Sir Tom Finney

In How I Learned to Sing, there are a couple of sestinas for my dad. The 2nd tries to capture something of one of my favourite things in life: walking up to Deepdale, home of Preston North End, with my dad. I tried to make it a bit like a poem version of an animation in which we morph from me as a child to me leading him, now a slower and older man. I wanted to pull off that lee Hall trick of it being full of feeling and sentiment without it being sentimental. I didn't want anything 'clipped' though: it is a risky gesture, and not for me to say if it came off.

I share the poem below, as I dubbed it a 'Finnale: ancient Lancastrian verse form, a sestina mentioning Sir Tom Finney' and Sir Tom passed away last night aged 91. There's no need for me to say much about what a great man he was, and how sad that is. For North End supporters, I think he's always been a kind of grandfather figure. It's sad he never got to see PNE back in the top flight. I love the photograph above for all sorts of reasons, some of which are also wrapped up in the poem.

2nd sestina for my Dad, a Deepdale Finnale 

I march as if catching up, feet off the ground

across every gutter, from the bus station, my Dad

swerving me through ginnels he used to walk

with his gang from Lady Street, demolished now, toward a win,

but only for the police horses on the terraces as we lose,

then make our way back through fight-littered streets

that now glow in the dark, suddenly glamorous streets -

one set of expectations drowning another, grounds

for a Saturday night on the tiles as I lose

him in the crowd, squeeze back to the barrier and there’s Dad

leant where he can hardly see, dreaming of pools wins

and telling his friend the boss exactly where to walk,

how one day we’d drive there, stop short to walk

from Nan’s penultimate nursing home through streets

a shimmer of redbrick fresco into sunlit wind,

make our way across Moor Park’s muddy ground

hopeful and joking, sometimes with my Mum, Dad’s

being dragged there something we did together, lost

when her legs would not support her, when to simply lose

was harder than it had ever been to make that slow walk

through optimism and renewal, to find in my Dad

imagined grit of those proud sheepish workers’ streets

turned into short lets, passing through drugged ground

where the roar for late equalisers sounds like a win

to wretched early leavers too eagerly taking wing,

his shot knees cracking shut to slow him, mine loose

as ever, dragging my son now, hopeful that the ground

floodlit ahead might hold a game that would let us walk

away brightly, with only praise, only laughter, through streets

rivering with victors around us as we wait for Granddad,

eddies of history, generations of anticipation, all that Dad

disdained to climb so high to see, an echo of a Finney win

blowing these foggy memory-streaked streets,

full of everything all of us will one day lose,

someone who remembers the ancient trail we walk

towards who knows what, away from the very ground

that taught Dad how to teach me to lose

the desire to always win, to find a line to walk

through tight-woven streets, mapping memory’s home ground.

Finnale: ancient Lancastrian verse form, a sestina mentioning Sir Tom Finney

Stride review

Rupert Loydell, who published my first full-length collection, The Horse Burning Park, back in 1994, via his Stride Books, has reviewed How I Learned to Sing on the Stride Magazine website. It's a kind and generous review, describing how this book and Paul Hawkin's Claremont Road, which Rupert also writes about, had started to rekindle a jaded interest in poetry. In a strange coincidence, I once briefly lived on the next street to Claremont Road, in E11.

Here's what Rupert had to say about the book:

Mark Robinson has ended a decade of poetic silence whilst working as a senior arts manager with a New and Selected Poems. How I Learned to Sing is aptly titled, for one of the astonishing things Robinson continually does is make music out of political and social concerns and observation. His poems tell stories, but these are stories fuelled and informed by anger and outrage at the way he and all of us are treated.

In more recent poems this is filtered through stories about his family, his fears for his children, often via more playful and gently experimental forms - lists and variant patterns. Robinson is ‘a northern poet' still, he says so in his poems; and the plain-speaking, plain-language of his early work has (thankfully) never gone away. Robinson has no time for daft ideas or political shenanigans, wants to cut through the crap and make it right; ask questions and get direct answers.

This isn't, however, political poetry that rants and screams: there's little sloganeering and no platitudes here. Robinson's politics is personal: in his world art and writing count, politics is personal and affects the real families, communities and society he is part of. It is from this that he makes his poems and tells his stories, makes comments and asks questions.

Here are two poets who have learned to sing down-to-earth songs, who know that 'Ideas should not be mistaken for facts' (Robinson) but know ideas come out of facts, make facts and inform facts. Fact: this is hard-won, hard-working poetry, that's reminded me how good words on the page can be.