Reviews
Barry's latest autobiographical publication is subtitled "The Autobiography of a Poet" which gives the reader a firm steer as to the distinctive quarry he is pursuing in this particular volume of memoires. This is not just a colourful and exact reminiscence of growing up during the austere and closely communal working-class living conditions of post-war Leeds but a search for the defining twists and turns (with analogy to Wordsworth's 'Prelude') in the growth of a poet's mind and psychological make-up. As he phrases it on page 46: "Does knowing derive from being or is it the other way round?" - a philosophical chestnut which Barry explores through an obsessive re-working of his past with all the attendant problems of sifting real memory from screen memory, fact from myth, subjectivity from objectivity.
The success of the book is rooted in the early chapters where Barry disciplines the 'adult' voice to the margin and focuses on connecting up to the fresh and uncluttered sensibility of the young child. This is frame-worked within a very palpable, factually correct and (presumably researched) re-call of the geography and impedimenta of the Leeds of his childhood. Details such as these are highlighted when describing the annual holiday train journey to Yarmouth: "Over the seats were pre-war photographs of Yorkshire coastal resorts in sepia tones, rather like the illustrations of H.V. Morton's timeless travelogues" make for a realism that helps to verify the writer's search to 'place' those mundane but often numinous moments that trigger an artist's imaginative growth and become the subject of his lifelong quest for an unique self identity.
Barry's early childhood would appear to have been as 'paradisal' as could be expected, living in a working-class neighbourhood that was materially spartan but blessed with proximity to family and community (a far cry from today's sealed off and fractured 'virtual' reality lifestyle, marooned on the Information Highway, simultaneously glutted with data and starved of connection) and lit up by his first muse Margaret.
The fractures to this 'Eden' occured both internally and externally. Re-call of being terrified at watching a film called "No Room at the Inn" about a "gin-drinking" woman who incarcerates young orphans in a "rat-infested cellar" indicated the possession of a highly sensitive mind that would need more sustenance than could be provided by a life of ordinary routine. Meanwhile setbacks to the family such as redundancy and illness, the de-stabilising effects of moving location laced with the corrosively depressive awareness of a shift up (in status? down in wellbeing ?) from upper working-class to lower-middle class, revealed a world out there which was competitive and utilitarian, waiting to pounce on and extinguish any predilections for individuality that a youngster might possess.
Education, Education, Education! This is the other main theme running through this volume. Like his hero, Stephen Daedalus from Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Barry needed to widen his experiential parameters in order to begin the long process of becoming a writer. Post-war British education ushered in a decade of grammar school/ secondary modern dichotomy, designed to prescribe an apartheid of professional and vocational educations on the basis of a single 11 Plus exam. These grammar schools were often run on unimaginative, militaristic 'Gradgrind' principles by second-rate teachers of middle-class extraction who had probably pickled themselves in envy at failing to secure a post at Eton on de-mob from the Services. Apart from exposure to a gifted and necessarily subversive History teacher, J.M. McNeil, who gave Barry much needed time and support, life at school seems to have been an extended tramp through a cultural desert. Nevertheless, Education became an obvious way forward and Barry's time spent training to be a primary school teacher at City of Leeds Training College co-incided with the arrival of more liberal pedagogical practises in the 60's as well as his first sustained spell of poetry making, culminating in his inclusion in Michael Horovitz's ground-breaking "Children of Albion" anthology. Ironically, this era in British education (perhaps only experienced by those, as the adage goes, "who weren't there" though Barry seems to have been very much there) was only a temporary idyll and since the seventies British education has clawed its way back to a polarisation between examination results obsessed private schools and inner-city 'sink' schools deprived of all vestiges of civic pride and discipline. Much of the latter parts of the book dwell on Barry's ideas formed on Education forged partially through his own experiences with schools as a pupil, teacher and parent, and partially from his wide and eclectic reading of 'key' contemporary psychologists who have radically influenced his ideas on the links between education and psycho/ spiritual health. As he ruefully mentions, the first need for most schools today is to install a psycho-therapy unit - too true!
The latter stages of the book are concerned more with recent events in his life. Whilst Barry has been writing, editing and publishing his Sixties Press imprint at a furious rate, he has also been shuttling between Leeds and North London, caring for his brilliant but mentally ill son Isaiah and ex-wife poet Brenda Williams, fighting battles against NHS bureaucracy to get the right service and support on their behalf. There is a very moving section of the book which recounts the sudden decline into mania of Brenda's father Cyril and one is made very aware of the fragility of most of our lives, teetering precariously on the edge behind seemingly safe front doors.
Overall, this latest contribution to Barry's autobiographical oeuvre is a brave and wide-ranging achievement. Apart from the pedantic check for typo errors and minor lapses in sentencing sequence that a commercial publishing house would run the script through, I don't see what holds it off from squaring up in the same company as other recent mini-masterpieces in the genre such as Lorna Sage's "Bad Blood". Furthermore, one senses that Barry hasn't finished with this material - more poems, prose and meditations are surely in the pipeline from a writer still engaged in the creative processes of establishing his authentic voice. And just in case we take him too seriously, the book ends on a note of 'nudge nudge wink wink' double entendre in which another 'muse' accuses Barry of having less than honourable intentions: "Well, it's not all but it's enough to be going on with, or off with..."
Mark Floyer 2005
Collected Poems
Pub. Sixties Press, 89 Connaught Road, Sutton, Surrey. SM1 3PJ
£10.00 (pp 274) ISBN 0-9529994-1-2 (2003)
Barry Tebb is irrepressible. The story in brief: working class childhood in Leeds (born 1942), trained as a teacher and, high on the expanding possibilities of sixties culture and committed to poetry, he achieved some early success via work in the New Statesman and a poem in Michael Horovitz's near-mythical 'Children of Albion' anthology. Then a twenty-five year writing block between 1970-1995. Since then, the muse has returned and a new flood of poems, essays, poetry propaganda plus novels to boot. This man is more prolific than David Grubb and certainly a lot funnier but is he any good? Well, yes, I have to say that I think he is, even allowing for a number of over-lengthy poems which arguably take Northern working-class nostalgia to new heights and which could do with some pruning. The trouble is that I suspect such pruning would detract from the energy of these poems which really are from the pen of a one-off writer. Apart from which, there's a warmth to the man which is persuasively at odds with, for example, Tony Harrison's dour and increasingly magisterial tenor.
Tebb also has a wonderful sense of humour and he's a bit of an awkward maverick, sending off his polemical, poetical firecrackers in a dozen different directions at once, which is utterly refreshing if at times confusing. Emerging from such a period of 'poetic reclusivity' to the delights of New Gen. conformity seems to have provoked puzzlement and then delightful, acerbic squibs such as 'Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry' which comments hilariously on the inclusions and exclusions in Keith Tuma's selection. Also good in this vein is 'A Call to Arms' where he imagines a 'coming together' of the generations - "Geoffrey Hill had Merlin and Arthur/Beside him and was whirling an axe/To great effect, headless New Gen poets/Running amok." - which evokes both the spirit of Monty Python and possibly gives Eric Bloodaxe's blade a much-needed sharpen. Perhaps Neil Astley should take on Barry Tebb. I'd put my money on Barry any day.
He's certainly not backward at coming forward (as my dad, bless him, used to say) and his self-publicity is often foregrounded in his poetry - there's one which is called 'The Dreaded Tebb' - but I guess the enduring strength of his work, a virtue which is also open to the 'charge' of sentimentalism, is to do with the way he consistently challenges current value-systems from the 'vantage point' of an earlier ethos which arguably opened up human possibilities and widened the channels for creative endeavours and expanded opportunities. If this all sounds horribly old-hat sociology and 'regressive' I can only say that I'm with Barry on this one. The sheer sense of abundance in his writing: the learning; the wide-references; the assertive acquisition of knowledge; the sense of delight in the possibilities of 'real' education is buoyed-up by an ever-generous desire to give as well as to receive. It seems that there is an essentially Christian ethic underlying this humanist project but if so it's moral and enriching rather than moralistic, libidinal rather
than life-denying.As with a lot of poetry which I'm not a hundred percent convinced by I've got to be in the right mood to try and get to grips with Barry Tebb. At times I think some of the longer poems (especially Bridge Over the Aire, for example, which is a very long poem) would have been better presented in prose form and I occasionally hunger for a poem where the POETRY is made more apparent. To be fair, some such as 'Guntrip's Ghost', have moments which provide real thrills, largely through the use of place-name vocabulary yet he can still manage to shift the mood and delight with material like this which elsewhere I might find less satisfactory - "Park, Park, come out of the dark/there's a time to sleep and a time to bark/and every dog will have its day, bark Park". Sheer Spike Milligan!
Tebb is certainly not politically correct and those poems where he engages with memories relating to pre-adolescent sexual desire are brave and forthright, if controversial. His interest in psychoanalysis probably feeds into these poems. Sometimes his polemics turn into rants - 'On reading"Writing in Education'', for example - which become ineffective because of the degree to which they overstate the case. There's a more lyrical side to his work which surfaces most usually in the shorter, overt love poems such as 'The Prism' and 'Making Love'.
Taken as a whole this collection has an abundance and variety which you couldn't always say about 'Collected Poems' (I'm sure this must actually be a 'selected' given his prodigious output) and Barry Tebb's voice is as distinctive as they come. He's certainly not in my top ten but his work presents a useful antidote to the various mainstream norms currently in fashion and his awkward positioning and insistence on being heard is refreshing and challenging.
© 2003 Steve Spence
THE NEW JOURNAL REVIEW
COLLECTED POEMS: Barry Tebb Sixties Press, 89 Connaught Road, Sutton, Surrey. SM1 3PJ ISBN 0952999412 perfect bound 276pp £10.00
The poetry is well worth anyone's consideration. Poems are both evocative, and a good example of the poetry even to telling of the poets and the poetics, of the period. Some are pure nostalgia for when poets were poets, or at least were the poets of his sixties' heyday. Which is not to sneer: Tebb can turn a mean verse a he drops and usurps names. This whole collected indeed could be viewed as an alternative history of 20th century verse, a rich seam to be mined by future thesis-seeking PhDs.
'My Father' is a free verse lament easily as telling as Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle...' While ‘To My Wife' is damn near the perfect love poem.
In his subject matter - of place (mostly Leeds), his female and child muses, his familiarity with words his choice of words - he bears easy comparison with John Clare. Save that Tebb will occasionally bestow upon himself an unbecoming heroic stature. But onward... to booklength poems about Howarth Moor. While ‘The Singing School' should be pinned to every grant-giver's office wall. And on to poems anecdotal, praise of, or damning, contemporary versifiers. How about this, from 'James Simmons/ R.I.P.'?
Those you castigated never forgave.
Omitted you as casually as passing an unmarked grave,
Armitage, I name you, a blackguard and a knave,
Who knows no more of poetry than McGonagall the brave,
Yet tops the list of Faber's 'Best Poets of Our Age'.
Barry Tebb is a poet steeped in the poetry of others; but most definitely has his own vision of what poetry should be. Which seems to be neither formal nor necessarily free verse, but principally a singing from the heart; and most certainly not in the pursuit of success, in terms of money or media fame. Although, resenting it of others, his spleen will be vented yet again, causing eyebrows to be raised and chuckles to be bitten back. He can make you cry too, pace Larry. You Are Dead.
Within this one long collected attempt to reconcile past with present, with once-dreams of the future to what has come to pass; with so many different, and all equally valid, views of the same place, same time, increasing with every seeming repetition one's comprehension of that time, of that event, that place... with, also included, translations from the French of Pierre Jean Jouve, Gérard de Nerval, Paul Eluard and others... Many of these poems I have read before - as submissions if not in published form - and I will read them again, am glad - despite my initial misgivings - to have them gathered together here. Because, on balance, if you too have lived through these times, then do yourself a favour, make this publication do for now and get this for the poems. They're worth every penny.
Sam Smith
COLLECTED POEMS REVIEW
Soaring confirmation that this poet lives every poem a real day at a time'
BARRY TEBB: COLLECTED POEMS
Barry Tebb has mythologised his life, which is something only true poets do. From his childood love for Margaret Gardiner- first of four "muses" and Laura to his Petrach- through his troubled marriage to fellow poet, Brenda Williams, down to his more recent spats with the magazine editors and other minor authorities who are wary of him and his work- every incident stands out clear, bright and significant. It is a life lived to effect, in which the incidental becomes universal. When Tebb has a run-in with the local librarian who refuses to stock his pamphlets and then slaps him with a huge fine for unreturned books, I'm reminded of Blake turfing the drunken soldier Schofield out of his Shoreham garden or Van Gogh cutting off his earlobe to teach some oblivious whore a lesson.
Apart from the events of his dedicated life, Tebb's great subject is his native City of Leeds. He drops its place names and personalities into his poems the way Blake did those of his London and Sussex landscapes. He is belligerently of the people, an angry working-class laureate and the people of Leeds should be as proud of him as he is of them. He has included them in his bid for immortality and they move through his poems in a light that is more than that of common day.
Like Blake, Van Gogh and so many other artists, Tebb is obviously- on the evidence of his own work- an awkward man. He promotes himself in ways that others find threatening, he is too intense for his own good and he takes it personally when people say "no" to him. He's not a man for schmoozing and he hates the poets of the New Gen. He had an early run of career success- when he was featured in Horowitz's epoch-defining anthology CHILDREN OF ALBION- but now the poetry establishment ignores him.
Well, shame on the poetry establishment! Tebb may not be a great poet (he is not enough of a verbal magician for that) but he is raw and authentic and entirely his own man. The poems (often individually slight) build on one another and cross-reference and create a world of experience I find convincing and deeply moving. This is a hard-won poetry with a solidity about it that suggests that it's here to stay.
Reviewer: Tony Grist.
New Hope International Review
COLLECTED POEMS by BARRY TEBB
Barry Tebb should he declared a ‘National Treasure’ and subsidized for life. He won't be, of course. He has trodden on too many toes for that and when he treads he stomps. Always willing to use his pen to attack whatever he deems an injustice, or the trend-following poetry elite. Nobody is too big for him to cross swords with, and if he isn't doing that then he's probably indulging in his lifelong love affair with Leeds, a place which will one day honour him, though maybe not until after he's dead.
Don't be put off by the £10 price tag. For the money you get 176 poems and extracts spread over 255 pages, and Tebb is well worth making the effort to read. He offers no gently rustic pastoral scenes and he's not very big on wandering flights of fancy either, but he does write with passion and clarity about people and places. About everything he considers important, and that is no bad thing to be able to say about a writer.
I enjoyed these COLLECTED POEMS. A great volume for dipping into and I’ll even forgive him for not giving OUTLAW an acknowledgement.
Bryn Fortey
Wales
OUTLAW REVIEW SUPPLEMENT Spring 2004
BARRY TEBB, COLLECTED POEMS
Now an elder statesman of English poetry, Tebb’s work has been significant since his first appearance in the sixties when he won praise from the likes of John Carey and was included in Penguin anthologies. Always trenchant, but always touching, this is very personal poetry. It gathers together in one volume the major works of the writer.
THE BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW
Collected Poems by Barry Tebb
Sixties Press, 89 Connaught Rd, Sutton, Surry, SM1 3PJ
276pp £10 ISBN 0-9529994-1-2
Reviewed by Carol Thistlethwaite
Collected Poems reads as a statement of poetics as well as a fascinating autobiographical collection. Tebb weaves his reminiscence of working class Leeds with references to his impressive reading, his muses, publications and frustrations, all of which culminate to where he is as a poet today.
The names of people, places and vivid images are re-visited throughout the book,
leaving me with the impression that he is recording history. My Perfect Rose, My Father, School Smell, Uncle Bob along with many more will not now be forgotten. The light he sheds on the working class of Leeds is angled differently from that of his contemporary Tony Harrison. Tebb slips through the chinks of light and enters right into the heart of these now-gone northern homes, not hiding the squalor but sharing its secrets and revealing that here too were levels within levels of class:
For fish and chips
We went past 'The Mansions',
Half a dozen enormous
Victorian houses, abandoned
To the poorest of the poor,
With missing front steps and
Holes in the halls so big
You had to jump and
Rats the size of cats.
The children who lived there
Pushed coal in broken prams,
Their jerseys had more
Holes than wool,
They had impetigo;
We passed them quickly
On the other side.
In admiration of James Simmons he writes:
You wrote from the heart, feelings on your sleeve,
But feelings are all a master poets needs:
And indeed this also applies to Tebb's poetry. He spills his love for Margaret in crystal pools across each page and pours transparent loathing against those who make him rage: the editors and poets of the establishment that has so far left him out. He shares the most intimate of moments beyond what most would dare. Summer with Margaret being one of many. For me Tebb is at his best in his multi-sensory images with strong emotions just below the surface of the page.
... in the nine months before his coming
When once you fell I felt his body scramble
In terror round the waters of your womb;
Only the placental coil stopping the leak
From life to his precious blood.
Plain-speak makes his poems accessible and his complex rhyme and changing
metre are used to various effects. A few stanzas from poems in the first section are
repeated in the latter. Bridge Over TheAire, and in re-reading I enjoyed them once more.
Carillon Magazine
There are several approaches to the reading of a book, and in the case of TRANQUILLITY STREET, two spring to mind. The linear, end-to-end approach will require a good bookmark, because the contents are printed in about 8 point type; the 'random' read runs the risk of leaving the reader with the impression that they are reading the same poem, regardless of which page they happen to open. Neither response should be a criticism of the poems themselves.
Nevertheless, it is perplexing that this semi-retrospective collection has appeared within a year or two of COLLECTED POEMS (2003) and CLOSING NOSTALIA ROAD (Selected Poems 1962 - 2002). THE LIGHT OF LEEDS is also described as a selected poems on the back cover. The reader may be distracted further by the publisher's sticker, which apologises for the considerable number of print errors (which appear to have occurred somewhere on the journeys from Sutton to India, where the book was printed). The book isn't cheap, either.
Despite all these idiosyncrasies, TRANQUILLITY STREET is a powerful read by a writer of great conviction and originality, who the reviewer pillories at their peril. In addition to their likely appearance in one of Tebb's tirades against the literati, reviewers who simplify or satirise this writer's work, miss its very diversity and depth.
The sense of place in general, and Yorkshire in particular, rolls through the book in great, emotional waves. Leeds stands at the centre, like a warm lodestone (A FINE MADNESS):
I've only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles
Its bravuras down the wind, rattles the cobbles in Kirkgate market.
It isn't a sentimentalised heart to Tebb's writing, it's repeatedly celebrated for its energy and variety: familiarly distinct. Other parts of Yorkshire and, particularly, Haworth assert their solid presence as places that generate their own truths and meanings. The Brontës' stubborn independence strikes a literary chord, with Tebb suggesting a particular affinity with some of the family. First, the failed promise of Bramwell in LETTER FROM HAWORTH:
I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea
With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped.
Then, the cussed genius of Emily, given her own section in THE ROAD TO HAWORTH MOOR, where the writer's loneliness seems especially apposite:
Besieged, beaten and bruised
I had proved my oracle lied
There was no peace in poetry and flight.
Many poems give the ordinary places in Leeds a vivid and occasionally crude mortality. Tebb's critics have often missed the bleak beauty of a poem like VIEW FROM THE INNER CITY:
The building site's scaffolding of bone
Masks pristine piles of brick where
May winds mourn and moan .
Sceptics have also picked on pieces like HYMN, for their blunt description of young 'working-class girls'. But it's the poem's lyrical conclusion which is most memorable, capturing the ageing process as:
. the soft
Sweetness of their soprano voices dying
Away into the unforgotten magenta and
Yellow-ochre of innumerable twilights.
There are many fine and similarly expressive short poems, almost-concealed by the longer pieces which have established Tebb's literary character. WINTERLIGHT is a succession of invitations to the reader:
we may stare in the mirror of silent pools
By long-deserted greens, deepen our sight
Of what lies beyond the things that seem
And make our vision clear as winterlight.
Some of the most powerful longer pieces, immediately determine the irony of the collection's title. The first seven pages are certainly not set in 'tranquillity street', since they uncover the grief, anger and confusion of the poet, in confronting his son's schizophrenia. OUR SON tells the awful tale of fractured brilliance: Eton, Oxford, India, and then:
When the crisis came — "I feel the head coming off my body" —
I was ready and unready, making the necessary calls.
In the understandably prosaic and bitterly incisive narrative, a new and grotesquely real world is created, where the patient whispers,
Daddy, I was damned in hell and now I am God's friend.
TO THE SOUND OF VIOLINS, which follows, traces the writer's attempt to escape the new shackles and responsibilities. A raucous night out with the young people of Leeds becomes a kind of celebration. But there's a strong thematic undertow, the memory:
of the ward where my son
Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast
My very existence with words like bullets.
In such poems, Tebb pulls us to poetic and broader truths, which are uncomfortable because we might go or have been there. That is his gift: a certainty and honesty in a world which is familiar enough to recognise, yet somehow apart. The Yorkshire we are shown is Tebb's, or a variation on the theme, which should be admired for its rugged independence.
One suspects however, that other volumes mentioned in this review may prove a cheaper and better organized introduction to his work.
Reviewer: Will Daunt.
New Hope International Review