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Looking for Larkin<\/em> is <\/em>the first full length collection of Jules Smith\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 Handsomely produced, it also contains a sequence of photographs by Dan Lyons which capture some of the monuments, wharves and streets of \u2018Larkinland\u2019 in and around Hull. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a poet who has been widely published since the early eighties, this is the first substantial gathering of his work. In \u2018the Barefoot Bride\u2019, which opens the collection and is placed alongside a shot of Pearson Park, Smith beautifully distils the influence of his master. Addressing a beloved with the Larkinesque endearment of \u2018Darling\u2019, he then describes a bride and wedding group in terms which are clearly intended to echo \u2018The Whitsun Weddings\u2019:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She trailed her ivory, wind-ravelled train<\/p>\n across the road to greet guests warmly,<\/p>\n colours sun-mingled as in a kaleidoscope .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like the protagonists in many of Larkin\u2019s poems, Smith is an outsider looking on, his \u2018incline towards the curves of their talk \/ distanced by not knowing the family.\u2019 Having described the stock figure of the best man sitting \u2018on a low wall \/ like Humpty Dumpty, flirting with women\u2019, he brings the poem to its conclusion with a quietly effective image which rings the changes on the fertility theme which is also important in Larkin\u2019s poem: \u2018Behind them all, the garden. Freshly dug.\u2019<\/p>\n In \u2018Looking for Larkin\u2019, the collection\u2019s title poem, Smith\u2019s elusive eminence grise<\/em> actually becomes his subject.\u00a0 Accompanied by an enigmatic photograph of Larkin\u2019s flat in Pearson Park, this is another highly intertextual poem in which Mr Larkin is recreated in the image of his own \u2018Mr Bleaney\u2019, so that now the room which once belonged to \u2018that novelist chappy\u2019 has been \u2018turned over to a well-balanced bloke \/ unafraid of ghosts, Pink Floyd posters on the walls.\u2019 With a few deft strokes Smith gives us a convincing \u2018warts and all\u2019 portrait of the poet \u2018almost capering\u2019 to his classic jazz whilst at the same time he is \u2018spying on \u201choneys\u201d\u2019. However, more than this, the piece is also a moving study on the subject of mortality in which the music changes with the decades and thirty years are reduced to \u201830 seconds on \u201cNews at Ten\u201d\u2019. Moreover, lest anyone think that Smith is merely an exponent of clever pastiche, he concludes with some bravura imagery that is entirely his own:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Coming and going across Pearson Park<\/p>\n some see orange and pink lamplights,<\/p>\n others luminous Larkinesque socks<\/p>\n against the evening\u2019s darkening suit.\u2019<\/p>\n Having established the Larkin theme, Smith proceeds to cast his net more widely. In \u2018She\u2019 he evokes his own adolescence by describing the erotic and \u2018fulfilled figure\u2019 of Ursula Andress rising from the waves in Dr. No. <\/em>It is also the first of several poems inspired by the poet\u2019s love of the cinema. Here, from the film version of King Solomon\u2019s Mines,<\/em> is the princess Ayesha disintegrating before our eyes:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then the change in her. Stifled crying out,<\/p>\n corruption showing first on her spotted hands,<\/p>\n flesh jerking past the frames of desire<\/p>\n through such processes only film can fake.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Witty, intelligent, and full of fun, it must also be admitted that the allusiveness of this and many other poems here makes plenty of demands upon the reader. Alongside its cinematic references to Ian Fleming and Rider Haggard, there are echoes of Charles Aznavour, Larkin\u2019s Mrs T, Ecclesiastes, Keats and no doubt others which the present reviewer has missed. Further highly entertaining excursions into the world of the silver screen are \u2018Brief Encounter\u2019, where \u2018a veil of light separates art from life,\u2019 and \u2018The Fall of the House of Hitchcock\u2019 which evokes \u2018Female hip and automobile in Fifties curves, \/ cantilevers of bra and bridge.\u2019<\/p>\n Central to Looking for Larkin <\/em>is <\/em>its <\/em>virtuoso showcase <\/em>\u2018Poets\u2019 Night on the S.S. Manxman\u2019, a dazzling mock heroic epic in which Smith shows himself to be Hull\u2019s answer to Dryden and Pope or, perhaps more appropriately, Clive James. There is no space here, and probably no need, to examine the rich literary heritage of \u2018The Rumoured City\u2019, other than to say that, from Larkin, Dunn, O\u2019Brien and beyond, the list of poets seems endless, including figures such as Roger McGough and Tom Paulin who may not be immediately associated with the city, or Oliver Reynolds who started out with Faber in a blaze of glory but seems subsequently to have faded away. Over the years Smith himself has played a not insignificant role in this tradition and, via his long association with John Osborne\u2019s journal B\u00eate Noire,<\/em> was well placed to observe the shenanigans and foibles of the city\u2019s literati. Extending over twelve pages and featuring some dozens of poets, it would be invidious to focus on individuals in a poem which Smith refers to as \u2018a long poem \/ on a long night, on a long boat. \/ A work of libel and celebration.\u2019 There is, however, mayhem and bickering aplenty which is frequently fuelled by drink. Perhaps, as someone is alleged to have said about the Sixties: \u2018If you can remember, you weren\u2019t there.\u2019 On a smaller scale, but just as hilarious and well observed is \u2018Flannnerie\u2019 in which the poet sharpens his scalpel on the Irish literary scene from Joyce and Flann O\u2019Brien down to the more recent days of \u2018Famous Seamus, the mud poet\u2019 and \u2018Fungus McMahon\u2019.<\/p>\n A poem such as \u2018Poets\u2019 Night on the S.S. Manxman is bound to have a particular appeal for those who were a part of the \u2018scene\u2019 it depicts, so that those who were not may at first glance feel excluded. However, Smith\u2019s brio and incisiveness, his skill with rhymes and rhythms and his frequently outrageous imagery are very appealing. Poets are, by and large, at least as fatuous and self-obsessed as everyone else and, whether the scene is the Roman Republic of Catullus or the coffee shops of Augustan London, it is always entertaining to see their vanities on display. The S.S. Manxman is a worthy reinvention of the \u2018Ship of Fools.\u2019 It would, however, be a mistake to see Smith as merely a gifted satirist and literary annalist. \u2018On My Birthday\u2019 is an endearingly nostalgic evocation of a Sixties childhood. Disappointed to discover that his postbox is empty, the poet is taken back to earlier days: \u2018Back in bed I\u2019m mindful of ten-bob notes, \/ riding the range of the back garden under a cowboy hat.\u2019\u00a0 \u2018Shinglers F.C.\u2019 returns to the same period and memorialises the doughty determination of its eponymous football team. In \u2018Tomorrow\u2019s People\u2019 the old men \u2018tending their allotments\u2019 at the end of their lives are compared to \u2018figures in a Breueghel landscape\u2019 who are reduced to merely \u2018doing something.\u2019<\/p>\n Finally, if proof were needed that there is more to Smith than postmodernist high jinks and literary knockabout, one needs to look no further than \u2018Graduation\u2019, his austerely sustained meditation upon the death of his father:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The ceremony went well. Eulogies,<\/p>\n gowned ritual, a sense of having passed<\/p>\n onto that brief handshake with authority.<\/p>\n A liberation of sorts. Me to play.<\/p>\n Outside, the life of summer transcendent\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As in Beckett and some of the later poems of Larkin, Smith\u2019s depiction of old age is relentless in its awfulness:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Being able to \u2018take his drink\u2019 left years<\/p>\n of enfeebled hopping on painkillers,<\/p>\n degeneration towards a chairbound,<\/p>\n legless, sightless, completely finished<\/p>\n dustbin character escaped from Beckett.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Cantankerous, humourless, feckless,\u2019 the father is a figure who, having passed on, is \u2018no longer \/ there to be feared,\u2019 yet somehow, too, in spite of the tensions between the father and the son he dismisses sarcastically as \u2018sugar plum\u2019, big \u2018ead\u2019, \u2018the professor\u2019, the poet also recalls moments of togetherness when father and son shared late night \u2018steak and kidney pies I wouldn\u2019t eat now.\u2019 Looking for Larkin <\/em>is a varied and engrossing collection which is, by turns, funny, nostalgic and moving. \u00a0It is beautifully illustrated by Dan Lyons and doesn\u2019t have a dull page in it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n