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Gregory Woods

BETWEEN TWO LINES OF MARTIN STANNARD

This beautiful road. Where does it go?

When it gets there will it still be beautiful
or will it have strayed, as tends to be the case
in this piss-take of reality, into suburban sprawl—
all gas stations, porn warehouses, and chapels of rest?

And will the ‘there’ it gets to | be worth having got to,
worth the worn-down clutch, the nerves frazzled
by that accident black spot on the hairpin above
the ravine, worth the passive-aggressive satnav?

There’s a scary moment when, hitting seventy
with the roof down, it all goes blurry and you forget—
I forget what. You might consider dredging up
a line or two of prayer from childhood, meek and mild.

Will it still be beautiful when you ease yourself out
of the driver’s seat in a layby for an urgent comfort break?
Will there be orange-cowled lizards and oleanders?
Will there be bullet holes in the rusted road signs?

I know a thing or two about beauty, of course,
don’t we all? You can have too much of a good
thing. Sunsets, harmony, daffodils. Bloody panoramas.
Me, I like to go indoors and deprive all the senses.

When I finally work out how to open the door
of my hotel room, I find the wi-fi has plugged into
some foreign power’s intelligence service
and in the disco-lights of the minibar it’s beginning

to rain. I telephone the breakdown people.

                       



Copyright © Gregory Woods, 2022

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Introduction by Ian McMillan

Sometime in the very early 1980’s I was doing a reading for Martin Stannard somewhere in Ipswich and I was staying over at Martin’s house. On the way back from the gig his car broke down spectacularly, gasping and wheezing, then clanking and sighing, then moaning and complaining, then dying. The night was clear and Martin and I stood outside the car waiting for the RAC and gazing at the stars and I realised, not for the first time and not for the last, that I was living in a Martin Stannard poem and that it was an exciting place to live. When I first read Martin’s poems and started subscribing to his wonderful magazine Joe Soap’s Canoe I was excited that he took his influences from absolutely everywhere. At the time a number of us were writing in the shadow of Ted Hughes and The Mersey Poets and our lenses were crowded with our visceral reactions to Thatcherism’s vicious flowering but Martin seemed to look wider than the rest of us; he took in John Ashbery and surrealism, a kind of cra
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David Belbin

There's nothing like getting it wrong . MARTIN STANNARD AT SEVENTY I first encountered Martin through his poems in 1987, when Wide Skirt Press published The Flat of the Land . The title poem, which also opened the collection, was a revelation. The style owed a lot to the New York Poets, who I had recently discovered, but also felt fresh, funny and self deprecating in a very English way. Two years later, John Harvey's Slow Dancer press published a new and selected called The Gracing of Days , then Wide Skirt press published Denying England . I loved both collections: the voice, Martin's laconic yet romantic view of the world, the string of humour tightly laced throughout. I dragged a bunch of my A level students to a Slow Dancer reading in the basement of Nottingham's Old Vic pub. Martin was appearing alongside a young whippersnapper called Simon Armitage, who John had also published a pamphlet by. I primed the students for the reading with a sheet of poems by b
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Alan Baker

I came to Martin Stannard's poetry relatively late, when, at a book fair, I picked up a pamphlet entitled "Easter" (published 1994). The easy, familiar tone and the quick wit drew me in to what was at first just a pleasant read. Then, imperceptibly, the poetry took me to to a zone of wonder and disorientation that was exhilirating. Fast forward twenty-six years and, by 2020, I had the honour of being Martin's publisher, when the third title of his that I published, "Reading Moby Dick and Other Matters", was released. It's a beautiful object (I can say that as the book design was all Martin's). And the title poem, "Reading Moby Dick" has all the features I'd been struck by in "Easter" but with an added sophistication that the intervening years of poetic practice had brought to it. It opens with a knowing dodgy joke - "Call me optimistic..." which sets the tone of irreverence and tongue-in-cheek meandering
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