Annie Fisher reviews The Remaining Men by Martin Figura (Cinnamon Press, 2024)
Martin Figura’s eventful life has provided him with rich material. In this remarkable collection of poems, he draws on his experiences to tackle some tough and urgent issues. He does so with a compassionate, light touch and a life-affirming energy, but he doesn’t spare the truth.
The book begins and ends with personal / family poems, one of which alludes to a traumatic and life-changing event. In between, the lives of soldiers, miners, nurses, carers and IT workers are set alongside the lives of political figures from the past century. This makes powerful social commentary. Figura is, as George Szirtes has said, “the laureate of the ordinary and overlooked”.
The jacket design is pertinent. It features a photograph (taken by Figura) of a man wearing a spotless white shirt, a paisley tie and a beige cardigan. Only the lower half of the face is visible, so we can’t see his eyes, but the slightly florid mouth and chin display the deep-etched wrinkles and slack tone of late middle-age. I imagine a faint whiff of Brylcreem and beer. The lips are thin and clamped firmly together. This is a man who has seen a thing or two in his time but prefers not to talk about it. The book’s title, The Remaining Men, suggests both marginalisation and steadfastness; and that slightly formal word ‘remaining’ has overtones of self-containment and restraint. I was reminded of Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day.
Figura is, as George Szirtes has said, “the laureate of the ordinary and overlooked”
The collection includes some evocative black and white photographs. The opening poem, ‘Sunday 11 November 1956’, is about Figura’s birth (in Liverpool) and is set alongside two photographs of Figura with his older sister. One of these shows a young Figura (maybe three or four years old) holding a toy car. He’s wearing white socks and sandals, short dungarees, a smart shirt and bow tie – a real ‘little man’. The accompanying poem paints a dreamily idyllic scene:
Dawn breaks across the Irish Sea like a movie score,
burnishes The Graces, their Liver Birds and pigeons;
burnishes the sugar white steam of the docks;
pours like golden syrup along Oxford Street,
shines on my father gazing from the window, Godlike
in his cloud, heralding me, a son!
We might imagine we’re in for a cosy memoir, but the second poem disabuses us of any such idea. In My Mother, My Father, Figura uses poetry to momentarily erase an unspeakable family drama from the pages of his memory and replace it with a happier script. The poem opens “My mother never met my father when seventeen […] They walked separate lives down hobbled streets”. Figura allows them “only this coincidence”:
to both marry on the self-same day they never did.
Franz Joseph Figura’s face shone like a silver zloty
behind his fine moustache and June Evelyn McCullogh’s
face shone like half a crown beneath her veil and happy
ever after they were, each with many children, none of whom
were me.
Subsequent poems go on to describe how Figura became “a strange little boy”, “the wrong kind of clever”, whose “lies became more dazzling” and who learned to fit wherever he was put. ‘Liar’, a poem about his younger self, characteristically combines fact, fantasy and self-deprecation:
As soon as he was sixteen, he took himself off to try on disguises.
He’s since believed to have passed for: soldier, astronaut,
photographer, accountant, matador, Prince of Denmark
and poet, without ever once being found out.
Moving on from family and childhood, Figura pans out to the wider world, the backdrop to his childhood. There’s a poem about the Hungarian uprising and a seriously chilling piece, ‘The Bomb’, which uses the words of an American army officer from archive footage. The officer calmly “allays unreasonable fears” about the atomic bomb to rows of fresh-faced young conscripts. The bomb “is one of the most beautiful sights”, he assures them; “anything that casts a shadow will protect you.” Atomic Bomb Explosion Test Footage : The 1950s Atom Soldier – CharlieDeanArchives (youtube.com)
There follows a sequence concerning the impact of war on soldiers from various recent campaigns (Figura was in the military himself for twenty-five years). ‘Bear’ is dedicated to Stewart Harris who was badly injured in Afghanistan in 2012 and went on to suffer PTSD. Back home with his family, Harris is taken to the brink of despair by the ‘bear’ of PTSD:
The bear brooded and the children shrank back
from its rancid breath which made the bear roar.
The rooms of the house became dead ends. One night
Stew placed his hand in the bear’s paw and together
they walked to the shingle edge of the sea and were
the most sorrowful sight the sea had ever seen.
The sea took pity and let them step into her low swell.
They clung together until the sea murmured home.
The title poem, ‘The Remaining Men’, is about men broken in a different way – miners left jobless, purposeless and forgotten following the closure of mines:
The men began to petrify into monuments. When
the new road for the business park went through
a lot of them were tipped back onto trollies, like the ones
railway porters used to use, then loaded onto flatbed trucks
with traffic cones. Most were broken down for aggregate.
[…]
As the centuries went by, they all but disappeared,
only the circle in the park remained. Archaeologists
and historians disagree about how they came to be there
and what they might have been used for.
One of the poems I found most powerful (and most disturbing) was ‘Sin Eaters’, which is written in the voice of someone whose job it is to view potentially illegal material on the internet:
We suffer this mortal sphere’s
effluent spew, its spastic utterances of desire,
glottal-specked malevolence and fears
so your innocence is spared. There
are eight seconds to decide and two errors
per hundred allowed: delete, ignore
or escalate? I need this job’s pitiful
recompense. It is not what I wished for
This shows us, in no uncertain terms, the impact this job has on its workers, despite the “outsourced wellness sessions” provided for therapy. We are left wondering how anyone could survive the trauma of viewing such material, and wondering, too, just how much violence, cruelty and abuse slips through the net in those appalling eight seconds.
I’ve said enough, I hope, to give some idea of its panoramic scope, its intelligence, skill and humanity
After this unsettling piece, a series of poems about well-known political figures (from Atlee through to Cameron, Trump and Putin), allows for some emotional rebalancing. There’s playfulness and much humour here (some gentle, some more satirical) but one way or another, each VIP is cut down to size. I particularly enjoyed ‘Edward Heath Canvassing Bexhill, February 1974’ and ‘Jeremy Thorpe at The Underbelly’, but my favourite was ‘Tony Blair’s Sleep App’, in which an AI voice helps the ex-PM forget what might otherwise keep him awake at night:
Let a peaceful heaviness settle into your bones Tony,
lie in a comfortable position. The brain can be coaxed
into deep sleep frequency with carefully chosen sounds.
You can select from:
the rattle of Islington cutlery, water pouring
over a cloth-covered face, the muffled crump
of distant ordnance, a rendition of desert night songs,
D: ream.
The end of the book brings us to the 2020 pandemic and its impact on nurses, care workers and families. This is from ‘Carers’:
Skill: is in lifting those who have fallen without breaking your back; in finding joy between fault lines and cracks; in reassembling a person from their photographs each morning; is not driven by what the market will pay; can speak with an accent; has set its own family and fears to one side; […] is this close to leaving; is ever so tired; is given to kindness and shouldn’t come cheap.
The final poem takes us back to Liverpool for ‘Reunions’ with old friends and with Figura’s relatives on his mother’s side. Although he left the city at two weeks old, Figura is as proud of his Liverpudlian roots as any poet would be:
I meet seven McCullochs at the docks
in an ersatz Spanish Café amongst the museums
to work, slavery and pop. My mother’s side are all
as funny as fuck, which is just as well with so much
history to unpack.
[…]
We talk and laugh so much, it’s five hours later
halfway to Norwich where I belong, before I need
to speak again and when I do, it comes out scouse.
There’s more here that I’ve not even touched upon, and extracts can’t do justice to the work itself, but I’ve said enough, I hope, to give some idea of its panoramic scope, its intelligence, skill and humanity. I have nothing but respect for Martin Figura after reading The Remaining Men. It deserves the largest possible readership.
Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.
