“God, the perils of the flesh were tiring. At the peak of my mania I found it therapeutic to hoover the cathedral (not a euphemism).” If you haven’t guessed yet from the first lines of ‘Dustbunnies in the Playboy Mansion’, poem number nineteen in Dirt Rich, Graeme Richardson’s debut collection, its writer is religious. That being said, don’t open the cover expecting cloistered sexuality, theological arguments or every page referencing father, son and holy spirit. These poems ooze with sexual frustration, drip in lost love and forgotten hope, always questioning or interrogating the viewpoints of their writer.
Graeme Richardson, former Oxford Chaplain and Parish Priest, may write poetry that touches upon his faith, but his work delivers a much wider, universal playground, for him to explore lust, parenthood or the passing of time. In fact, these diverse, intricate and often humorous works, triumph for their very inventiveness or for the careful beauty they create through contradiction.
It is clear he has grown up in the countryside, Nottinghamshire to be precise and, readers should be ready to encounter neighbouring towns like Mansfield, memorials to Oxford cemeteries or elegies to local landscapes. Every page seeps with “woodsmoke”, “hilltop earth” and rings in the voices of choir boys. Richardson may rely on familiar settings for the subjects of his poems, but he doesn’t rely on a regular form, exploring rhymed, blank and free verse, or even a more exciting version of his own, in-between.
For ‘Holywell Cemetery’, he cleverly balances motion with immobility in a graveyard, using a strict rhyme scheme alongside a repeated structure that sandwiches the poems at the beginning and end. At one time, he may let his work wriggle loose, in others he might keep the poems on a tight leash.
In quiet, married life and grief creep into the collection about mid-way. Richardson doesn’t shy away from the full force of his maturity in a collection complete with sexual images, grief and a physical trail of past romantic encounters. He is not afraid of showing the body in visceral struggle against itself. Often through snapshot, sometimes through carefully choreographed linguistic photography, Richardson might place a poem about a couple’s wedding day next to a lament for the death of their child. This has a chilling sensory effect, allowing the reader to experience an abundance of life occurring haphazardly and out of any regular chronological order.
Published by Carcanet, Dirt Rich is Richardson’s impressive first collection. It comes after his two pamphlets, initially with Hang Time (2006) and then, eighteen years later with Last of the Coalmine Choirboys (2024), alongside his role as a critic for The Sunday Times whilst he lives in Germany. He clearly knows his way round pen and paper, with metre that snaps or fizzles at just the right unexpected moments, shaping images that stretch far and wide in the brain.
Words by Harry Spiers
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