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Poem Of The Week: Hang By Ian McMillan

Hang

A charity shop coat hanger
Holding the past
And a possible future
In equal measure,

Singing an anthem
Of circular capital
Flying from M&S
Over to Wombwell

And making a landing
Behind possibility
Over by blue high heels’
Tottering history,

Telling their story.
Nobody’s listening.

What you see is what you get. The washed-out enervation of Ian McMillan’s syntax in ‘Hang’ is as denuded as the starved scapula of a charity shop coat hanger. The narrator is a resigned flâneur, an embodiment of denial, of the sense of possibility that is a mere facsimile of something inevitably replaced by the ‘circular capital’ of commerce.

In the presence of adversity – the book from which this poem is taken is a meditation on austerity – ‘product’ sinks downwards like swirling dregs round a plughole, to fetch up, in the poem, in the stale interior of a Barnsley tat shop. McMillan’s flight over the semantic terrain of the past and present is airless and unwinged, his ‘anthem’ a muffled elegy for a world in thrall to the narcotic lunacy of capitalism, and at the mercy of its enfeebling blandishments.

And as the shop’s denizens forage amongst the blue stilettos whose ‘tottering history’ - wonderful phrase - is locked securely in the scuffed heel, there is concentrated, unscrutinised silence.

‘Hang’ is taken from That’s Not a Fishing Boat, It’s a Giraffe: Responses to Austerity, and is published by smith|doorstop (2019)

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