Poetry review – ENGLISH LAUGHTER: John O’Donoghue finds hope in the humour and fair-mindedness that Alan Morrison perceives as being vitally English characteristics
English Laughter
Alan Morrison
Cyberwit.net, 2026
ISBN: 978-93-6354-056-9
$15
Alan Morrison’s English Laughter, his fifteenth collection in twenty years, comprises a selection of elegies for canonical poets, and a number of poems that explores contemporary politics. Politics has been an abiding theme for Morrison – his leftwing credentials include his position as Poetry Editor of The Morning Star, and his editorship of the website The Recusant. Morrison is, therefore, first and foremost a political poet, an inheritor of the mantle of Tony Harrison, another working class poet whose ability to pass comment on contemporary politics distinguishes him from his more middle class contemporaries.
English Laughter begins with ‘The Baptist’: ‘The Baptist said of everything going on in Gaza:/It’ll all come out in the wash…’ Here Morrison takes to task the Trumpian Evangelicals who believe that Armageddon will be a military phenomenon as opposed to a spiritual one, a battle for peace as opposed to a war waged against the innocent. This powerful poem ends with a particularly telling line: ‘We are bombing our way to a Second Coming…?’
This take on events in Gaza, which seems to be largely forgotten about by Western leaders and Western media, is typical of Morrison’s approach to politics. Take ‘The Spanish Plume’ (¡No pasaran!), which comes with the subtitle On the far right anti-immigrant riots of 30 July – 5August 2024
August 2024
The Spanish Plume
Spreads its heat
Across England
Scorching pastures
To blanched grasses
Straw-blond strands
A note on the poem states that the Spanish Plume is a plume of warm air the UK experienced in August 2024, and that ¡No pasaran! – They Shall Not Pass! is the Anti-fascist slogan of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. This conflation of the meteorological and the political intelligently juxtaposes an Act of God – the Spanish Plume – with those various small acts of resistance against the bully boys of the Right. Morrison is avowedly Left in his stance here, a committed Catholic Socialist who is one of the few contemporary poets able to make poetry out of politics. If the poet is a witness to their times, I think Morrison is the kind of poet – like Harrison, like James Fenton, like Seamus Heaney – who is prepared to write to the moment. His fable Kier Hardie Street shows that he is able to construct parables in the manner of Ilya Kaminsky, whose Deaf Republic imagines an occupied town falling deaf in response to the shooting of a child. But Morrison is a quintessentially English poet, and his points of reference are the headlines and the Britain our political leaders seem to have damaged so badly.
As if to enlist in his resistance movement those poets and historical figures whom he can conscript who shall also cry ¡No pasaran!, Morrison has a number of obscure and not so obscure characters fall in behind ‘The Baptist’, such as David Jones, Ivor Gurney, and Malcolm Arnold. He starts this oppositional roll call with Niall McDevitt, the Irish poet who died in 2022:
Flâneur [fle-ner] of the stucco frontages of Fitzrovia,
Bloomsbury, Hampstead, Frestonia,
You flew on raven’s wings from Limerick to Dublin
Through London to Paris & Babylon & back…
It’s in these elegies that Morrison’s poetry really takes flight:
How in the other place you will walk with Blake
Across shadowless tracks of unspoilt pastures
Bunyan anticipated, you’ll meet at last with Blake’s
Skyward gaze, he’ll smile in a glint of sunlight
In the gold-flash of a stream-caught gauntlet,
& thank you for all your work on his behalf…
McDevitt was a poet Morrison was drawn to for various reasons, not least because of his own oppositional take on the contemporary scene. McDevitt, like Morrison, was an anti-capitalist, a poet who saw in London a salvation that came from its poets, ancient and modern, and who decried the way the very streets had become ‘charter’d’. He thought, like Morrison, that Albion still existed, that beneath all of the contemporary obeisance to Big Business, an England that had built Jerusalem still obtained. McDevitt will I am sure become a poet future generations will look to for example and guidance, a mystic as much as a poet, a prophet as much as a commentator, a very loveable Irishman in a metropolis he celebrated and abhorred in equal measure.
The one figure in Morrison’s small patrol of resistance fighters I hadn’t heard of is ‘Woodbine Willie’, The Cigarette Saint, G.A. Studdert Kennedy, 1883 – 1929:
His epithet
“Woodbine Willie –
“The cigarette saint
Of No-Man’s-Land”
Supplying dying
Soldiers with morphine
Bible & Woodbine
Eucharist
Of cigarettes
Tobacco smoke
For incense.
Kennedy became a vicar, saw service in Flanders as an army chaplain, and was awarded the Military Cross for providing dying soldiers with cigarettes and reading them the Last Rites. At his funeral in 1945 nearly two thousand people came to pay their respects – a wreath delivered by former servicemen, a packet of Woodbines placed at its centre a mark of respect from his former comrades
Morrison’s final poem of the collection is the poem that gives the volume its title, English Laughter:
It’s slightly deranged, occasionally hysterical,
Unfortunately infectious to those who hear it,
& always deeply puzzling unless it is satirical:
Because there’s no amusement when there’s no exit…
& after least resistance, a fair bit after,
Fascist attractions are met with English laughter.
Here, in a nutshell, is Morrison’s answer to the problems which beset our nation. There may be problems with the small boats and the reception given to them by the far right thugs who demonstrate outside asylum seekers’ hotels; there may be 981,000 NEETs facing an uncertain future; there may be plans afoot to break up the United Kingdom; but Morrison’s answer is essentially an optimistic one. Laughter, the preserve of
Tristram Shandy, Lewis Carroll, Swift, Wild, Edward Lear
. Noël Coward, Charles Jolly, George Formby, Max Miller,
. Norman Wisdom, Thomas Handley, Ronald Shiner, Tommy Trinder,
. Frankie Howerd, Talbot Rothwell, Tommy Cooper
is ultimately what will see us through. We are a fair-minded, resilient nation, and it is in championing the underdog, whether that’s the asylum seeker, the refugee, the NEET, or the unemployed, that we are at our best. In English Laughter, with its elegies and its polemical poems, Morrison continues to fly the flag for a poetry of inclusiveness. Those old Sixties virtues of peace, love, and understanding are safe in his hands.
Sep 30 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Morrison
Poetry review – ENGLISH LAUGHTER: John O’Donoghue finds hope in the humour and fair-mindedness that Alan Morrison perceives as being vitally English characteristics
English Laughter
Alan Morrison
Cyberwit.net, 2026
ISBN: 978-93-6354-056-9
$15
Alan Morrison’s English Laughter, his fifteenth collection in twenty years, comprises a selection of elegies for canonical poets, and a number of poems that explores contemporary politics. Politics has been an abiding theme for Morrison – his leftwing credentials include his position as Poetry Editor of The Morning Star, and his editorship of the website The Recusant. Morrison is, therefore, first and foremost a political poet, an inheritor of the mantle of Tony Harrison, another working class poet whose ability to pass comment on contemporary politics distinguishes him from his more middle class contemporaries.
English Laughter begins with ‘The Baptist’: ‘The Baptist said of everything going on in Gaza:/It’ll all come out in the wash…’ Here Morrison takes to task the Trumpian Evangelicals who believe that Armageddon will be a military phenomenon as opposed to a spiritual one, a battle for peace as opposed to a war waged against the innocent. This powerful poem ends with a particularly telling line: ‘We are bombing our way to a Second Coming…?’
This take on events in Gaza, which seems to be largely forgotten about by Western leaders and Western media, is typical of Morrison’s approach to politics. Take ‘The Spanish Plume’ (¡No pasaran!), which comes with the subtitle On the far right anti-immigrant riots of 30 July – 5August 2024
August 2024
The Spanish Plume
Spreads its heat
Across England
Scorching pastures
To blanched grasses
Straw-blond strands
A note on the poem states that the Spanish Plume is a plume of warm air the UK experienced in August 2024, and that ¡No pasaran! – They Shall Not Pass! is the Anti-fascist slogan of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. This conflation of the meteorological and the political intelligently juxtaposes an Act of God – the Spanish Plume – with those various small acts of resistance against the bully boys of the Right. Morrison is avowedly Left in his stance here, a committed Catholic Socialist who is one of the few contemporary poets able to make poetry out of politics. If the poet is a witness to their times, I think Morrison is the kind of poet – like Harrison, like James Fenton, like Seamus Heaney – who is prepared to write to the moment. His fable Kier Hardie Street shows that he is able to construct parables in the manner of Ilya Kaminsky, whose Deaf Republic imagines an occupied town falling deaf in response to the shooting of a child. But Morrison is a quintessentially English poet, and his points of reference are the headlines and the Britain our political leaders seem to have damaged so badly.
As if to enlist in his resistance movement those poets and historical figures whom he can conscript who shall also cry ¡No pasaran!, Morrison has a number of obscure and not so obscure characters fall in behind ‘The Baptist’, such as David Jones, Ivor Gurney, and Malcolm Arnold. He starts this oppositional roll call with Niall McDevitt, the Irish poet who died in 2022:
Flâneur [fle-ner] of the stucco frontages of Fitzrovia,
Bloomsbury, Hampstead, Frestonia,
You flew on raven’s wings from Limerick to Dublin
Through London to Paris & Babylon & back…
It’s in these elegies that Morrison’s poetry really takes flight:
How in the other place you will walk with Blake
Across shadowless tracks of unspoilt pastures
Bunyan anticipated, you’ll meet at last with Blake’s
Skyward gaze, he’ll smile in a glint of sunlight
In the gold-flash of a stream-caught gauntlet,
& thank you for all your work on his behalf…
McDevitt was a poet Morrison was drawn to for various reasons, not least because of his own oppositional take on the contemporary scene. McDevitt, like Morrison, was an anti-capitalist, a poet who saw in London a salvation that came from its poets, ancient and modern, and who decried the way the very streets had become ‘charter’d’. He thought, like Morrison, that Albion still existed, that beneath all of the contemporary obeisance to Big Business, an England that had built Jerusalem still obtained. McDevitt will I am sure become a poet future generations will look to for example and guidance, a mystic as much as a poet, a prophet as much as a commentator, a very loveable Irishman in a metropolis he celebrated and abhorred in equal measure.
The one figure in Morrison’s small patrol of resistance fighters I hadn’t heard of is ‘Woodbine Willie’, The Cigarette Saint, G.A. Studdert Kennedy, 1883 – 1929:
His epithet
“Woodbine Willie –
“The cigarette saint
Of No-Man’s-Land”
Supplying dying
Soldiers with morphine
Bible & Woodbine
Eucharist
Of cigarettes
Tobacco smoke
For incense.
Kennedy became a vicar, saw service in Flanders as an army chaplain, and was awarded the Military Cross for providing dying soldiers with cigarettes and reading them the Last Rites. At his funeral in 1945 nearly two thousand people came to pay their respects – a wreath delivered by former servicemen, a packet of Woodbines placed at its centre a mark of respect from his former comrades
Morrison’s final poem of the collection is the poem that gives the volume its title, English Laughter:
It’s slightly deranged, occasionally hysterical,
Unfortunately infectious to those who hear it,
& always deeply puzzling unless it is satirical:
Because there’s no amusement when there’s no exit…
& after least resistance, a fair bit after,
Fascist attractions are met with English laughter.
Here, in a nutshell, is Morrison’s answer to the problems which beset our nation. There may be problems with the small boats and the reception given to them by the far right thugs who demonstrate outside asylum seekers’ hotels; there may be 981,000 NEETs facing an uncertain future; there may be plans afoot to break up the United Kingdom; but Morrison’s answer is essentially an optimistic one. Laughter, the preserve of
Tristram Shandy, Lewis Carroll, Swift, Wild, Edward Lear
. Noël Coward, Charles Jolly, George Formby, Max Miller,
. Norman Wisdom, Thomas Handley, Ronald Shiner, Tommy Trinder,
. Frankie Howerd, Talbot Rothwell, Tommy Cooper
is ultimately what will see us through. We are a fair-minded, resilient nation, and it is in championing the underdog, whether that’s the asylum seeker, the refugee, the NEET, or the unemployed, that we are at our best. In English Laughter, with its elegies and its polemical poems, Morrison continues to fly the flag for a poetry of inclusiveness. Those old Sixties virtues of peace, love, and understanding are safe in his hands.