delineation of the mirroring. In the last line, as with its predecessors, any reader could step into the poet’s shoes and empathise or sympathise. (I can remember, incidentally, similar happenings involving large-bottomed baboons at Windsor Safari Park when I was young, c.1971.)

For me, the three meaty stanzas of irregular lengths seem well-suited to the content. The syntax is measured throughout, with no verbiage. Is there also, as in most zoo poems, an implied questioning of why wild animals have been brought thousands of miles from their native habitats to be kept for human entertainment? The events in the poem provoke complex emotions, all of which the poem elicits to some degree or other. There is a fine art to writing narrative poems and this one succeeds in telling its story with wit, charm and intelligence.