Poetry review – MISSING PERSON: Vanessa Lampert admires both the perceptiveness and the kindness of Nicholas Hogg’s observations
Missing Person
Nicholas Hogg,
Broken Sleep
ISBN 978-1-915760-44-9
£9.99
Already a successful novelist, Nicholas Hogg here presents his first collection of lyric poems. It is grounded in a landscape of British working-class life in the latter part of the twentieth century. The poet is quick to position himself amongst ‘my fellow have-nots’, in the opening (title) poem. His style is descriptive, and sometimes unflinchingly bleak. In “Pyro”, ‘Your dad / beats your mother, and mine is a drunk’, and in “Jackpot” we meet ‘the thugs and the drunks, the two blokes / flogging bacon’. Vivid descriptions of the circumstances of Hogg’s childhood tether a yearning for what the boy imagines might lie beyond the physical and cultural geography of his suburban Leicester. A skilfully wrought grounding and containment of a boy’s tension and restlessness ever straining at the leash is a theme that endures throughout.
A boy drifts out to sea on a cheap blue lilo
bought with his holiday money.
his father told him not to go beyond the harbour wall,
but he had read a book about Captain Cook
as a wanderlust youth
The poem’s embodiment of story whilst gesturing into the unknown territory of the white space beyond language, is deftly executed and frequently negotiated. In “Gun (With Englishman)”, two boys shoot at a target attached to a fridge.
Have you ever held a gun before?
I once fired a revolver, point-blank at Mark Stoneley,
loaded with a roll of paper caps. He cried,
and told his mum, who told my mum. So, No, not really.
We drove towards Mexico, […]
The intimacy of naming the other boy encompasses a vivid childhood memory with its inescapable disappointments and irreplaceable love; ‘his mum’, ‘my mum’. By juxtaposing imagery of the gradual dismantling of innocence with a weapon of destruction, the poem manifests the painful truth of a boy’s desire for escape and the inevitable losses inherent within the process of growing up. The poem softens in its concluding lines, briefly revealing and thus venerating the romantic desire of its speaker for a different life, only to have him return, so far from home to the more prosaic truth.
I want to add a detail here, like circling birds, or a dust-devil swirl.
but no. Just a fridge. And a target flayed with a heart
blown out.
Hogg is highly accomplished in constructing for himself a smooth exit, a sense of things being resolved at the close of his poems. ‘The black stone missing as I board the plane’ (“Obsidian”). ‘It’s good to feel the cut, sometimes, to know the world is true’ (“Rain”), ‘into every room he walks / for the rest of his life.’ (“Starring Role”). Whilst often a masterful strategy in poetry prizes, within a collection, this tendency to batten down every hatch in the poem’s final line feels accumulative and can read as slightly fussy. In the otherwise vividly filmic “Fosse Way”, the glorious penultimate line ‘All your diamond cliches, crushed beneath my boots.’ is overshadowed by its final line, ‘I’ve travelled this road a thousand times, and never seen the sky this close.’
A meticulous counterbalancing of whimsical and prosaic imagery is beautifully accomplished in some stand-out poems. “Tupperware” compares the ubiquitous plastic food containers to a bond between same-sex lovers ‘from a state where touch / is crime. Where a man can be lynched by a righteous mob’, their union reflected by Tupperware being ‘neatly stacked. / With each box clipped so firmly to the other, / they could never be prised apart.’
“Concerto” delivers a relentless visual interrogation of an unnamed man.
He’ll go down the canal and get plastered
On a Sunday, knocking back a bottle of bootleg vodka
that looks like water and tastes like thinners
This piling-on of images creates a portrait of its subject so filmically vivid that the poet’s subsequent strategy of announcing his own presence in the story (rather than remaining an observer of it) is a risk that pays off. This announcement is confident and unsentimental. ‘Still, what I want to walk away with today, / along the towpath speckled with leaves’ Like Robert Frost’s ‘piece of ice on a hot stove’, the path to the poem’s tender denouement has been made:
(…) he used to solder the typefaces onto the key levers,
And that he would test the strength and accuracy of his weld
By tapping out each letter against the platen,
Only signing off his work on a certain, perfect note.
Nicholas Hogg’s portraits of working-class life remind me of Liz Berry’s writing. There is kindness and nowhere for his subjects to hide from his forensic eye. There is also the opportunity to travel to a world beyond. This is poetry for everyone.
Mar 20 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Nicholas Hogg
Poetry review – MISSING PERSON: Vanessa Lampert admires both the perceptiveness and the kindness of Nicholas Hogg’s observations
Already a successful novelist, Nicholas Hogg here presents his first collection of lyric poems. It is grounded in a landscape of British working-class life in the latter part of the twentieth century. The poet is quick to position himself amongst ‘my fellow have-nots’, in the opening (title) poem. His style is descriptive, and sometimes unflinchingly bleak. In “Pyro”, ‘Your dad / beats your mother, and mine is a drunk’, and in “Jackpot” we meet ‘the thugs and the drunks, the two blokes / flogging bacon’. Vivid descriptions of the circumstances of Hogg’s childhood tether a yearning for what the boy imagines might lie beyond the physical and cultural geography of his suburban Leicester. A skilfully wrought grounding and containment of a boy’s tension and restlessness ever straining at the leash is a theme that endures throughout.
The poem’s embodiment of story whilst gesturing into the unknown territory of the white space beyond language, is deftly executed and frequently negotiated. In “Gun (With Englishman)”, two boys shoot at a target attached to a fridge.
The intimacy of naming the other boy encompasses a vivid childhood memory with its inescapable disappointments and irreplaceable love; ‘his mum’, ‘my mum’. By juxtaposing imagery of the gradual dismantling of innocence with a weapon of destruction, the poem manifests the painful truth of a boy’s desire for escape and the inevitable losses inherent within the process of growing up. The poem softens in its concluding lines, briefly revealing and thus venerating the romantic desire of its speaker for a different life, only to have him return, so far from home to the more prosaic truth.
Hogg is highly accomplished in constructing for himself a smooth exit, a sense of things being resolved at the close of his poems. ‘The black stone missing as I board the plane’ (“Obsidian”). ‘It’s good to feel the cut, sometimes, to know the world is true’ (“Rain”), ‘into every room he walks / for the rest of his life.’ (“Starring Role”). Whilst often a masterful strategy in poetry prizes, within a collection, this tendency to batten down every hatch in the poem’s final line feels accumulative and can read as slightly fussy. In the otherwise vividly filmic “Fosse Way”, the glorious penultimate line ‘All your diamond cliches, crushed beneath my boots.’ is overshadowed by its final line, ‘I’ve travelled this road a thousand times, and never seen the sky this close.’
A meticulous counterbalancing of whimsical and prosaic imagery is beautifully accomplished in some stand-out poems. “Tupperware” compares the ubiquitous plastic food containers to a bond between same-sex lovers ‘from a state where touch / is crime. Where a man can be lynched by a righteous mob’, their union reflected by Tupperware being ‘neatly stacked. / With each box clipped so firmly to the other, / they could never be prised apart.’
“Concerto” delivers a relentless visual interrogation of an unnamed man.
This piling-on of images creates a portrait of its subject so filmically vivid that the poet’s subsequent strategy of announcing his own presence in the story (rather than remaining an observer of it) is a risk that pays off. This announcement is confident and unsentimental. ‘Still, what I want to walk away with today, / along the towpath speckled with leaves’ Like Robert Frost’s ‘piece of ice on a hot stove’, the path to the poem’s tender denouement has been made:
Nicholas Hogg’s portraits of working-class life remind me of Liz Berry’s writing. There is kindness and nowhere for his subjects to hide from his forensic eye. There is also the opportunity to travel to a world beyond. This is poetry for everyone.