Review: Tour de Vers, edited by Andy Jackson

Title: Tour de Vers – Poems for the Tour de France
Authors: Ruth Aylett, Linda Cracknell, Jonathan Davidson, Steve Dearden, Morgan Downie, Kitty Fitzgerald, Harry Giles, Adam Horowitz, Kirsten Irving, Andy Jackson, Jonny Lovett, Harry Man, Nalini Paul, Jon Plunkett, Chris Powici, Janet Smith, Sheila Templeton, Sheila Wakefield, and Richard Watt
Publisher: Red Squirrel Press
Year: 2014
Pages: 42
Order: Red Squirrel
What it is: Nineteen poems inspired by the Tour de France
Strengths: We need more cycling poetry
Weaknesses: The variety of voices and views on offer makes for a somewhat scrappy tour of the Tour’s delights

Cycling poetry has made fewer appearances on the Café Bookshelf than I would have liked. Everything to Play For, an anthology of sports-related poetry – including a tricycle of bicycle-related poems – was the last entry, and that was eight years ago. Ten Poems About Bicycles appeared four years before that, shortly before Scarlett Parker’s The Srampagmano Tales. And that’s it. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough. That is quite likely, as I only came across Tour de Vers when it was reissued last year, having missed it when it was first published in 2014, the year of the Tour’s Yorkshire grand départ, a high-water mark in the Great British Cycling Boom.

Tour de Vers opens with Jonathan Davidson’s ‘Le Grand Depart’ (Davidson’s ‘A Lady Cyclist Learns to Cycle’ appeared in Ten Poems about Bicycles), a poem that takes a marvellously jaundiced approach to the Tour:

the caravan shovelling
Over its shoulder promotional items, the manure
Of capitalism; the phalanx of police motorcycles,
Outriders of the state, conditioning good order
Amongst the obedient multitude;

Davidson here is part of a fine tradition of Tour criticism, one that can be found as early as 1906 when Maurice Genin likened the Tour’s sandwich-board men to les forçats de la route et la réclaime, prisoners of the road, and the advertisement. Sadly, Davidson doesn’t quite stick the landing, his cynicism giving way to the smugness of the Sunday-morning CTC rider (Davidson is a proud member of the Coventry section), the type who imagines the Tour’s riders envy him:

In the heart of the peloton.
In the soul of the heart of the peloton, they all know
That Le Grand Depart is no substitute for a couple
Of friends riding side by side on a Sunday morning.

Morgan Downie’s ‘At the Start’ takes a more romantic view of a stage start: “a forest of noise, canopy twitter / of mobile phones, the whoop / and cry of early morning drunks, / commentators jabber at the air / while the cyclists sweat and drip / staring out into the ipod distance.”

Linda Cracknell’s ‘The Selfish Herd’ considers the peloton in full flight (“Full tilt we’ll freewheel / through Huddersfield / striving to co-operate / until the sprint-break for Harrogate, / when team tactics / stretch the group soul, fracture our shoal.”) while Kitty Fitzgerald’s ‘Domestique’ considers a rider alone (“Cycling the Coquet, three geared sit-up-and-beg / when state-of-the-art racers whizz by, heads down, / arses up. I’m an anachronism, enjoying the view, / complex blue of the sky, breath caught in my throat.”).

Mountains in particular attract poets and a third of this collection’s poets pay tribute to the Tour’s big climbs, taking us from the Pyrénées to the Alps.

Sheila Templeton takes a romantic road up ‘Col du Tourmalet’, Wiki-facts filling her pockets as she climbs:

The best view is high on the Distance Mountain
up beside Octave’s enormous statue, silver-white metal
shimmering in July heat, mouth at open stretch
willing air into his lungs
dancing on his pedals
his roar of Vous etes des assassins! Oui, des assassins!
still raw.

Also making an appearance is the rather romantic belief that there was no road over the Tourmalet, just smugglers’ tracks, as well as Alphonse Steinès and the telegram he never sent. Romantic fiction is better than reality, I know. And that’s fine … so long as you remember it is fiction. But Templeton doesn’t and ends her poem like this:

So many ghosts. Necessary ghosts – taking their place
under silent witness of soaring lammergeiers,
dark specks of griffin vulture. Remember them
as you watch the mad bright confetti of the peloton,
lungs bursting, tendons burning, ears ringing.
Remember who came before.

Would that we could remember the actual past, and not the Wikified version of it.

Arterra / Universal Images Group / Getty Images

Harry Man takes a trip to the Spanish side of the Pyrénees with ‘Falling Off Diente de Llardana, Satan’s Tooth’ (“Midflight from the handholds / Raymond was a spider, cordless off / the orange, sunlit arm of a mossy sofa”) and in ‘The Peloton’s Tale’ Chris Powici takes on the Col de Peyresourde (“a long downhill dream / of pine groves and grass scents”).

Ruth Aylett tackles ‘Mont Ventoux’, doffing her cap to Petrarch, who probably didn’t ascend the bald mountain (“Beast, monster, giant of Provence; / Petrarch the poet climbed it first on foot / But looked to Augustine not Simpson at the top.”) while Richard Watt’s ‘King of the Mountain’ takes us deep into the Alps (“Under Val Thorens / there are majestic caves / whose fora rest on tall, Ionic plinths / shoelaced by light that’s carefully / handed down vitruvian veins”).

Janet Smith does ‘Col du Galibier’ (“toe clips straining, your Chater pedals connect // crank shaft steel direct to the muscle of your / calves, soleus-slow springs gastrocnemius-fast, cranks / knee to knee joined by motor nerves to brain… / contract, relax, contract”). And then there’s Harry Giles’ ‘Alpe d’Huez’, a visual poem, all saw-tooth angles turning this way and that up and down the page (you can listen to the author performing it on Bandcamp, where the poem doubles back on itself and descends the way it’s just gone up):

Harry Giles / Red Squirrel Press

Outside of the mountains, two poems take us to the back of the bunch: Steve Dearden’s ‘Last’ (“For every RPM, every hour, every k of / my nineteen Tours, I’ve buried my OCD // Before each stage I have to be: / last out of bed, last downstairs, last in breakfast / last sat down”); and Andy Jackson’s ‘Broom Wagon’ (“Some succumb, look anxiously to us, imploring. / Others fight the coming of the end, standing / high on pedals, baring insect-speckled baleen // straining dregs of energy from late-afternoon air.”). At the other extreme of the peloton, Nalini Paul’s ‘Aerial’ puts you into a breakaway (“When your heart becomes itself / and reminds you of gravity / sky is in your lungs / clouds in your breath. / Light sings above the summit / fills your vision with distance.”)

Jon Plunkett’s ‘Dope Test’ is a Fred’s dream of the Tour (“I have ridden the Tour / countless times. The A826 / becomes the long haul / of some Pyrenean slope / or a twisted road / to an Alpine col.”) while Adam Horowitz’s ‘La Plus Belle Avenue du Monde’ offers another Fred’s tale (“Not quite the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, / this tatty high street I am aiming for, / processing on my bike through trees (they line / the road in audience, a score // of birdsong caroled from their upraised arms).”)

Jonny Lovett’s ‘Je Suis le Meilleur: Voice of the Yellow Jersey’ does what it says on the tin, giving voice to the yellow jumper (“Maillot jaune. / Sporty cock. / First canary / off the block. / The leading body sock. / One…step…ahead / of the flock.”). Kirsten Irving’s ‘Sidewheel Front Runner’ takes on the green jersey (“from the air, each rider is a clot skewered by a line and from the house, / as a child, your mother would be cheering, even as you fell onto the grass”).

If pressed to pick a favourite among the 19 poems offered here, I would have to choose Sheila Wakefield’s ‘Sprint Finish Haibun’, which mixes prose and poetry in a celebration of fandom and Mario Cipollini, the Lion King: “Saeco’s star, my hero, no Armstrong-style security, is roaming free. I catch his scent, that of masculinity, pure sexuality. I act immediately.”

Sheila Wakefield / Red Squirrel Press

Overall Tour de Vers’ 19 poems offer a curious take on the Tour, critical and adulatory at the same time, celebrating the real and the imagined and reminding us that the Tour is more than just a big bike race.

fmk