‘Happiness writes white,’ said Larkin, abbreviating Henry de Montherlant’s maxim, ‘Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches’ [‘Happiness writes in white ink on white pages’], but there are exceptions to all generalisations. The end of 2023 saw the publication, by Vole Books, of My Family and Other Birds, Rod Whitworth’s long-overdue first collection, full of poems which largely, though not exclusively, celebrate life and its myriad joys. Hats off to Janice and Dónall Dempsey at Vole for recognising that it needed to be out in the world. It’s available from them, here, or from Rod, here.

Rod asked me to write one of the two endorsements for the collection, which I very gladly did, but here’s a sentence from the other one, by Peter Sansom, which truly nails the book’s qualities: ‘The work of a skilful but unshowy writer, it is imaginative, open, honest and shrewd, and many other things besides, like funny and angry and loving – a chronicle in fully realised individual poems of lives and times.’

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

*

Mr Knowles

Nine, in the sun, belly down
between cowpats and buttercups,
watching council houses
growing across the clough,

dreams held by the swing of the sledge
driving piles; I noticed
the thump at the top of the swept
arc, and was astonished.

But you knew, showed me how to count
the distance to the storm, see
the slip-catch held before the snick,
the shunting bounce before the bang.

You taught me nature has its laws:
how each effect follows from a cause.

*

This is evidently a poem about the power of knowledge and how it’s acquired and passed on; but it’s also more than that, of course, given the ground it covers in its 14 short-ish lines. It’s an informal sonnet, with the first two quatrains following an ABAB slant-rhyme pattern, the third unrhymed, and the closing, full-rhymed couplet neatly snapping the poem shut.

The opening stanza succinctly divulges a plethora of information in its 17 words, telling us the poet–persona’s age, the weather, likely time of year, location (presumably in Ashton-under-Lyne) and period (early-Fifties). There’s something very heartwarming about that ‘belly down / between cowpats and buttercups’; the unhurried, grass-level view of the post-war social-housing boom making Manchester greater. The scale and pace of building social housing fit to last then were phenomenal compared to today. That ‘growing’ is the word used and not ‘grow’ gives a better sense of time passing as the boy idly watches the housebuilding. The cross-Pennine dialect word ‘clough’, meaning a steep ravine, adds a lovely local specificity.

The syntax of the sentence which rolls across the first two stanzas is unusual because its subject doesn’t appear until halfway through the sixth line. It’s an effective device for front-loading the poem with lots of contextual facts . I daresay there’s a linguistic term for it. The phrase ‘dreams held by’ is a little ambiguous, though I presume it means something like ‘daydreams put on hold during’. (Could it have a secondary meaning too: that the sledgehammer’s swing somehow encapsulates dreams and ambition? Perhaps not.) I can’t remember ever seeing or hearing ‘sledgehammer’ shortened to ‘sledge’ before, but it works well here, not only because of the rhyme with ‘swept’: it enables the line to consist entirely of words of only one syllable, giving it almost a concrete sense of the repetition of the hammer’s blows. Then ‘driving piles’ is a satisfying phrase, enhanced by the deferred aural, and visually-mirroring, alliteration with ‘dreams’. The use of a semicolon here, rather than a comma, provides a slightly longer pause, as if the boy’s noticing is more active than his maybe more passive previous spectating. The third line (and into the beginning of the fourth) is also monosyllabic, and contains a delightful rhythm and music, thanks to those regular ‘p’ sounds. It takes a brave poet to include a clause like ‘and was astonished’ without it appearing grandiloquent and thereby unintentionally amusing to the reader; it succeeds here because it conveys the poem’s – and demands the reader’s – first emotional reaction, and, moreover, because the poet has wisely not spelled out the reason for the astonishment in big letters and has instead insisted that the reader do some work.

The introduction of the poem’s eponymous hero only at this point is nearly as late as that of Harry Lime in the film of The Third Man; that he appears without any description, even to tell us whether he is the boy’s schoolteacher or a local wise man, and that, crucially, he is directly addressed, beautifully shifts the register and augments the poignancy of the recollection. The whole of the third quatrain is especially wonderful, with its three further examples of actions preceding the sounds which they cause. The first is the most obvious, but is well-phrased and served by the smart line-break after ‘count’. The second is less universal since not everyone likes cricket as much as I do, but is fine nonetheless, with the italicisation of ‘snick’ reminding us of the word’s onomatopoeia. The ‘held’ here is either a deliberate echo of the same word in the second stanza or an oversight, but ‘taken’ wouldn’t have done the trick as nicely and putting ‘snatched’ between ‘catch’ and ‘snick’ would probably have over-egged the pudding. The third is a bit like a clown-car, with a cartoonish noise at its end, but could be far more serious.

The closing couplet is summative, yet isn’t clunkily so because it draws a wider conclusion and lesson than simply that happenings are generally perceived to occur prior to the sounds they create. Remembering that actions have consequences, we infer, has broadly influenced the decisions the poet has made throughout his life.

The poem leaves the reader to imagine what Mr Knowles looked and sounded like, the implication being that, like all the best teachers – in school, college, university or the university of life – he was a kind and patient man who imparted his erudition without fanfare. That description could also apply to Rod Whitworth and his poems.