Review of We’re All In It Together, eds Michael Stewart, Steve Ely, Kayleigh Campbell, Grist 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

This is an anthology of “poems for a disUnited Kingdom”, with a “state-of-the-nation” focus, as the preface calls it. The call for poems, which we’ll return to later, asked “What does it mean to be ‘British’ […] Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United? Is it even desirable?”

This remit, for all the exhortation “interpret the brief in your own way”, was clearly always going to produce highly politicised, even polemical, poetry. Whether this works depends a lot on whether the poet can come at the theme somewhat slant, creep up behind the reader with a rapier rather than charging head-on with a club. The very first poem, Jim Greenhalf’s “Imperial Exodus”, had me exclaiming out loud with admiration at its subtlety and artfulness in this regard. It is a two-parter about the end of an empire, one part in the voice of the subjugated natives soon to be free, the other in that of one of the imperialists going home. But where is “home”? Clearly, it’s Rome, and the liberated natives are British:

      Did you see it, the last boat leaving?
      Thank God they’ve gone. Good riddance.
      All these years they’ve been telling us
      what to do and how they want it done.
      Things can only get better now, they say.
      No more Pax this and Pax that.”

Or is it?

      And they called us barbarians!
      They treated us as refugees in our own country,
      changing our habits, our customs, words

The point of course is that be they Roman, British, or what you will, empires are much the same everywhere. The second voice, gloomily contemplating a return to a place which he knows is not the “home” of his imagination, if it ever was, almost certainly did once belong to some Roman centurion, and also to some hidebound British administrator nostalgic for Fifties Britain and dreading a return to its modern incarnation:

      I’m sorry to be going back.
      Nothing glorious in that old ruin
      of slaves and foreigners
      pouring like floodwater over our borders.

This poem was a terrific start to an anthology, respecting the reader’s intelligence, feeling its way into the minds of its narrators and not preaching at us. Another that impressed me greatly was Gerry Cambridge’s “The Green and the Blue”, in which our narrator must find a way of living alongside the Neighbour from Hell, aka the Glasgow Rangers fan in the downstairs flat. It isn’t just that on match days the music is ear-splitting, it’s the question, in the narrator’s mind, of motive. Is the volume accidental or deliberately aimed at him as a Catholic? Face to face, the neighbour doesn’t seem as intimidating as the narrator feared:

      An uncertain
      broken-toothed smile. Skinny as a whippet, late twenties

Yet even his apparent co-operation about the noise raises suspicions about motive:

       Next time it’s too loud
      jist come doon an chap on the door. I understand
      this puts the onus back on me by apparent sleight of hand –
      Unconscious, or sleekit ruse?

The dance of approach and retreat, reaching out and suspicion, between these two is deftly done and rather moving. It’s also, as far as I can see, deeply pessimistic. I see no way for these neighbours ever to be part of a “united” society; too much divides them and religion is actually the least of it.

Division indeed is the keynote of the anthology. Rosie Garland and Mia Rayson Regan focus on the isolation caused by covid. Others highlight the divisions of Brexit. Many centre on race, from Aamina Khan’s “Yorkshire Cricket” to Ben Banyard’s “Scottish Tenner”, a far smaller incident but almost as redolent of distrust and suspicion as “The Green and the Blue”. Sexual politics and divisions, though not altogether absent, figure less, perhaps because only about a fifth of submitted poems came from women. Meanwhile Georgia Hilton likens England, in “Oh England I Love You”, to an “ageing parent”, right-wing and xenophobic, who constantly falls for well-spoken con men. It probably seemed like a good analogy for the way electors vote against their own interests; the trouble is, it relies on an offensively ageist stereotype. Believe it or not, the elderly are not all, or even mostly, gullible far-right bigots, and if we’re accusing people of having “fallen into the black hole/of internet conspiracy theories”, I seem to come across people of all ages who do that. The way government has managed to set different sectors of the community – young and old, black and white, gay and straight - against each other to distract them from the common enemy, ie those who have the money and power and are determined to hold on to it, would have made a good poem for this anthology, but this one just feeds into the prevailing narrative.

Many will probably feel angered and alienated by one or more poems in this anthology, since alienation is at the heart of it. There is certainly plenty of energy and commitment, though humour is in short supply, an exception being William Thirsk Gaskill’s wry sideswipe at bureaucracy, “On This Occasion”. The preface mentions that many poems were rejected for being “too hectoring and didactic”. I think a few still got through. Indeed, reading the text of the open call quoted in the preface, I don’t think I have ever seen quite so many abstract nouns in one paragraph, and if I’d read the call at the time, I would certainly have assumed they wanted poems about isms and ologies rather than people. Fortunately, they didn’t always get them. A few here do strike me as too obvious, and there are a couple whose point eludes me. But the good considerably outweighs the bad, which is most of what you can ask of an anthology.

The other thing you can ask is that it fulfils whatever remit it has set itself, and I think it does, in an odd sort of way. Though covid does figure, the acrimonious division that emerged between mask-wearers and anti-maskers does not, and nor does the way this division seamlessly followed on from that of Brexit. Whichever Twitter bubble one is in, the Venn diagrams for Remainers/mask-wearers and Brexiters/covid-deniers are almost perfect circles (and I did say “almost”, so don’t bother telling me if you’re the exception). This would lead me to suppose that the natural state of this, and perhaps any, country, is tribalism rather than unity, maybe because most countries are too big to be tribes in themselves, and that people will seize on anything to argue about just for the feeling of being in one tribe and against another. The poem which best encapsulates this tribalism is Gerry Cambridge’s, but the sheer variety of divisions represented here, not to mention the seeming triviality of some of them, itself, I think, answers the question in the preface, “Is it possible for the Kingdom to become United?”  Doesn’t look like it.