Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This review is taken from PN Review 279, Volume 51 Number 1, September - October 2024.

Sarah WimbushMontagu Slater, Collected Poems (Smokestack) £8.99
Pompapom, Pimpapombimban

The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater is an intriguing read. Born in 1902, and having grown up in industrial Cumbria, Slater won a rare scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Despite that brush with the elite (or perhaps because of it) Slater went on to be a committed communist all his adult life, and his socialist leanings chimed with other thirties poets of the time, such as Stephen Spender and the young W.H. Auden.

A rigorous introduction by Ben Harker (Professor in Cultural Politics at the University of Manchester) defines Slater as more than simply accomplished; rather, he was prolific. And yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, the relatively obscure Slater seems to have been ambivalent to recognition. Frequently uncredited on collaborative projects, this was a person totally focused on exposing the capitalist economic exploitation of the working class through his own political writing, and that of others.

‘In Encitement to Disaffection: A Fragment’, Slater sites labour as a battle, one in which there are no shiny medals, only muddy tin hats. This poem also includes a reference to Humphry Davy, inventor of the Davy lamp which saved countless miners’ lives by detecting explosive gasses such as firedamp:
Khaki’s a nice quiet colour
Tin hats don’t shine
Sombre as a Humphry Davy
In a fire-damp mine.
Nationalism is then ridiculed in the final line of the first stanza, which could also be the sound of an explosion: ‘Pompapom pompapom pimpapombimban’.

As with many other writers of his ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image