Poetry review – HALFWAY TO BARKING: Jennifer Johnson enjoys a light-hearted and fanciful collection by Sarah Lawson
Halfway to Barking
Sarah Lawson
Severn Press
ISBN 978-1-9168910-2-9
60pp £8.00
Sarah Lawson is a long-established and well-regarded poet, translator and prose writer with a useful website giving details of her previous work which includes the first translation, in 1985, of Christine de Pisan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies.
Halfway to Barking is an unusual collection of poems, many of which have fun with imaginings that make the familiar unfamiliar with the aid of some sophisticated humour and inventive language. Some not-too-obscure cultural and philosophical knowledge is assumed in a few of the poems, but most can be read by anyone who is familiar with poetry. The quirky humour in these poems demonstrates the kind of sharpness you might expect from an intelligent outsider. Lawson was born in Indiana in the US but has lived in the UK since 1967. Response to humour, of course, depends on personal taste and a reader’s knowledge; but many should enjoy the sheer fun in the writing, hopefully benefitting from what the Ancient Greeks called humoral medicine.
I will select a few poems in the collection to illustrate in detail what has been described above and the techniques by which this has been achieved.
I must admit that when I first saw the title Halfway to Barking, I thought it might mean halfway to being Barking mad! The first poem which has the same title tells me that this can be, at most, a secondary meaning. The 6-line poem is shown below.
From Earls Court to Monument
Is half way to Barking on the District Line.
Always go by increments of half;
Zeno’s advice is as good as mine.
There’s nothing further he can teach.
“There” is a place you never reach.
The familiar notion of being unable to reach your desired destination is made unfamiliar in this poem by Lawson using Zeno’s paradox about successive halvings along with Zeno’s advice not to resist the divine reason (logos) which governs the universe – t.e. accepting what you can’t control.
The second poem “Bertie Wooster at the Wallace Collection” is an example of a highly enjoyable humorous piece, here quoted in full
Well, here we are
In front of Fragonard,
And regard the lady on a swing
Among the spring-
Like leaves.
Which do you prefer,
Sir?
Watteau, Jeeves.
Fragonard and Watteau both painted a lady on a swing. The last line ‘Watteau, Jeeves’ is a pun on ‘What ho! Jeeves’ which readers of P.G. Wodehouse will recognise in the novels as Bertie Wooster’s usual address to his admirable butler.
The haiku “Kew” shown below with its odd logic also depends on a pun.
You don’t need the whole
A-to-Z if you only
go as far as Q.
In “Dante in the London Underground” Lawson imagines Dante asking Virgil for help in negotiating the Tube which he sees as a ‘netherworld’. Use is made of ‘a Circle underground’ relating that line to one of the circles of hell. However, Dante concludes in the final 4 lines that perhaps the London Underground isn’t really hell.
But you need a ticket in this place –
It’s not enough to show your face –
Whereas the entrance fee
To Hell, I’ve learned, is mostly free.
As in the first poem, the common metaphor treating the underground as hell has been reinvigorated by an imaginary Dante and dark humour shown in the last four lines is emphasised by the rhymes.
“The Cemetery for Doornails” is a poem that speculates on what happens to all the dead doornails that have been invoked by those who employ the phrase ‘as dead as a doornail’. The reader is given the directions needed to find the cemetery using mad-sounding places such as:
Take the High Street, then turn
at the crackpottery,
past the half-bakery.
The poem suitably finishes with ‘Dead End’.
Another example of Lawson’s unusual imagination can be found in “The London Eye” in which the first line ‘Has the rest of the bike been stolen?’ gives the reader a picture that they might find hard to unsee.
“London Flea Market” conjures up a literal stock market of fleas in which the fleas’ variations in value are cleverly described in the line ‘All year the figures have hopped and jumped;’.
Another example of the poet creating fun by taking literally a well-known phrase occurs in the poem “Theory and Practice at the Zoo” which begins ‘We knew it should work, the theory was sound’. But the planned cross-breeding experiments fail because, unlike the common animal symbols used for a future peaceful utopia, ‘the lion refused to lie down with the lamb’. The last two lines of the poem may also be making fun of what can go wrong in academia.
We examined the problem, we thought hard and long-
The theory was right, the lion was wrong.
The rhyme enhances the ridiculous concluding statement.
I highly recommend this collection for the enjoyment it should bring readers who appreciate sharp, fanciful humour of the sort that will enable them to see familiar sites and situations in new, thought-provoking ways.
Jun 21 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Sarah Lawson
Poetry review – HALFWAY TO BARKING: Jennifer Johnson enjoys a light-hearted and fanciful collection by Sarah Lawson
Sarah Lawson is a long-established and well-regarded poet, translator and prose writer with a useful website giving details of her previous work which includes the first translation, in 1985, of Christine de Pisan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies.
Halfway to Barking is an unusual collection of poems, many of which have fun with imaginings that make the familiar unfamiliar with the aid of some sophisticated humour and inventive language. Some not-too-obscure cultural and philosophical knowledge is assumed in a few of the poems, but most can be read by anyone who is familiar with poetry. The quirky humour in these poems demonstrates the kind of sharpness you might expect from an intelligent outsider. Lawson was born in Indiana in the US but has lived in the UK since 1967. Response to humour, of course, depends on personal taste and a reader’s knowledge; but many should enjoy the sheer fun in the writing, hopefully benefitting from what the Ancient Greeks called humoral medicine.
I will select a few poems in the collection to illustrate in detail what has been described above and the techniques by which this has been achieved.
I must admit that when I first saw the title Halfway to Barking, I thought it might mean halfway to being Barking mad! The first poem which has the same title tells me that this can be, at most, a secondary meaning. The 6-line poem is shown below.
The familiar notion of being unable to reach your desired destination is made unfamiliar in this poem by Lawson using Zeno’s paradox about successive halvings along with Zeno’s advice not to resist the divine reason (logos) which governs the universe – t.e. accepting what you can’t control.
The second poem “Bertie Wooster at the Wallace Collection” is an example of a highly enjoyable humorous piece, here quoted in full
Fragonard and Watteau both painted a lady on a swing. The last line ‘Watteau, Jeeves’ is a pun on ‘What ho! Jeeves’ which readers of P.G. Wodehouse will recognise in the novels as Bertie Wooster’s usual address to his admirable butler.
The haiku “Kew” shown below with its odd logic also depends on a pun.
In “Dante in the London Underground” Lawson imagines Dante asking Virgil for help in negotiating the Tube which he sees as a ‘netherworld’. Use is made of ‘a Circle underground’ relating that line to one of the circles of hell. However, Dante concludes in the final 4 lines that perhaps the London Underground isn’t really hell.
As in the first poem, the common metaphor treating the underground as hell has been reinvigorated by an imaginary Dante and dark humour shown in the last four lines is emphasised by the rhymes.
“The Cemetery for Doornails” is a poem that speculates on what happens to all the dead doornails that have been invoked by those who employ the phrase ‘as dead as a doornail’. The reader is given the directions needed to find the cemetery using mad-sounding places such as:
The poem suitably finishes with ‘Dead End’.
Another example of Lawson’s unusual imagination can be found in “The London Eye” in which the first line ‘Has the rest of the bike been stolen?’ gives the reader a picture that they might find hard to unsee.
“London Flea Market” conjures up a literal stock market of fleas in which the fleas’ variations in value are cleverly described in the line ‘All year the figures have hopped and jumped;’.
Another example of the poet creating fun by taking literally a well-known phrase occurs in the poem “Theory and Practice at the Zoo” which begins ‘We knew it should work, the theory was sound’. But the planned cross-breeding experiments fail because, unlike the common animal symbols used for a future peaceful utopia, ‘the lion refused to lie down with the lamb’. The last two lines of the poem may also be making fun of what can go wrong in academia.
The rhyme enhances the ridiculous concluding statement.
I highly recommend this collection for the enjoyment it should bring readers who appreciate sharp, fanciful humour of the sort that will enable them to see familiar sites and situations in new, thought-provoking ways.