IN SEVERAL of the poems in his latest collection, Andy Croft refers to the situation of the contemporary poet and they are certainly not of the “I’m a poet, I’m a unique individual, how I suffer” variety.

Instead, he is concerned with what it means to be a politically committed poet in the age of open mics

and the hyping of “Each post-New Gen New Generation/And last week’s latest new sensation.”

The newest trend is so often no more than old wine in new bottles and to be modern does not mean having to turn one’s back on tradition. Croft consciously draws on and develops a rich poetic heritage in quatrains and sonnets and notably uses Lord Byron’s Don Juan stanza to brilliant effect in a poem about his time teaching creative writing classes in South Yorkshire prisons.  

Into the old bottle of Byron’s canto, Croft pours sparkling new wine in an imaginative and humorous satire on our contemporary self-regarding and celebrity-obsessed culture, together with serious observations about the prison system as a reflection of class society.

It’s a poem which typifies Croft’s conception of poetry, in which familiarity with local and national popular culture is fused with erudition and internationalist politics in tributes to communist giants like Paul Robeson and Chris Hani.

Croft is also a “popular” poet in his devotion to rhyme. In response to the “dark times” in which he was writing, Bertholt Brecht famously changed from more traditional forms to unrhymed irregular verse.

Writing poetry is “easier” of course when you are not constrained by rhyme and metre but, without Brecht’s keen sense of language and contradiction, political poetry can often be no more than earnest preaching in chopped-up prose.  

Croft uses rhyme and metre with the same facility and inventiveness as Tony Harrison and invariably produces similarly memorable poetry. And he shines a chilling light on the world we live in:

“And so the dead are always nameless,
Uncounted, slaughtered in a war
By enemies they never saw,
And we, whose dreams are always blameless,
Lie listening for the noiseless drone
Of desert whirlwinds we have sown.”

The elegiac tone that informs some of his poems, not only the more personal ones, is connected with Croft’s rejection of facile optimism, his recognition that he is writing at a time when socialism has suffered many defeats.

Like Antonio Gramsci, he is a pessimist of the intellect (“Today the struggle is an ancient text/In which we trace the victory march of violence/From one dishonest decade to the next”) and an optimist of the will (“As if there’s anybody could delay/The walls of privilege tumbling down one day”).

Honest and inspiring, if we had a socialist Poet Laureateship there would be no other candidate than Croft.

Published by Shoestring Press, £10.