The Toll

Luke Wright

• Publisher: Penned in the Margins
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781908058423
• eBook ISBN: 9781908058546
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

An escaped lion roams the streets of Essex;
a lonely pensioner holds a tower block fete; ,brand a young woman dreams of leaving home.
Travel the unfashionable A-roads and commuter lines of England -'where industry meets marsh'- with poet Luke Wright. In his stunning new collection, discover a country riven by inequality and corruption but sustained by a surreal, gallow's humour. The Toll combines the elegaic with the anarchic, placing uproarious satire cheek-by-jowl with wild experiments in form and touching poems of parenthood.
In this mature follow-up to his best-selling debut, Mondeo Man, Wright captures the strain of austerity Britain, speaking truth to power and registering the toll it takes on us all.

The Ballad of Edward Dando, the Celebrated Gormandiser!

Hurrah! It’s me! It’s ballad time!

Hang some bloody bunting!

Now shut your eyes, sit back, we’re off

to eighteen twenty-something.

The belching Georgian after-party,

age of gout and laudanum;

opulence and dropsy spread

to all that could afford them.

The spit-roast swine, Germanic wines,

Beau Brummel’s ice-cold quips,

the clash of Nash’s symmetry

with George’s wobbly bits.

Frayed pantaloons and powdered cheeks

and boo-sucks to the prigs.

The Tory party ruled but it

was all about the wigs.

And dandies dashed in Hackney cabs

from bar to drinking shop;

a gin-soaked trail of tabs until

their foppish waistcoats popped.

And just as in our stage-school age

the slack-jawed Shaznays dream

of being auto-tuned and airbrushed

into pop’s hareem

so young men walked the gas-lit streets

of London’s rotten heart

with grand ideas to take their lives

and spin them into art.

And so, our hero: Edward Dando,

apprentice to a hatter

(we don’t know what his hats were like

but they, dear friends, don’t matter).

For days spent stitching hats for chaps

sent Dando mad with boredom;

the line of dandruff decades stretched out

miserably before him.

A member of the lunar race

that history near forgot.

He might, had he been born later,

lined-up with Marx’s lot,

but short on ideology

or union or committee

Dando only had a hunch

that life was sort of shitty.

While some were blessed with tails and titles

others buffed their boots

and pickled, stewed and boiled the scraps

of labour’s rotten fruits.

O who will pave my grave with jewels?

O who will sing of me?

The hatters, blacksmiths, cooks and fools

all piled up like scree.

And that, thought Dando, shouldn’t, couldn’t,

be the way for him.

So he resolved to live a life

of shellfish, beer and vim.

Off then to an oyster house

with sawdust on the floor;

a pile of shells around his boots.

Our hero ordered more

— shuck-gulp-drop, shuck-gulp-drop —

and all washed down with porter,

the swagger of a Don Juan

with his mitts on someone’s daughter.

And when he’d swallowed thirty dozen,

Dando belched and sighed,

performed a dance of pocket pats.

What rotten luck! he lied.

I’m sorry Mr Oysterman,

I’ll have to see you clear

another day, all right old boy?

Next time I’m passing here.

And had he been a gentleman

the trader would have bowed

and sent him on his merry way,

contented with this vow.

But swagger isn’t breeding and

no sooner out the door,

this whistling, cocksure hatter felt

the rough arm of the law.

They banished our voluptuary

to Brixton for a month,

where Dando’s raging hunger gave

the other lags the hump.

They shackled him in solitary

for stealing beef and bread,

where there the old screws pummelled him

and boxed his grisly head.

But when his month of gruel was up,

he found the nearest stall,

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Luke Wright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• O England heal my hackneyed heart
• The Slow Days
• A12
• Dad Reins
• Essex Lion
• Hoax
• SPAD
• The Ballad of Edward Dando, the Celebrated Gormandiser!
• Thunder, Lightning, etc.
• Port Eliot
• VAD Hospital, Saffron Walden, 1915
• Watch
• The Pretender
• The Much Harpingon One-way System
• One Trick Bishop
• The Bastard of Bungay
• IDS
• The Toll
• Kelvedon - Liverpool Street
• The Back Step
• Family Funeral
• Sue’s Fourteener
• Ron’s Knock-off Shop
• On Revisiting John Betjeman’s Grave
• Sick Children
• The Minimum Security Prison of the Mind
• David, at 68
• Lullaby
• Hungover in Town, Sunday Morning
• Burt Up Pub
• The Ballad of Carlos Cutting
• Swimming with Aidan, aged 4
• Essex Lion (... continued)
• When your wardrobe towers like a soldier...