Rapid House

Author: Tom Crompton

Publisher: Distance No Object (2020)

"‘make me a cluster / of life that’s bleating / I got that for you’: Tom Crompton’s book of garlanded resistance-songs channels debris from orchard to picket to leisure centre, flecking the ‘cosmic of / everything dull’ with foxgloves, ‘fluorescent / anti-aster’, and scarlet creepers. Rapid House is spun-out, blown-off, fucked-up on sound and ‘maggie’s bird gear’. Whether ‘shadowing / finch / from a / too small flat’ or ‘kicking about / a bomb of blue jays in my hood’, this poetry commits to continuing and listens to itself do so: ‘sounds are enough’, it declares, to push on with, stringing themselves on ‘autopilot’ into wreaths of uncompromising, tender and embittered lobbings, their enemies always in earshot – holding fees, bosses, ‘pig-cotton’. Alongside O’Sullivan, I hear Griffiths and Coolidge in Crompton’s ‘wheeling words’: he writes phrases like ‘crush gummies / military taxi’, ‘green dingo’, and ‘the tubby skipping moon’. To be read aloud outside while shirking."

—Tom Betteridge