Poem about the dash4/23/2024 ![]() ![]() The “Punk Jesus” who, like the narrator, fails to get picked up “on a roundabout near Bedford”, steps forward into potential significance. Nicely paced over its six five-line stanzas, the story casually, slowly, raises the tension. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. skip past newsletter promotionĮnter your email address Sign up Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. That stanza has fun with ambiguity (“another will talk about / fucking lorry drivers”) and drifts into the well-timed inconclusive bathos of the fashion designer, who gives the hitchhiker a mint, and the jealous dog that growls in the back-seat. ![]() He gives us a short spin in a high-performance Ford Cosworth then switches in verse two to various kinds of lift-givers (“Samaritans and chancers”) without loss of power. Hogg weaves easily between past-tense recollection and the immediacy of the present (the latter being the favoured angle) and between specific anecdote and generalisation. But expectations of “a good story” are roused. It has aroused our suspense by the end of that first of a number of casual half-sentences, “… and hoping not / to get robbed, mugged or murdered.” The narrator’s looking back over a hitchhiking life, so we know he probably didn’t end up murdered. The latter may be better expressed by Paul Celan’s word, “ atemwende” – the “breath-turn” in which “your sense of self is suspended and you are open to everything”. I settled on Hitchhiker because it combines two effects that poetry often keeps apart from each other: muscle-tensing narrative anticipation, and epiphany. It was hard to choose a poem, since I couldn’t find one I didn’t enjoy living in. Precarious beginnings on a tough housing estate are presented clean of self-pity in the first section: then the rebellious spirit goes “missing” in places exotic, cosmic, hallucinogenic or just sharply realigned “ordinary”. The appeal Leicester-born novelist and screenwriter Nicholas Hogg’s enthralling collection Missing Person is hard to summarise: Hogg’s poems seem to possess a hard-edged romanticism, or, to put it slightly differently, a realism that has an uncompromising shine and excitement. A prince in a fable with a palace of his own. And then the boy in the boat leaping ashore. How the mist would clear and a castle reveal, the unexpected ramparts sealed with moss. Borne along the highway in a Vauxhall Cavalier, I saw, through his eyes, More often I think about the teacher who cried recalling a holiday to Scotland with his dying son,Īnd how they took a row boat onto a loch so thick with mist that the known world shrank to a bubble of white. I’m going to Leicester, to see my sister. ![]() ![]() He also has a crucifix tattooed on his forehead, just below his mohican. He wears a trench coat, and boots once worn by a paratrooper. On a roundabout near Bedford, another hitcher waits. A fashion designer, who picks me up from a garage forecourt, will give me a mint while her dog growls from the back seat. One man will explain Islam, another will talk about fucking lorry drivers. ![]()
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