HAARLEM ROAD
Poems by David Jacobs

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Haarlem Road is David Jacobs’s second Peterloo volume. It continues the ‘urban’ theme of Terminus (Peterloo Poets, 1984) which received praise in several national literary periodicals, including Poetry Review and Ambit:

“The obvious parallel is Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street but these poems have a resilience all their own. Jacobs’s is a sad, faithful but haunted vision of small failures and human details. Jacobs essentially sits and watches (sometimes watching himself watching), but such stillness has an intensity about it which raises his observations above reportage.”
                                          George Szirtes, Poetry Review

“These urban and suburban studies are distinguished by a palatable blend of wit, melancholy and sharp observation. ‘Park Tennis’ contains correspondences of Martian precision and the whole poem is a neatly extended metaphor for the artist as detached observer who is, metaphysically, at least, as much involved in the game as the participants themselves.”
                                             Vernon Scannell, Ambit

(‘Park Tennis’ later featured in the BBC Time for Verse series of programmes of sporting verse and also in the Oxford University Press anthology Spring Literature edited by Vernon Scannell).

The second section of Haarlem Road includes, amongst others, poems from abroad, and retains the precision and vivid description of the earlier sequence.

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Pioneers

They service cars, stay with them for hours,
Dipping themselves in gloom, coming up as if for air.
We notice brass doughnut and pagoda leftovers.

Pioneers of Haarlem Road. They have time licked.
they leave untidy parking stationary for weeks
And carry on as if success achieved too early

Would discomfort them. At times we notice them
Inside, doors closed and staring out, as if
The vehicles were home and the world television.

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HAARLEM ROAD
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover design: Gordon Stowell
Publication: SPRING 1988 (64 pages laminated paperback)