Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005-2008 by Adrian Mitchell
Bloodaxe Books, £10.95
Adrian Mitchell, who died last December at the age of 76, was one of Britain’s most exciting, prolific and politically-committed performance poets. A lifelong socialist and pacifist – he was arrested at Faslane for protesting against Trident – who revelled in the English language and the work of William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and, especially, William Blake, he famously wrote in a preface to his first volume of verse in 1964: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” He spent the rest of his life writing poems, songs and plays which would engage and inspire rather than push people away.
He was born and brought up in Hampstead, educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and worked as a journalist for the Oxford Mail, Evening Standard and Sunday Times before becoming a full-time poet and playwright. He had talent, passion and commitment and made a name for himself on the burgeoning performance poetry scene in the 1960s; Michael Kustow fondly recalls him leaping on stage at one of Arnold Wesker’s early Centre 42 working class arts festivals “in a many-coloured coat like a Blakean challenger and rock’n’roll hero. He had fine music hall timing, and a gravity under all the quickfire jokes and patter.” With Michael Horovitz and Christopher Logue he pioneered poetry readings in Britain and many of his best political poems – which often drew for inspiration on the oral traditions of the Border ballads and Delta blues – became part of the folklore of the left during the anti-war demos and anti-racism rallies of the ’60s and ’70s.
Tell Me Lies, his final collection of poems, covering the last three years of his life, was completed just a few weeks before his death. It is as exuberant and entertaining as you would expect. There’s a lot of comic stuff – such as Ban the Banjo – and a lot of clever stuff like The Plays What I Wrote by Shakespeare which ticks off each of the Bard’s works with a two line description: “Each new play is staged – they wouldn’t dare spike it / After my hit comedy As You Like It. / And I makes another romantic kill / With Twelfth Night or What You Will.”
He is, as always, marvellously inventive with language – “The rivers a real wonderway” and “we’ll lie till dawn / in the cool clear water / and name all the stars in the sky” – there are elegies for fallen comrades such as Ivor Cutler, Tilly Laycock and John La Rose and he is as culturally eclectic as ever, namechecking everyone from Captain Ahab and Louis Armstrong to “the thunderstroke of Zeus” by way of Chet Baker, Tommy Cooper, Leonardo Da Vinci, Anne Frank, Aretha Franklin, Spike Milligan, Paul Robeson, Doctor Watson and Father Christmas.
But it’s the serious stuff which lingers longest in the memory. His version of Bertolt Brecht’s About the Child Murderer Marie Farrar, a young girl who kills her baby, is particularly moving and Grendel’s Groove is an extraordinary achievement: a 470 line poem, based on the Anglo-Saxon epic, told not with Beowulf (or Beerywolf as he is here) as the hero but, rather, from the monster’s point of view. He respects the Old English poetics of alliteration and rhythm (rather than rhyme) and while some of the lines are played for laughs – the monsters’ treasure hoard contains “Ingots diamond tiaras / mixed glittergem crown sets / emeralds marbles, / one heap of blinding bling” – most of it is played straight: “One day dada Cain the Killer / found this beautiful gloopy mere, / one of Hell’s holiday resorts, / and fell in love with its dread deeps, / its murky soulsoup, / its darling darkling depths, / its benighted shadowcreatures, / its softly silences.”
Ralph Steadman, an old friend, provides the lettering for all the titles and some typically brilliant illustrations throughout this 160 page volume – none more so than his poignant, powerful pictures of war, poverty, death and destruction in the powerful closing section.
Mitchell has, as you might expect, several pops at New Labour. In More Friends he looks forward to the general election of 2010: “We’re going to have another Old Etonian / As her majesty’s PM / While New Labour melts into a pool / Of ineffectual intellectual phlegm” and At the Crossroads is a twist on the old Robert Johnson story of meeting the Devil at the crossroads and selling his soul to play the blues. It begins: “I built the best of England / With my brain and with my hands. / Liberty Equality Fraternity – / That’s where I took my stand / And the people called me Old Labour / The brave heart of this land” and ends, after a meeting with “A man in a silver business suit / Swivelling in a black leather chair” who describes himself as “the Great Political Entrepreneur”: “He extracted my soul with care / And placed it in his credit card case / And gave me his black leather chair / Then he laughed and said: ‘You are New Labour now.’ / I said: ‘Thank you, Mr Blair’.” And the final poem, To Whom It May Concern Remix, in which he reworks one of his most celebrated poems, first performed at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1964, and which then electrified a full house at Horovitz’ pioneering Poetry Olympics at the Albert Hall in 1965, concludes: “Tell me lies Mr Bush / Tell me lies Mr Blairbrowncameron / Tell me lies about Vietnam.”
Keith Richmond
