Roar!

by Martin Hayes

A roar of frustrated rage and pain at the way we live and work in the twenty-first century. It's a book about 11-hour shifts, sick-days, lay-offs, computer systems crashing and the joy of Friday afternoons. Dermot, Stacey, Shaq, Big Bri, Dexter the old-timer, Antoine, Mohammed, Jim the Letch, and Harry the head supervisor work for Phoenix Express couriers, located somewhere `between Stockholm Street and Syndrome Way', making money for other people and trying to make themselves heard above the roar of an economic system that `has us in its mouth and is shaking us about in its teeth'.

Genres: Poetry

296 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2018

Reviews

[Kieran · Rating 4 out of 5]

9 / 10

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a British version of Fred Voss mainlining the austerity era verbal pugilism of the Sleaford Mods, too knackered after a 55-hour week to go on marches or demos but about a millimetre off smacking the boss in the face. Imagine a poetry that drills down into the festering depths of the modern workplace, where the permanently debt-ridden work shit jobs for shit wages while bastards on four times their salary treat them like cattle or worse. Imagine an entire volume of this kind of poetry - and not just the average 50 or 60 page collection. Imagine almost 300 pages of it, the cumulative detail acquiring a novelistic power, the characters and their lives and shattered dreams scoured through the volume like deep knife cuts. Roar! lives up to its title: it’s unflinching, brutally honest and a scream of frustration against everything that’s wrong with today’s Britain. It’s also a broadside against the kind of “establishment” poetry that clamours after prizes and accolades and ignores the reality of hard graft and lives lived on the breadline. This is poetry at its bluntest, grittiest and least subtle. We need more of its ilk.

[Matt Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10