The Genuine Genius of Grenade Genie – A Promising Collection from an Exciting Poet
Grenade Genie, oscillating as it does between surreal and serious, is an insightful tour de force which contends with the defining issues of our era and the questions which plague generations of Britons contemplating their identity. That is not to say, though, that this is an insular and inward looking collection. On the contrary, its wide ranging focus moves effortlessly from English local council disputes to the intricacies of Iranian geopolitics.
The collection is divided into four sections, entitled Cursed, Coerced, Combative and Corrupted. It is the second collection by highly regarded poet Thomas McColl, who described the collection as united by a main theme that “ultimately, everyone and everything is expendable”.
The division into four is effective because, by highlighting the specific elements of the human condition with which a section is concerned, the poems feel more laser focused. Moreover, given the often unusual nature of the work, the reader’s understanding benefits from this additional direction. One such example is the long, meandering poem which gives the collection its title — a rumination on the nature of genius and discovery, and its impacts on the left behind through the medium of a genie found in a grenade. Grenade Genie falls into the ‘Coerced’ section, but would be an entirely different poem if it were found in the ‘Corrupted’ section.
The opening poem is on the opposite end of the spectrum to Grenade Genie — No Longer Quite so Sure is a poignant articulation of the exhaustion of the working class, particularly in light of the constant failures by local councils to make even minor changes to improve their lives. It is told from the perspective of a tired worker, falling asleep on the bus to work only to be wrenched back awake at the same point in every journey when the bus hits a hanging branch.
By balancing the exhaustion of the worker with the failures of councils creaking under austerity, the poem articulates a range of contemporary political impulses: the desire for dignity, for fair working conditions, for a functional public realm. The collection does more than this, though. Halfway through there is a poem entitled Socialist Workers on Oxford Street, which grapples with the apparent impossibility of establishing a simple solution to these problems whilst lightly poking fun at that mainstay of every city centre — the socialists selling papers referred to by McColl as “delusional Communist King Canutes”.
The collection is well worth your time, particularly the poems mentioned already and the moving exploration of the emotions of refugees battling against Fortress Europe and Fortress United Kingdom found in Carry My Eyes (Above and Across the Barbed-Wire Border). The lines: “I hear that there are many now discussing our terrible plight / saying welcome the refugee / but my tear tortured eyes are tired / of earning nothing more than sympathy” are particularly poignant in light of the British government’s response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Words by Charley Weldrick
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