Poetry review – MARGINAL FUTURE: James Roderick Burns examines S J Litherland’s rich and vivid state-of-the-nation collection and finds it grimly truthful but not without hope
Marginal Future
S.J. Litherland
Smokestack Books
ISBN: 978-1-7394734-7-1
142pp £7.99
This is a substantial – a very substantial (almost 130 pages of poetry) – collection necessitated by its wide-ranging and serious themes: austerity, Brexit, climate change, abandonment (both by governments of unfavoured regions, and people), the false comforts of nostalgia, the thin gruel of contemporary culture. It is dense and allusive, not an easy read, but worth sticking with – there are many delights folded into its dark fabric.
In poem after poem, we are confirmed in cultural gloom:
The flag of our country is dark
and dirty, rained on, left on the table
of the century
(‘Fox Country’)
Under the coast the mine is creaking like a sail,
the tunnels buckling, the pit props breaking
under the stress of abandonment
(‘Red Wall Down, IV: Tides’)
In Durham Covid
is blooming among the young
(‘Wet Morning After’)
Nor is this sense of grim foreboding confined just to the north east (Litherland’s long term home); we find it in determinedly anti-nostalgic portraits of Birmingham, the landscapes of various painters, even an extraordinary sequence set in frozen eighties communist Russia. In short, the book establishes without a doubt that our world is miserable, has often been so and most likely will be a “marginal future” going forward. As the title poem has it:
the sea of years is scuttled of water,
the beautiful horizon a parade of trees like green waves
but the years creep to shallows
If the collection only charted the myriad darknesses of the world, it would be successful (if depressing). Yet over seven parts, the poet strives to find redemptive qualities in our experience, particularly in explorations of relationships which avoid the cheap solace of nostalgia, and the splendours of the natural world (albeit one marked by human activity).
‘Red Wall Down’, for instance, finds a positive grounding in the Durham Miners’ Gala (itself a bulwark against the madness of the Red Wall turn to working-class Toryism) without romanticising the north east: while mourning their working lives, the drumming of the crowd becomes “a refusal to comply” (‘III, Winds’). Similarly, echoing Ted Hughes,
For all those who reflect
and mark respect, the music
holds sunlight of the lives
closed in the bible of coal
(‘Ode on Gresford’).
Despite everything the wider culture has done to mining communities – establishment exploitation, Tory neglect, austerity, Brexit – there remains a fundamental seam of decency and hope to be mined.
In similar vein, and with the poet’s family hailing “from Brum’s towers, stacks, masts, trailing/volcanic plumes as if lit by hand to a cigarette”, some escaped and turned to rightwing bromides; others entered “her Brummie/room with no locks and curbs and forgot to shut/the door. She tidied up and became a communist” (‘Made in Birmingham’). Perhaps every situation encountered here can’t be remedied with stout political defiance, but it is certainly a marker against negativity.
Nature, too, serves in this way. With Litherland’s consistently subtle tone, it is not used as a great counterweight to Covid infection or the crude demagoguery of Brexit, but rather as the calming substance into which the mind and soul can escape, sometimes through small haiku-like snapshots (“white birds pegged on a moving line”, ‘Early Morning Moments’) and at other times more dramatically, as in the swooping, soaring concrete conclusion of ‘The Stone Fights’, where childish violence and raw high spirits attain the majesty of flight:
Playing Agincourt arrows
we were at war our street
against theirs almost
knightly almost
dumb the rules
of the
game
The entire poem starts in a pinpoint, tiny moment in the upper left page, swells like Larkin’s shower of arrows then drops in a cone back down the page. It is a performance with great brio, inventive and apposite, allowing the spirits of the children to shine (albeit while rough-housing) and more importantly, to outshine the darkness of their environment. Where there are great streaks and theatrical sets of doom, we find bursts of light and life.
The reader is encouraged, section by section, to feel the depth of what is wrong in the world but to hold off despair. The processes of attrition, of grinding down, can also be restorative and cleansing, witness the end of the extraordinary ‘Red Wall Down’ sequence, ‘Tides’:
The sea returning to wash the coal shoreline,
dredges away the slag and shale, a century
of tipping over beaches the waste of the mine
Similarly “The far field/raucous geesebabble” of ‘Inspired by Birds’; a young poet spotted in the wild, “holding … the lamp of poetry, here in the windless autumn day” (‘Memento Mori’); or (from ‘Errata’) the “gift/of the latch lifted on the dark” – these things are not set up as equal and opposite to the dark, but as mitigation of it, as beacons of hope and illumination, much as ‘Easter Tide’ delivers four short lines that illustrate the collection all on their own:
Light winds that chill, cold currents
lie over the land: Easterlies!
Flowers must wait in their beds
or caught in light apparel of buds.
Sep 27 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – S J Litherland
Poetry review – MARGINAL FUTURE: James Roderick Burns examines S J Litherland’s rich and vivid state-of-the-nation collection and finds it grimly truthful but not without hope
This is a substantial – a very substantial (almost 130 pages of poetry) – collection necessitated by its wide-ranging and serious themes: austerity, Brexit, climate change, abandonment (both by governments of unfavoured regions, and people), the false comforts of nostalgia, the thin gruel of contemporary culture. It is dense and allusive, not an easy read, but worth sticking with – there are many delights folded into its dark fabric.
In poem after poem, we are confirmed in cultural gloom:
The flag of our country is dark and dirty, rained on, left on the table of the century (‘Fox Country’) Under the coast the mine is creaking like a sail, the tunnels buckling, the pit props breaking under the stress of abandonment (‘Red Wall Down, IV: Tides’) In Durham Covid is blooming among the young (‘Wet Morning After’)Nor is this sense of grim foreboding confined just to the north east (Litherland’s long term home); we find it in determinedly anti-nostalgic portraits of Birmingham, the landscapes of various painters, even an extraordinary sequence set in frozen eighties communist Russia. In short, the book establishes without a doubt that our world is miserable, has often been so and most likely will be a “marginal future” going forward. As the title poem has it:
If the collection only charted the myriad darknesses of the world, it would be successful (if depressing). Yet over seven parts, the poet strives to find redemptive qualities in our experience, particularly in explorations of relationships which avoid the cheap solace of nostalgia, and the splendours of the natural world (albeit one marked by human activity).
‘Red Wall Down’, for instance, finds a positive grounding in the Durham Miners’ Gala (itself a bulwark against the madness of the Red Wall turn to working-class Toryism) without romanticising the north east: while mourning their working lives, the drumming of the crowd becomes “a refusal to comply” (‘III, Winds’). Similarly, echoing Ted Hughes,
For all those who reflect and mark respect, the music holds sunlight of the lives closed in the bible of coal (‘Ode on Gresford’).Despite everything the wider culture has done to mining communities – establishment exploitation, Tory neglect, austerity, Brexit – there remains a fundamental seam of decency and hope to be mined.
In similar vein, and with the poet’s family hailing “from Brum’s towers, stacks, masts, trailing/volcanic plumes as if lit by hand to a cigarette”, some escaped and turned to rightwing bromides; others entered “her Brummie/room with no locks and curbs and forgot to shut/the door. She tidied up and became a communist” (‘Made in Birmingham’). Perhaps every situation encountered here can’t be remedied with stout political defiance, but it is certainly a marker against negativity.
Nature, too, serves in this way. With Litherland’s consistently subtle tone, it is not used as a great counterweight to Covid infection or the crude demagoguery of Brexit, but rather as the calming substance into which the mind and soul can escape, sometimes through small haiku-like snapshots (“white birds pegged on a moving line”, ‘Early Morning Moments’) and at other times more dramatically, as in the swooping, soaring concrete conclusion of ‘The Stone Fights’, where childish violence and raw high spirits attain the majesty of flight:
Playing Agincourt arrows we were at war our street against theirs almost knightly almost dumb the rules of the gameThe entire poem starts in a pinpoint, tiny moment in the upper left page, swells like Larkin’s shower of arrows then drops in a cone back down the page. It is a performance with great brio, inventive and apposite, allowing the spirits of the children to shine (albeit while rough-housing) and more importantly, to outshine the darkness of their environment. Where there are great streaks and theatrical sets of doom, we find bursts of light and life.
The reader is encouraged, section by section, to feel the depth of what is wrong in the world but to hold off despair. The processes of attrition, of grinding down, can also be restorative and cleansing, witness the end of the extraordinary ‘Red Wall Down’ sequence, ‘Tides’:
Similarly “The far field/raucous geesebabble” of ‘Inspired by Birds’; a young poet spotted in the wild, “holding … the lamp of poetry, here in the windless autumn day” (‘Memento Mori’); or (from ‘Errata’) the “gift/of the latch lifted on the dark” – these things are not set up as equal and opposite to the dark, but as mitigation of it, as beacons of hope and illumination, much as ‘Easter Tide’ delivers four short lines that illustrate the collection all on their own: