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Deaths of the Poets by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts review – a road trip in need of a compass

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Tracing the final footsteps of our great poets makes for a lively jaunt – but what does it say about their work?

On the grey January morning when the news reached the world that David Bowie had died, the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts were on the top floor of House of Fraser in Bournemouth, watching a hot air balloon far below fail to take off. Did this strike them as a good metaphor for the unwieldy project that is their second book together? (The first, Edgelands, was about the wild places on our doorsteps.) I’m not sure that it did. “Judging by the logo and the lurid colours, we reckon it’s some kind of health promotion,” they write almost Pooterishly of its deflated bulk, after which – poetic impulses and wishful thinking overtaking them at last – they insist that the town, which smells of a sea that today will remain out of sight, “feels like the very edge of England”. Bournemouth, as glimpsed from a department store cafeteria: in their eyes “a good place to come if you want to vanish”.

Farley and Symmons Roberts are on the trail of Rosemary Tonks, who used to come to this cafe in the days when this branch of House of Fraser was known as Dingles. Tonks, who died in 2014 at the age of 85, is more famous now for her repudiation of fame than for the two collections of poetry (and six novels) she published in the 60s and early 70s, books that made her the toast of literary London.

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