Matthew Paul has had poems published in a number of leading magazines, and already has one excellent collection, The Evening Entertainment, to his name. His second, The Last Corinthians, builds upon his wry focus on subjects that intrigue him, details of the suburbs, the looked-down-upon, and the overlooked.

In a number of poems he demonstrates - while at the same time masking - the Larkinesque skill of structuring poems with a rhyme and half-rhyme scheme so unobtrusive and conversational that you barely notice it. Here’s Beatrix Potter hunting for mushrooms:

 

     Sniffling the mizzly air, Beatrix rises early, to rendezvous,

     Unchaperoned, with Mr McIntosh. Nervous, whiskered

     Polymath, he leads her into Hatchnize Wood, to pursue

     The sulphurous caps and stipes of Herald of Winter.

                                                 (‘Old Man of the Woods’)  

 

‘Nitpickers’, after the painting by the English artist Edward Burra, is a poem about French prostitutes beset by nits. The subject sounds vaguely unpleasant, but there’s a tenderness in their portrayal: “Madame won’t sanction short hair, not even Eton crops. / ‘Nos habitués ne l’Iaiment pas.’ So the nits make hay - / and the women scratch and scrape in sunshine every day, / never quite eradicating small boys from their scalps.”

There’s a similar warmth in another poem based on the Burra painting ‘Blue Baby: Blitz Over Britain’, in its admiration for British resilience during German bombing in the second world war, and its demonstration in the final stanza of Matthew Paul’s relish for detail:

 

     On VE Day, hilarity thrives like fireweed. Gil performs

     Stanley Holloway’s ‘Brahn Boots’. Pat’s dolled up

     as Britannia, in bedsheet and helmet, and holds upright

     her dad’s polished pitchfork as a trident – even when

     the whole street’s Hokey Cokey collapses into fits.

 

The poems referred to so far appear in the first section of the collection, ‘Heydays’. The second section is titled ‘Black Forest Gateau’, and includes poems about where Matthew Paul grew up, which I would also describe as my neck of the woods for most of my life. It’s a corner of south-west London bordering Surrey, and is home to poems such as ‘Pathe News visits the Ace of Spades’, another about a car showroom in Surbiton where his dad opted to buy a ‘passion wagon’ Austin Maxi (‘OYF 747L'), and one that simply celebrates his affection for his parents titled ‘Good Life’:

 

     Mum grew the annuals, though polyanthuses

     brought her out in an instant, measly rash.  

     Dad tilled vegetable plots, on two, separate

     allotments: The Man with the Golden Trug.

 

With his eye for the offbeat, Paul records the fact that Alfred Bestall, the Burma-born illustrator of yesteryear comic character Rupert Bear, lived in Surbiton, and pictures the three defendants in the notorious Oz underground magazine trial – the image of Rupert was borrowed by the magazine in such a way that it was charged and convicted of obscenity – visiting him at his home in Cranes Park:

 

     Three loon-panted freaks from ‘an art journal called Oz’

     visit Fred one August Sunday, to hail Rupert’s adventures

     in lands far from Nutwood. Their spokesman, Australian,

     asks if they can smoke, reminding Fred of those Anzacs

     he ferried in Picardy, fifty years before. The smell’s heady.

                                                                  (‘The Rupert Man’)

 

In a nod to changing times, an affectionate portrait of schooldays is brought up short at the end with a reminder of the later, malevolent influence of Ofsted. He exchanges reminiscences with a former teacher after encountering her at a work meeting:

 

     Her deputy interrupts us: Ofsted are coming tomorrow; to rootle

          like pigs let loose into woodlands for pannage -  

 

     will downgrade the school’s ‘Leadership and Management’

          from long-held ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’.

                                                                    (‘Music’)

 

Sport and particularly football runs like a vein through this collection, from ‘Brian Clough visits the Rijksmusuem’ to Middlesbrough footballers turning up at the Paul family’s regular holiday hotel (‘Half-Board at the Alum Sands Hotel Again’), to the collection’s title poem, which celebrates those players who managed to combine football and cricket in days gone by, before money demands really took over.

For those who feel no affinity with the southern suburbs, the third section of The Last Corinthians explores further afield, taking in Northern Ireland, Alred Wainright’s Lake District, as well as driving instructors with Seventies attitudes towards women. 

There is always the oddity of the apparent everyday. Here are poems about work, the kind of subject that many poets might turn their noses up, or have never actually experienced  – office cleaning in West Berlin in 1987; selling Yellow Pages space to vets over the phone; the brief camaraderie of a fire evacuation.

If this collection at times reflects a certain nostalgia, it isn’t of course of the flag-waving kind. In Matthew Paul’s poetry, the delightful details are everything, along with his skill with music and rhythm, as he recreates – and, to my mind, celebrates - a world of mushroom vol-au-vents, cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, Black Forest gateaux, Shippam’s fish paste, and “cremated fruitcake”.

I applauded this collection at its Doncaster launch back in June, with copious quotations. It has been a great pleasure to return to it again, for a second look.

 

Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians, Crooked Spire Press, £11