Rory Waterman reviews Missing Person by Nicholas Hogg (Broken Sleep Books, 2023)
“I was a convict boy who dreamed of running”. That’s the first line of the opening (and title-) poem of Nicholas Hogg’s Missing Person, and there hangs a tale. Hogg grew up in Leicester, after which he seems to have run as far, as fast, as he could: he has travelled around the globe, made an impact as a novelist, started a successful business. This is a debut collection, but it is the product of experience.
The first of the book’s five sections remembers a working-class upbringing in suburbia, and adolescent attempts to “rise from the ruins of a broken / home in a broken town”: going to the park to “hunt / for spent casings of fireworks” because “there’s nothing else to do” (‘Pyro’), for example, or playing video games:
What I really wanted, beyond a High Score name
on a title screen, was a glitch. A gateway graphic
where the pixel split, and I stepped on through
to the 8-bit plane.
(‘Video Game’)
In ‘Starring Role’, he suddenly breaks away from this concatenation of memories to proclaim prosaically that “the man will carry / this void / into every room he walks / for the rest of his life.” This essentially lays the ground for the rest of the collection.
This is a debut collection, but it is the product of experience
Escape, in adulthood, often seems to take the form of unsuccessful attempts to sate wanderlust. The second, and longest, section opens in unfulfilled reverie: an “escape plan”, to fly solitarily to “a plot of woodland / with a log cabin” in some arctic nowhere, “walk out onto a frozen lake, / listen for that heart-stopping sound / like a steel cable snapping”, and spend evenings back at his hearth reading “by a single bulb, / where the black type is anthracite, / and the words spark fire” (‘Northern Lights’). The closest he gets, in the next twenty pages of occasionally self-consciously worldly, anecdotal poems, are trips to the edges of the tourist map and the limits of the (capitalised, brand-named) Lonely Planet. I seem to share many of Hogg’s proclivities in this regard, and most of the environments he describes happen to be ones I’ve experienced myself, not always in dissimilar circumstances; he is an evocative guide. In ‘California’, we find him hitchhiking “across the USA / with a knife” and “a pilgrim’s want / of the mythical West – as if that glittering sea // could save the world”, a kind of modern Supertramp redux and reduced, and finally confronted by “the great wide spangle of light, / the Pacific, where we stopped our car and picked up stones”. In ‘Sarajevo Grammar’, apparently not long after the siege ended in 1995 and on a high trail “where the landmines slept”, a woman tells him:
There were books on the breeze when the library
burned, remember, it was on the news.
And you, watching from your sofa.
In ‘Fiji’, men dig a fire pit and say “This is how we used to cook the priests“, then the speaker goes “swimming in the Pacific like a local” – but crucially also not much like a local at all, and he knows it. ‘July’ returns us to England, “to a classroom on Edgeware Road”, and presents desires to escape that pointedly undermine his own, as
students compete with each other
on spelling checks
and survival stories. There is the man who walked from Kabul
to France
because the Taliban found his Bee Gees tape.
There are moments when I want to give Hogg’s poems a damn good edit: “out onto”? “the pixel split”? “every room he walks”? “a pilgrim’s want”? Isn’t “broken / home” an amateurishly simplistic, weak, form-following-content construction? Here, though, the simple language is unshakeable, and the line-breaks a perfectly subtle embellishment to what is possible in prose.
Then, in the third section, the book explodes from the world to the universe, moored again by (often gritty) personal anecdotes: macro and micro. “The galaxy of fire that shines this road” (‘Meteor’) gives way to the woman rolling a joint on a bus who “tells me the whole universe / has to exist / for this moment / to exist” (‘Interstellar’), and to the speaker gazing out of a window at a planet, “the two of us / in orbit” (‘Jupiter’). Where to go next? The book’s fourth movement rounds on the destructive present, informed by its earlier preoccupations. In ‘In Bloom’, workmen have been “charged with the vandal / murder of an overgrown plot where the foxes live”; “we are the sun”, concludes the speaker with both shrug and epiphany, “that yearns through leaf and stem, the amber / in a fossil on an ocean floor”. And in ‘Dorothy’ – dreaming of Oz, with “the Technicolour walk / in the opioid dell” and “a plastic town where the munchkins chuckle” – “the news is on, where the Taliban trend / and the Red Woods burn”. (But again: “vandal / murder”? “Red Woods”?)
… a vivid, lively, generally well-marshalled and often heartily enjoyable collection
Then, in the book’s closing fifth, attention falls on the things we tend not to see, or to dwell on. Under a Camden bridge, in ‘Tupperware’, there are two gay men “from a state where touch / is crime. Where a man can be lynched by a righteous mob, // dragged from his bed, and thrown off a roof”. The speaker leaves them sandwiches daily, we are told, “Until one visit / when the men had gone”. I’m not sure what we are to take from this anecdote, other than that he is a Good Guy. ‘Gazza’ finds “England’s greatest ever footballer” pissed up in Leicester Market, “buying King Size Rizla”. I’m not sure what to make of this either, and Hogg certainly doesn’t try to explore it further. The book would be stronger if it lost this final chapter, without which it already feels complete.
Occasionally, then, Hogg seems to me gratingly too-cool-for-school, too off-the-cuff, too keen to take the easy way out of a poem. Nonetheless, his work often presents a world not much seen in contemporary poetry, at least not like this, even though a lot of it is concerned precisely with the sort of lives most people in this country actually live. Hogg’s style has much in common with Geoff Hattersley (now also published by Broken Sleep), in terms of typical subject matter, loose adherence to conversational forms, and easy, slightly detached and ironic delivery – but who else is writing like this? Too many of these poems seem to rest on the assumption that a simple, well-rendered snapshot is enough to make a poem. Nevertheless this is a vivid, lively, generally well-marshalled and often heartily enjoyable collection.
Rory Waterman is the author of three collections from Carcanet: Tonight the Summer’s Over, which was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses, shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize, and most recently Sweet Nothings. He teaches English at Nottingham Trent University, has written several books on modern and contemporary poetry, and co-edits New Walk Editions. Rory Waterman’s website is here.
