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Poets' Corner
Number six : 20th February 2013
A Minor Poet
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Rather like a coral reef , Western literature teems with small fry and minnows. The minor poets ,
"strangely-neglected" authors from the past ,
unpublished authors of the present. Through these unnumbered shoals swims the occasional figure
who may trail in his wake a slipstream of
publishers’ advances and full-page reviews in the literary periodicals while remaining unknown to
the general public. We are about to shine
a passing light upon a little-known author of three slim volumes of verse , one Brian Higgins
(1930-1965). Although he’d shown youthful
promise as a gifted mathematician , he first became a professional rugby league player , then a
schoolteacher , before migrating to London
to pursue an unsuccessful and bibulous literary career. “Born in Batley in 1930 , bored at
Bradford in 1940 , in 1950 he had an affair with
the gamma function” , states the autobiographical note to his first book of poems , from which the
following excerpt is taken :
Manchester , the great pale face of Lancashire.
Spewn in useless fly-blown shops and prosperous slums
A ganglion of rotting and roaring industrialism
A monstrous rancour of wheels and payment
From glass-blowing St. Helens to the grease-filled passageways of Oldham
And then the Pennines , waste and mist and lonely sheep
Walls dividing nowhere from nowhere
A tow-headed farmer and the occasional sudden pub.
In the winter you can never see much for the fog and sleet
In the summer it's like Turkey or somewhere
Then Huddersfield , Halifax , Bradford and Leeds
With a few banal remarks about the juxtaposition of muck and money .....
Although unremarkable in themselves , these lines evoke for me the experience of a journey made
several times a year for over forty years ....
the bus ride between Oldham and Leeds. Brought up in Oldham , where my parents continued to live
their (separate) lives , I went to University
in Leeds , a city I live in still. At first the bus took the A62 route through the Pennine
villages west and east of the Standedge pass , along
the Colne Valley to Huddersfield. From there it motored alongside the Calder as it ran
through Mirfield and Dewsbury , finally coming into
Leeds with the ‘sweet river Aire’. Here was a travelogue documentary through the Industrial
Revolution. Isolated weavers’ cottages , ruins of old
water-powered mills , derelict canalside wharves and loading bays. Quarries on every skyline ,
abandoned railway lines , factories now limping
their way from the Steam age to old age (and retirement). After the M62 motorway had been
completed , the bus sped along it. A noteworthy feature
was the farmhouse of an exemplary Yorkshireman who had refused to move , so he and his family now
dwelt in between the east- and west-bound
carriageways. He had been supplied with an underpass under each , so he could access the moorland
on which his sheep grazed. Anyone who has been
obliged to pull up on the hard shoulder of a motorway and get out of their vehicle will have a
notion of what it must sound like to live in the
middle of a motorway. An appropriate symbol of the North's resilience as the roar and racket of
24/7 'progress' shakes all their windows and rattles
their walls.
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic
Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's
Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of
Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam,
14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake,
25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet,
19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy,
20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's
Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas,
20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's
Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William
Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts ,
20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William
Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub
Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music,
20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia &
Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of
Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone
Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard
Kipling, 20th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell,
20th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest
Proposal, 20th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray
and The Eighteenth Century, 20th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan
Poe, 18th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly,
19th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be
Saved, 24th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants,
20th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel
Johnson, 15th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot,
10th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord
Tennyson, 18th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen,
12th November 2016
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