A couple of years ago, I took my son up to Hull University. It was an open day for potential Chemistry students, but in the middle of the opening presentation, the tutor showed a slide of ‘Hull’s Three Poets’.The slide was the famous picture of of Larkin, Andrew Motion and Douglas Dunn outside the University Library; it was introduced as ‘Larkin, Motion and Christopher Reid’!! Well, two out of three isn’t bad, and it was good, perhaps, that the Undergraduate Admissions Tutor for Chemistry was even bothering to suggest that something other than science went on in his university. And that he knew a current ‘famous’ poet at the university!!
A volume that announces itself as Looking for Larkin does become a hostage to fortune. And Jules Smith’s beautiful new book doesn’t duck the challenges. The first of those is to make a homage to Larkin, in which the identity of the writer isn’t subsumed by a poet who has come to have one of the largest identities in twentieth century British poetry. Smith’s own identity is one of both lyric poet and satirist. This latter allows him to create exquisitely turned satires on that Hull scene. In the two longest poems in the book, Poet’s Night on the S.S. Manxman’ and ‘Deus ex Machina’, Smith pokes possibly deserved fun at the members of that particular coterie. And certainly their drinking habits get a ‘mention’ in this technically adept piece.
Larkin was, famously, the poet who wrote about the choices that life forces on us and how we do or do not have the confidence to deal with those choices. Jules Smith’s lyrics are, interestingly, somewhat warmer and more robust, but share with Larkin a deep empathetic feel for the humans he observes; an empathy that Smith is also willing to explore, ‘Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson;/ real people, plausibly symbolic./ So young, so lovely; a sad plot. You can/ touch them surely, just reach out. You cannot.’ ‘Brief Encounter’. And love is not so far from the surface of Jules Smith’s poems either, particularly so in a profoundly moving, deeply ambivalent elergy to his father. If Larkin’s Hull is the focus of this book, that does not mask a calm, clear-sighted vision of the whole of humanity.
Looking for Larkin, though sub-titled ‘Selected Poems’ is a slim first gathering for a poet who’s been writing for a long time. Daniel Lyons stark but loving black-and-white photographs of Hull complement the poems beautifully.
Ian Pople