5/22/2023 0 Comments Author of cloudstreet![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Like a lot of people, I’ve spent most of the past month watching football. You’ll laugh out loud and love the rough music the words make. Inner London Buddha (2018) collects more than 100 poems about the construction industry, melancholia, unemployment, dodgy landlords, sex, love and drug use. The former taxi driver, airplane cleaner, carpenter and poet Mick Guffan may be a ghost or a pseudonym, or a fabrication. The story of an 11-year-old girl from Jamaica, it makes the argument that all working-class or outsider art makes: find room on the shelves for all the unheard stories. Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) was one of the first books about the experiences of black girls in the UK. Working-class artists are only ever allowed conditional access to the art world. What’s forgotten in all this is how beautifully Healy writes and continues to write. After he allegedly made threats against publishing staff, the book was withdrawn from sale and his work was suppressed for years. Healy came from the world of dossing and endless drinking and violence and prison. It was around then I read John Healy’s memoir The Grass Arena (1988). Around the corner, Vauxhall Park was full of the drinkers who couldn’t even get into the Oak. My nights were spent in the Royal Oak, a dark, narrow boozer run by a pie-faced man from Skibbereen. In my early 20s, angry and lost, I was living in a squat in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall, south London. ![]()
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