Late Reviews

Tony Benn often described the Labour Party as being less a socialist party than a party with some socialists in it. And John Hegley’s These Were Your Father’s, like most of his books, is less a poetry collection than a collection of writing with some poems in it.

The writing that is not poetry is still great writing – ranging from snippets of scripted stand-up comedy, to short plays which blend the mundane with the bizarre, to surrealist stories that evoke the ‘Incidences’ of the Russian surrealist Daniil Kharms. 

I first came across a poem from the book – and John Hegley as a writer – in my English class at school. Our English teacher Mrs Davey had pinned one of the poems to the wall. It was quite a wall, with the Hegley poem next to a picture of Martin Luther King featuring a “four little children” quote from his “I have a dream” speech.

The poem on the wall was ‘Man and Gran United’. It that involves ‘Grandma’ walking her dog by the canal and bumping into Manchester United’s controversial French football star, Eric Cantona. 

It was 15 years later that Cantona appeared as himself in Looking For Eric (the only Ken Loach film I’d advise anyone to watch for pleasure) providing life coaching via the subconscious of down on his luck postman. So Hegley was ahead of his time locating Eric in a mundane scenario for comic effect. 

It includes the sequence:

“Then Eric spoke in English 

and he asks the doggie’s name

and Grandma said I call him Jesus

because he isn’t just for Christmas

then the doggie fouled the pavement

and Eric fouled the dog”

A blend of wordplay, twisted cultural reference and outlandish absurdity that is typical of Hegley’s writing – alongside his strong recurring interest in football, Jesus and dogs (he also writes a lot about glasses, potatoes and his dad). 

Mrs Davey was particularly wise to put this poem on the wall because it’s a poem with something for almost everyone. But also because it’s a poem that gives the impression of being cobbled together to the extent that young readers might feel (in most cases incorrectly) that they would be capable of writing something similar. 

It did that for me and a big percentage of the early poems I wrote were a bit like John Hegley’s but nowhere near as good. But one way or another it was a start. 

While ‘Man and Gran United’ is a thing of beauty it definitely isn’t the best poem in the book.

That’s the (more or less) title poem ‘My Father’s Glasses’ where – over 12 lines – Hegley delivers a metaphor that is simultaneously simple, profound, hilarious and heartbreaking. 

My Father’s Glasses

These glasses were my father’s,

he left me them to keep, 

he was an opticians’s clerk,

he got them on the cheap.

These glasses were my father’s,

He saw the world through these  

and sometimes what I’m looking at,

it seems my father sees.   

‘These lenses don’t feel right’ he says,

‘nothing’s very clear.’

‘What do you expect?’ I answer,

‘you’re not really here, Dad.’