Geoff Hattersley (1956-2024) published five main collections and at least nine small press titles. Unusually among his English contemporaries, he often wrote directly ‘out of’ working-class life. The second part of Harmonica (2003), for example, has two dozen poems stemming from his job as a machine operator in a plastic injection moulding factory. These poems tell of interactions with fellow workers (Cowboy, Jacko, Chicken Bone Charlie) and the Works Manager. In Back of Beyond (2006, pp 92-97) the poet or protagonist is working for an agency, packing screws, sealing envelopes, alongside Becky and Ugly Darren, under the Supervisor. These and earlier poems (such as ‘Factory, Late Seventies’) arise from fellow workers’ attitudes to the work, to management, to immigration, and to each other. A section titled ‘Volunteer’ (part II of Hattersley’s second Bloodaxe collection, On the Buses with Dostoyevsky) has sixteen poems inspired by experiences working on a kibbutz. All these work-poems, with other poems of family life and community, speak of working-class life but live more in their comedy, oddity and pathos than in a mission to witness.

Hattersley hates the earnest and pretentious. He prefers plain speech and a conversational tone out of which to spring his surprises. The back cover of one of his booklets, Port of Entry, describes his poems as ‘by turns wry and self-deprecating, and savagely satirical. They are written in a deceptively casual, almost improvisatory style, but their statements are, in fact, cunningly balanced against each other.’ It is useful to think of the ‘statement’, rather than the image, ...