This review is taken from PN Review 279, Volume 51 Number 1, September - October 2024.
on Montagu Slater
John Fuller, Amy Clampitt, Gillian Clarke, Vasko Popa, R.F. Langley, Kathleen Raine, Séan Rafferty, Pearse Hutchinson, Michael Hartnett, Richard Kell, R.F. Langley, John Montague, Sally Purcell, Robert Nye, Freda Downie, Drummond Allison, Lee Harwood, David Constantine, Edward Lowbury, Anthony Cronin, Edith Sitwell, C.K. Williams, Thom Gunn, Weldon Kees, P.J. Kavanagh, Norman MacCaig, Paul Auster, John Welch, Christopher Middleton, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Donald Davie, Miriam Waddington, Ciaran Carson, Elizabeth Jennings, A.S.J. Tessimond, Norman MacCaig, Charles Tomlinson, Michael Hamburger, Michael Donaghy, Sheila Wingfield, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Duncan, W.S. Graham, Michael Murphy, Kathleen Raine, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Anne Stevenson, Montagu Slater, Ian Patterson, Collected Poems (Smokestack) £8.99
Pompapom, Pimpapombimban
The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater is an intriguing read. Born in 1902, and having grown up in industrial Cumbria, Slater won a rare scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Despite that brush with the elite (or perhaps because of it) Slater went on to be a committed communist all his adult life, and his socialist leanings chimed with other thirties poets of the time, such as Stephen Spender and the young W.H. Auden.
A rigorous introduction by Ben Harker (Professor in Cultural Politics at the University of Manchester) defines Slater as more than simply accomplished; rather, he was prolific. And yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, the relatively obscure Slater seems to have been ambivalent to recognition. Frequently uncredited on collaborative projects, this was a person totally focused on exposing the capitalist economic exploitation of the working class through his own political writing, and that of others.
‘In Encitement to Disaffection: A Fragment’, Slater sites labour as a battle, one in which there are no shiny medals, only muddy tin hats. This poem also includes a reference to Humphry Davy, inventor of the Davy lamp which saved countless miners’ lives by detecting explosive gasses such as firedamp:
As with many other writers of his ...
The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater is an intriguing read. Born in 1902, and having grown up in industrial Cumbria, Slater won a rare scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Despite that brush with the elite (or perhaps because of it) Slater went on to be a committed communist all his adult life, and his socialist leanings chimed with other thirties poets of the time, such as Stephen Spender and the young W.H. Auden.
A rigorous introduction by Ben Harker (Professor in Cultural Politics at the University of Manchester) defines Slater as more than simply accomplished; rather, he was prolific. And yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, the relatively obscure Slater seems to have been ambivalent to recognition. Frequently uncredited on collaborative projects, this was a person totally focused on exposing the capitalist economic exploitation of the working class through his own political writing, and that of others.
‘In Encitement to Disaffection: A Fragment’, Slater sites labour as a battle, one in which there are no shiny medals, only muddy tin hats. This poem also includes a reference to Humphry Davy, inventor of the Davy lamp which saved countless miners’ lives by detecting explosive gasses such as firedamp:
Khaki’s a nice quiet colourNationalism is then ridiculed in the final line of the first stanza, which could also be the sound of an explosion: ‘Pompapom pompapom pimpapombimban’.
Tin hats don’t shine
Sombre as a Humphry Davy
In a fire-damp mine.
As with many other writers of his ...
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