Tom Roder      Poetry
  1962 - 1997                         << Back

Henry's Dog's Poems   [1991]

1. The Short Sad Day of Four Face
2. In The Kennel
3. Another Day for Henry's Dog
4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Henry's Dog
5. I Rarely See The Skeleton of the Dog
6. Henry's Dog Constructs A Political Manifesto
7. Henry's Dog Finds Himself Part of a Fairy Tale
8. Henry's Dog is Called Upon To Give An After Dinner Speech
9. Henry's Dog Haiku
10. Psalm: Henry's Dog's Absence
11. Henry's Dog Meets His Cousin The Wolf
12. Four Poets Take An Interest In Henry's Dog's Ear
13. Henry's Dog Goes Honky-Tonk In the Summer
14. Henry's Dog Pays Homage To Those Things That Make Life Worthwhile
15. Henry's Dog's Love Song
16. Henry's Dog Considers His Fictive Status
17. On The Variety Of Dogs
18. Different Bones
19. Mask Appearing (with an explication)

Appendix I
(The frequency and nature of the involvement of Henry's dog in Henry's dog poems)

Back Cover

---

for Ant. & others

Dogs have more love than integrity. They've been true to us, yes, but they haven't been true to themselves.
-- CLARENCE DAY, This Simian World (1920)

Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in the world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may live outside.
-- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, "The Character of Dogs" (1883)

The Short Sad Day Of Four Face

I. The Winter Clearance Sale

I thanked my lucky stars
the Winter Clearance Sale was On
and I would get in early
and get that 3-piece suite
I'd had my eye on
for quite some time.

*

Stella Marlowe, the bitch,
just managed to jump in
before me, her face
wreathed in smiles.

II. Friends Around

This is a time for shaking
off friends who all the time
sit in my bed-sitting room
listening to Bach while
I try to catch the beauty
playing on their lips.

Outside the neighbour's new
Alsatian puppy does its nut
running running round the
washing prop which might
have been specially made
for it to do its nut on.

The grass is as frosty as
frosted glass but green apart
from the occasional neat pile
of Alsatian dog shit. Mrs
Shilling opposite catches me
looking at her.

My friends get up as if to
leave - yes, they're leaving,
(you can't stop friends from
leaving). Bach's over. I offer
them a piece of cake I've made
lovingly.

III A Vision

My great fat easy chair stuffed
with tiny birds' wings
came towards mid-life
in the open drawing-room
where billows of steam
bend our brain waves

Earlier there had been
mustard-coloured choirboys
going for a piece of sky.
Let's line it all up,
shift it into focus, diving
deep into the bearded clam.

A libertine with a quince thrashes
me within inches of my life-span;
I tossed her an old shilling from
my collection of loose coinage.
My ancient envelope can't be deciphered
now its been folded into a tight cheroot.

The only thing left to do; take Henry's dog,
Bertrand, for a drink, tie him to a staging-post,
flip my fivers on the bar and clear this head.
(A swift bird darkens pool water, turns a swan half
grey; two children go rolling by - the sizzle
of skates is hardly heard).

IV. The Discotheque

Here are the maidens creeping
bearing boxes of sultanas
glassy-eyed but still weeping
moving soft with their bandannas.

I'm a tremulous one -
my shoulder twitching as the tang
of urine hits my nose because now
I'm checking the stray bits of my
hairstyle in the mirror due west
of five young men shaking the last
droplets intently from their boozy
shrunken willies.

I've been making conversation to a
girl, who made my ear buzz, then erect
its little inner-ear hairs for more,
standing by the cigarette machine.
I changed two fifties for her pound
then engaged her aforementioned
ear in the sweetest way possible.

She possibly wasn't having any of it
or perhaps I spoilt the magic, or
something was lost by the unique angle
of our heads as I dropped those crafty
words into that ear of her which was
exposed like a great soft white mushroom,
(or rather something much nicer; a seashore
kind of shell minus its mollusc).

She said she had to sit down with friends
and my heart sank like a great waterlogged
cigarette in the duckpond. A great wishbone
of a tree clasps the moon as Henry's dog
makes his way homeward raising his shivery
leg against the ice-cream cabin. I open the door,
collapsing on a pile of dresses.

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In The Kennel

(with apologies to Marta Perez)

I
Dog-food

Sorting with my nose my food -
forcing to the side of the dish
sultry, ridged chunks of meat that
glisten with irregularity, but moving
towards the centre great marbled
slices plush with juice.
I love myself, I love my food
- its opaque mass tingles
against my tongue.

II
My Master

He's bought me a retractable lead
and taught me the difference
between aimless bounding
and the decent, intelligent foray.
I now know the educated sniff
from aberrant nose wandering;
the well-aimed bark
from doggy cacophony.
Now, I'm an intelligent consumer
and can tell the difference
between Winalot Prime
and Pedigree Chum
with my eyes closed.

III
In Transit

Sometimes when I walk alone
through the park and see
up a bank a small allotment
regular and green with some
warm body leaning over
smouldering leaves, a plume
of blue smoke joining the blue
of the sky, I wonder
(despite this timeless industry)
what its all about.

IV
On Building Something

Dogs don't build but queerly find themselves
residing in domestic lounges for:
            a) their paws are too small to hold bricks
            b) mud seems more for digging than cementing
            c) so many are building in their stead

What should our tack be when:
            a) building materials are expensive
            b) we can't differentiate between an elevation and a plan
            c) there is always another bone

V
Forming A Sentence

Dogs traditionally don't form sentences,
their energies being given to abrupt exclamations:
the warning or the affirmation,
unmediated signals from regions
of blood, fur tongue and eye.
But if I were to stretch an exclamation
into a sequence of signs more human
it might be:
"Oh! The Unbearable Sadness of a Human Face
Met on a Woodland Walk!"

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Another Day For Henry's Dog

First, roll about the dog-rug,
bend the eyes away from their dog-warm
eyelids and stretch with a sneeze
uncertain legs while re-inventing
the mad order of a dream:

Break a bottle, make a handshake,
be a lover, kiss the old tide,
flee an angel, snap the donkey,
run the gauntlet, eat the cheese.

*

It is the local news-agent's dream-day
for he has three customers bent like
old trees over a diversity of stock.
And he can just imagine them sinking
their hands in numerous involved pockets
for bits of cash, coupons and wallets.
Henry's dog's there dripping river
wetness on the wipe-your-feet mat.
A ghostly tintinnabulation involved
his ears; a strange yearning ghost
in-the-cemetery sound which Henry's dog
puzzles over - a fast moving river
of a frown bending the fur on his head.

Don't worry Bertrand! Its only Missus
of the newsagent pulling crinkly stockings
up and up neurasthenic legs. The things
we notice but can't attribute gnarl us
half-to-death thinks Henry's dog.

*

Henry's dog lollops out
like a loony pizzle
for he's found another
meaning (or half-meaning)
in the loon-faced moon
which shines on his
mechanically recovered
bones.

*

She seemed so pale, frayed, pummelled
I wished to love her, thought Bertrand
of the check-out girl who levered a can
of dog meat on its edge to read the price
better. She was so pink and uniformed
I could have licked the sad sheen from her eyes and made it dissipate
in a great pond of duck-water.
This is the nearest Henry's dog came
to an unwritten sonnet, but then
its nearer than most come.

(Our days are pleasure bound, our nights are heaving;
through a time of cryptic fountains crept
the water bug called love which leaves its debt
upon our onion heads while we-re still breathing.

I met this sparkly lass by a dim church
which bent and warped its pews in our direction
so in the aisle we kissed our resurrection
left our meaning hymn-books in the lurch.
The dream-willow bends its moon-bright branches;
sat on cool willow leaves, stroking each for
each weeping parts that run like mucky weather
to the bank of a river - an old trout glances.

We reach the wooden cabin where they're equipped
for lovers, and dance about their egg/bean
combinations; you sit like a stiff queen;
your face is shadowed as your sense is stripped …)

*

That night Bertrand found himself
at unusual ease as he tried
to uncover the figure in his
rug. This strange wearisome
challenge set by a distant
cousin was a frustration, but
"Woof, Woof, Woof," I'll woof
myself to sleep.

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Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Henry's Dog

I
Light as a blackbird,
chirpy as a lark,
Henry's dog meets the dawn
with eyes like single-lens reflex
shutters.
He is the dawn,
precious, transient,
snap-happy.

II
The weight of a fine meal
drags his lowly equipage along
the paths; the paving stones
glint and glare and warm
his tufted belly.

III
The mulch of autumn
takes his footprints:
pad        pad         pad         pad         pad
        pad         pad         pad         pad         pad
tail
mile
high.

IV
Narcissus with a moist nose;
steam lifts from the nose
like cartoon clouds
as Henry's dog stares deep
into a lake.

V
A fragment of tapestry charging around
on a field of snow.
A jigsaw piece warm with fur
on a field of snow.
A tender arc of urine
on a field of snow.

-- Henry's dog.

VI
Henry's dog fragmented,
seen behind a clump of daffodils.
Foreshortened,
his head as big as a world,
his tail a thin, dry spindle; yet

complete

VII
Blackness turns into
something variegated.
Now there's an eye,
serious and brown,
which acquires the context
of a dark brow and
a furry cheek.
One spongy pink
ocean lolls.

Henry's dog through the key-hole.

VIII
A robin perches on Henry's dog's head.
Is it acting as a look-out?
No. Henry's dog is not a rhinoceros.
Is their relationship somewhat symbiotic?
No, or perhaps, yes; they're friends.

IX
The shadow of Henry's dog
meets the shadow of two trees
in Rotherham.

Five hedges encroach
with their broad shadows.

A bird flies overhead
and flaps its shadow along.

There is a complication,
a confusion of shadows.

Now all is shadow.
Where's my shadow?

X
A fire engine, Henry's dog,
a frog.

The red, the white,
the green.

A house burns by a lake;
crackles, spits and smokes.

Gush, Woof,
Hop.

XI
Henry's dog sees
three bones.
His mind feels
one with three bones.
He wonders why
there aren't four.
But three bones
will do.

XII
Bark, Bark, Sneeze,
Itch, Shake, Jump,
Rub, Lick, Blink,
Yelp, Lollop, Gnash.

        *
* BONE *
        *

Yawn, Sleep, Woof.

XIII
A bright king shakes
his left paw.
The sun shines.

A bright queen shakes
his right paw.
The sun shines.

The sun shines.

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I Rarely See The Skeleton Of The Dog

I rarely see the skeleton of the dog
in the local well set-out museum
without a strange, pared-down sort of shiver.
It seems articulation without soul,
sure direction without any pleasure.
Still, it has a sad and endless rhythm
for bone connects to bone to bone to bone.

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Henry's Dog Constructs A Political Manifesto

Let me see
of course, there will be
dancing girls, and lots of them
and young boy with lederhosen
flexing catapults on the top
of glistening towers. They will
survey my fiefdom and protect it from
maraudering bigger dogs, other undesirables
and crazies who leap about fields
encouraging my brethren to bound over
tussocks to fetch useless sticks.

A band of cartographers will be set to work
on a definitive Dog Friendly Map, marking
each small buried bone, every cooling puddle,
and indicate the rough number of trees
and lamp-posts in each parish.

All meaningless, misleading and doggist expressions
will be erased from the vocabulary; gone for good will be:
"In the dog house,"
"It's a dog's life,"
"Dog-eared manuscripts,"
"I've been dogged by misfortune,"
"Puppy-love,"
"You're barking up the wrong tree."
And anyone who points out that "dog" spelt backwards
is "God" will be given three years of sadness.

Each mature dog will receive
an aluminium aeroplane
with ruby tipped wings
and bone-and-stick motif
on the cockpit door.
These will allow dogs
to breathe in the atmosphere
of foreign climes and cultures
and build up impressive stores
of photographs and anecdotes
useful for pent-up winter days.

There will be General Days of Depravity
when dogs might leave off courting
their regular partners and congregate
in rank barns (to be erected in every vicinity).
Here, there will be much flexing, pouting and preening,
hip-jiggling, snorting, mincing and a general
over-consumption of dog-food. So, by morning
we will be a lolling, puddling mass of happy dogs,
recombining our dulled and frayed senses,
collecting our reason and dignity,
swaying down the lanes back
to our Floras and Poppies.

Furthermore,
each dog will receive; a little tartan waistcoat
for the sake of a modicum of elegance
and to stop its belly shivering in winter;

a triptych arrangement of mirrors
so it might view front-quarters, side-quarters,
and hind-quarters without unseemly chasing after its own tail;

ornamental arrangements of biscuits, bones and sausages
by way of mimesis and merely to demonstrate we can
appreciate a secondary order of things.

*

Yes! Vote for Henry's dog.

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Henry's Dog Find himself Part Of A Fairy Tale

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Henry's Dog Is Called Upon To Give An After-Dinner Speech

Ladies and gentlemen,
while normally being poorly disposed
to slicking down my fur with oil and gels,
polishing my collar-studs with bees-wax;
while normally hanging loose and easy
from the tight bore of my mind,
dancing free and casual on an orbit,
held but not confined by my neuroses;
I am delighted to have this opportunity
to descant on a few things I might know.

*
The other day I saw a man emerge,
his face as dark as thunder
with a constipated grin,
thin and twitchy alcoholic lips,
from the Municipal Toilet carrying
a dozen oranges in a green string bag.
I thought it might be a parable,
a sort of playful dance
in sunlight of the way things are.

He rested the twelve oranges
in the gap between two wooden laths
of a public bench which faced
a fountain by the grass and flower-beds
of the Peace Gardens.

In the roar of a departing bus,
as water dripped from cherry blossom,
he selected three fine oranges and juggled
them in the air until they seemed
nothing more or less than
three bright coppery discs dancing
in a grey-blue sky.

From this I might construe
things are not as we find them,
the theatre of a day is large;
don't imagine those sat by you
fixed in some hard winter form.
Take an orange, roll it bravely
down some hil, up some valley,
see where it might lead you.

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Henry's Dog's Haiku

Where are all the bones?
Cherry blossom blows now, but
where are all the bones?

My master is suede
on the foot but I don't know
any leather songs.

Continuity
is the song of the fast stream.
My fur wet with mist.

My heart will break fast
the good spirits have fled us.
A stick in the hedge.

Old weather settles
down amongst the shrubbery.
Frost bites deep my bones.

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Psalm: Henry's Dog's Absence

There was a great deal
of love in the valley
when Henry's dog returned
from a long and strange
absence in a distant country.

The love had grown apace
in all the large and small
houses; it wrapped itself
round every tree and every
bush was almost aflame
with that little word.

Henry's dog took it in
his stride while at the
same time being naturally
delighted with the way
things had turned out.

The valley was just about
a model railway of love;
one could lie back on a carpet
and watch it chugging and
steaming round every obstacle,
jolting even the signal box.

It was not uncommon to see
people held in some sort of
parallelogram of forces as if
love had become somehow pure
and mathematical.

By all the laws I know, by all
the forms that hold me, keep
me, nourish me, thought Henry's dog
I will never leave this valley
again until my absence is required
to suck the love back in.

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Henry's Dog Meets His Cousin The Wolf

I bumped into Cousin Wolf;
bigger, braver, master of his wood,
leader of his pack and I felt
a smallness, timidity, embarrassment
as if I'd been caught wanting -
milky-toothed, tractable, polite
like a postal clerk might feel
on seeing his sailor-brother
on shore leave for the first time
and realising he lacks the swagger,
sea-tricks, blue tattoo and rough tobacco.

I returned his friendly smile
with a weaker, city version
and asked him how life was:
Was the pack holding together okay?
Enough food during the rather severe winter?
New births? Sad deaths? (Social calendar stuff.)
He answered all my questions with a certain
impatience and I felt his forest eyes
scan through layers of glibness,
examine the glossy history
of my comfortable pelt.

I have it good but find some cause for shame.
Evenings spent in warm and self-reflective mood:
having the time to eat leisurely,
stretch, relax and sift through memories,
build a little personal history, say I'm this
but once was that, construct a clever chart
of progress. And yet
for all this cushioned compromise,
these stick-chasing frolics,
I can't fall down on what might be
the better life - dog or wolf.

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Four Poets Take An Interest in Henry's Dog's Ear

Seamus Heaney caressed my ear -
filled it with ash-plants and fields,
stirrup-pumps and hedges,
so it twanged taut
like thwacked and stretched
towels and became
as yearning as an isthmus.

*

Ted Hughes crowed in my doggy ear
but soon made it quicken into wolf,
steady as a radar in a Polish forest,
and I who had thought my ear a stuck on
vehicle of sensation realized I was
all ear, all blood, all wolf, and
my wolf-thoughts tightened, then rebounded
like a bat it a closet full of blood.

*

Geoffrey Hill had audience with my ear,
conferred on it a brass-burnished crown
which he connected, somehow, with an
Italian mystic or minor poet
whose blood had thickened in his ears
by an autostrada. He declaimed my ear
gravid as a stone.

*

Philip Larkin said
Fuck your ears!
They seem the sort of ears
that run among high fields
warm with intercourse,
only half-aware
of high white ambulances
that skirt around the haystacks.

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Henry's Dog Goes Honky-Tonk In The Summer

Its summer and it will never end
            honky-tonk        zink-zank-zonk
I feel the prickling dew on my forehead
                        honk tonk
                                                            fish jumpin'
and I say blow that horn brother
                        blow that horn brother

                        BLOW THAT HORN BROTHER and

set all those trash cans jumpin'

I'm going to gather my fur into bunches
just watch me
                        gather it ino bunches, plait and braid it
fix little hard beads to the end of each tuft
so the beads will clack together as I stroll

            clack clack clack round my shack

HO!   There's a sassy chick due west

bending in hot-pants sprinkling
her parched cabbage-patch
with little diamond shivers of water

arcing  arcing

                                    from her green watering can

                                                                          birds singin'

                                    bees hummin'

Yes I'm going to go into the deep cool shade of indoors
emerge     blinking     carrying my brand new-guitar

Plink     Plank                                                                 Plonk

Plonk-a-diddle     merrily-we-go-now

strawberry fairs squash and blossom in sunshine

river-run fast    river-run    riverrun

Never knew my warm shoe
it’s a sandal scandal

Plink     plink

Come round share my bowl brothers
                                                                & sisters
Zing-a-zang a-zay

            Everyone goes clattering round America

Zing-a-zang a-zay

            Hot is my patch of turf

Squeeze on     Squeeze on
                                                                                           plink

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Henry's Dog Pays Homage To Those Things That Make Life Worthwhile

And I am king of all I see
the fountain and the water flea
trailing flashguns of delight
small and spangling in the blackness.

The buckled shoe
The water shrew
the small apartment
wardrobe.
These things can
delight us.

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Henry's Dog's Love Song

She is subtle-deep perceptive
when she selects between
the artificial bones,
knots and chews.

She contains all within her, so
don't make me trap the design
of her fur in words - it sweeps
in so many directions, bending
itself to no comparison.

*

The fine collusion of
two beating minds
taking turns to be
half-a-step behind
the other.
Our pretty mismatch
of little thoughts
twinkling in a larger
togetherness.
The meadow revolves
its sweet soil smells
around our trotting,
prancing, chasing.
We find our foot-falls
match exact and stop.

*

A sensual bloom of breath
a perfected blossom of sex,
fur rub, fur rub, fur rub,
repeating the world of low
cherry bough and twittering
high bird in the hot, cracked
smile of her eyes.
Her eyes giving the picture
of myself in love twice over
before we collapse
in a panting, tonguing embrace.

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Henry's Dog's Mediations On His Fictive Status

I'm more-or-less
substantial as a thin
book between
thicker books.

You can't rub me out;
I'm made of ink.

My fur hangs like commas,
Times Roman bold.
It dries italic.

?
The question mark
seems to me
occasionally,
a dandy tail
poised above
a neat anus.

!
The exclamation
is the same,
but more surprised.

I linger
near margins
hardly daring
to encroach,
feeling that
some other
belongs to
realms of
marginalia.

I hardly know
whether I'm
a paragraph,
heroic couplets,
or doggerel.

I eat my
own words, I
eat myself.
A tasty fiction.

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On The Variety Of Dogs

for Jol Pike

The other day, sitting down,
whiling away the time
with a Chesapeake Bay Retriever
(who was staying over)
we fell into one of those
conversations that don't
have a particular moral
but, never-the-less, have
a sort of fascination all
the same. It was about
the great variety of dogs.
You know, it was one of those
hot empty evenings, there was
little else to do; Henry
had gone to bed early so
not much chance of a decent walk
(too hot anyway). Well,
to be honest, boredom
had set in a little so
I said to this Chesapeake
Bay Retriever: "You know
there are a lot of different
kinds of dog in the world."
And he scratched his fur a little
and said (sort of nonchalantly):
"Yeah, but is that a big reason
for some sort of celebration?!
And I said: "Well, its sort of
interesting when you consider
the whole range from (let's say)
the Toy Manchester Terrier to the
Norwegian Elkhound."
"Or, conversely, the Japanese Spaniel
to the Bouvier des Flanders,"
he adjoined.
"Why's that conversely? I asked.
"Perhaps it isn't … but so what?
Got a spare bone?"
"Yeah."

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Different Bones

I
Minuet, well remembered
dance step - like festive dogs
on two hind legs balanced
between a past and future
in the present of applause.
You all deserve
a short bone.

II
Always imagining
a different world,
a different story,
pegged between the grass left
and the grass longed for.
The fountain blows east and west
spattering the warm cobbles.
Deep beneath a flower bed
an average bone.

III
The world is half-empty
of those I have loved -
I run through broad spaces
where once there were faces
striding on long legs.
Wonder some have wallets
laden with photos, little
neck clasps holding a lock of hair?
I lick from one end
right to the other
of a long bone.

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Mask Appearing

Truth resists being projected into
the realm of knowledge.
(Walter Benjamin)

-------------------
2 fall, as in descent and Autumn

4 super-market signs, especially refers to Tesco on
Ecclesall Road, Sheffield, which at the time of writing was was undergoing structural alteration and refurbishment.

6. bites into your shoulder, the strap of the bag is narrow and fabricated from nylon plaited and twisted into a rope; hence the pressure exerted per square inch by the rope on the soft flesh of the shoulder is rather greater than would be the case with a broader strap (regardless as to whether it might be constructed from natural or man-made fibres).

7. quizzical booklets, viz.: A lever her twinkle (1988), The Complete Dog, Cat & Fish Owner (1962), The Organ (1991), The Game of O (1989), Horst can flick five beer-mats (1939), Psycho-Active Journal (1991), Waking-Up-Poems (1989), Special Weather (1990), The Benefits of Silence (1991), and other assorted booklets.

8. mildew, the room faces west, has a large window and receives a great many hours of direct sunlight, but is unfortunately, inadequately ventilated and prone to condensation.

9. Franklin, after Freeewheelin' Franklin of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (1882-1945), thirty-second president of the United States of America who kept in contact with the people by having fireside talks."

9. Mary, either the Virgin, (cf. Christmas, 1.20) or the woman who as a child had a white-as-snow lamb. Both emblematic of purity, innocence and the pre-lapsarian state: unsullied, undirtied by exposure to quizzical booklets, (1.7) etc.

14-15. "A scent or a steam can last / forever!" Cf. F. Gonzalez-Crussi, The Five Senses (London, 1989), p 66: 'Hence, "with respect to herself" she would be a smell of carnations without beginning and without end.

15. Henry's, after John Berryman's Henry, cf. The Dream Songs.

15. Bertrand, named after Bertrand Russell (1872 -1970), long-lived, thin and crepitant philosopher.

20. mask, an ethnographic flourish, refers to cheap but effective half-face, plastic-moulded masks available at the local newsagents and other retailers.

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Appendix I: Key To The Frequency and Involvement of Henry's Dog In Henry's Dog's Poems

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Back Page of Publication...

About Henry's Dog:

Henry's dog exhibits those rare qualities so frequently absent (or at least indiscernible) in Modern (or should we say Post-Modern) Dog. Part visionary poet, part media celebrity, part political analyst, Henry's dog, never-the-less, never forgets his essential condition as dog, and importantly never becomes so inured to this condition to wish to cease giving voice to it, celebrating it.  Just as it has become customary to watch out or the dark shadow of Ted Hughes' crow, it will be incumbent on future generations to keep their ears peeled for the resounding "Woof" of Henry's dog.

Henry's Dog's Poems go some way along the road in helping us to understand and explain (but hopefully, not enlarge) that enigma popularly known as Henry's Dog.  Some of the poems are narrated by Henry's dog himself; others are personal, eyewitness accounts; and in a few of the poems he merely makes a fleeting, guest appearance.

About previous collections by Tom Roder:

"Tom Roder looks at the world in an odd, one is tempted to say original way . . . he invests the ordinary with a sense of the extraordinary . . . I'm impressed by Roder.  I like his style."  Peter Sansom, Review in Orbis 75

"Very entertaining poems . . . I enjoyed them a lot."  Mick Imiah.

"Poems with an amazing treasury of unexpectedness in which you can rummage."  Peter Redgrove.

ISBN 0 9513998 4 5

£2.50