Backroom 45: Neil Young

Let me pursue a favourite pastime and quote myself.

 “Neil Young’s first collection recalls themes with which, you’d hope, our children will find it difficult to connect: war, sectarianism, poverty. I’ve always thought the job of poets wasn’t to secure sales, workshops or honours but to memorialise their people: I don’t mean by that necessarily a race or a country, but those who’ve one way or another touched them, formed them, made them. This is poetry’s oldest duty. Young’s book tells the story of his people frankly, brutally even, but with grace, skill and humanity, love in fact. This is a compelling and accessible book."

Too true. Neil is a people’s poet and a poet’s poet. He is hugely underrated but, like Shug Hanlan appearing in a few days time, ratings are a thing I don’t think he cares particularly about. An avowed socialist, his poems are often unashamedly political but can be achingly personal too. He's class.

Neil Young hails from Belfast and now lives in Aberdeenshire, where he is co-founder and major human dynamo behind widely acclaimed magazine 'The Poets’ Republic' which has recently turned pamphlet publisher, too, publishing over the last two years Joy Hendry,
Katie Ewing, JoAnne McKay and Maria Stadnicka.


'Shrapnel' Reviewed in the Morning Star

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-abd8-neil-young-shrapnel-1

Link for 'Poetry Republic' magazine

http://poetsrepublic.org/


A Transcript of the Poem reads above-

11-o’-Clocks

I see her first through the frosted-glass partition
with the hall; moving around in the kitchen,
bobble-slippered over a blue-tiled floor,
click-clicking the paraffin heater. I smell
the thin escape of fume, eidetic, warm. It ignites.
Then I am there too, about four, at the table,
legs skimming the floor. She pushes two custard creams
on a plate to my hands, I slurp diluted orange juice
from a Tupperware beaker with its rim chewed
where my two older brothers had drank before, pre-school.
She flicks the radio on. Petula is singing Downtown;
mam’s singing too: “Listen to the rhythm of the gentle bossa nova”
though she hasn’t been to a dance in years. She’s always
in the background, doing, tending, until she is there no more.