Title: Tour de Vers – Poems for the Tour de France
Authors: Ruth Aylett, Linda Cracknell, Jonathan Davidson, Steve Dearden, Morgan Downie, Kitty Fitzgerald, Harry Giles, Adam Horowitz, Kirsten Irving, Andy Jackson, Jonny Lovett, Harry Man, Nalini Paul, Jon Plunkett, Chris Powici, Janet Smith, Sheila Templeton, Sheila Wakefield, and Richard Watt
Publisher: Red Squirrel Press
Year: 2014
Pages: 42
Order: Red Squirrel
What it is: Nineteen poems inspired by the Tour de France
Strengths: We need more cycling poetry
Weaknesses: The variety of voices and views on offer makes for a somewhat scrappy tour of the Tour’s delights
Cycling poetry has made fewer appearances on the Café Bookshelf than I would have liked. Everything to Play For, an anthology of sports-related poetry – including a tricycle of bicycle-related poems – was the last entry, and that was eight years ago. Ten Poems About Bicycles appeared four years before that, shortly before Scarlett Parker’s The Srampagmano Tales. And that’s it. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough. That is quite likely, as I only came across Tour de Vers when it was reissued last year, having missed it when it was first published in 2014, the year of the Tour’s Yorkshire grand départ, a high-water mark in the Great British Cycling Boom.
Tour de Vers opens with Jonathan Davidson’s ‘Le Grand Depart’ (Davidson’s ‘A Lady Cyclist Learns to Cycle’ appeared in Ten Poems about Bicycles), a poem that takes a marvellously jaundiced approach to the Tour:
the caravan shovelling
Over its shoulder promotional items, the manure
Of capitalism; the phalanx of police motorcycles,
Outriders of the state, conditioning good order
Amongst the obedient multitude;
Davidson here is part of a fine tradition of Tour criticism, one that can be found as early as 1906 when Maurice Genin likened the Tour’s sandwich-board men to les forçats de la route et la réclaime, convicts of the road, and the advertisement. Sadly, Davidson doesn’t quite stick the landing, his cynicism giving way to the smugness of the Sunday-morning CTC rider (Davidson is a proud member of the Coventry section), the type who imagines the Tour’s riders envy him:
In the heart of the peloton.
In the soul of the heart of the peloton, they all know
That Le Grand Depart is no substitute for a couple
Of friends riding side by side on a Sunday morning.
Morgan Downie’s ‘At the Start’ takes a more romantic view of a stage start: “a forest of noise, canopy…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Podium Cafe – All Posts…