André Surridge (1951-2019) contributed poems to A Tinging Catch and my football anthology Boots. He has a sporting interest. I came across his work when we were both regularly published in Tony Chad’s magazine Valley Micropress.
He is known as a haiku and tanka writer. Tanka is a Japanese form of five lines, two more lines than a haiku. He published Wings for You: Selected Poems 1968-1990 in 1993, and wrote 15 one act plays. His final book One Hundred Petals was haiku and senryu published the year he died.
I came across another cricket poem of his, a prose poem. It’s about a boy’s imaginary world with cricket while doing his homework: an essay on the French Revolution.
I liked it and will include it here.
ANDRÉ SURRIDGE
It isn’t cricket
It isn’t cricket. Well, how could it be? Where’s the first eleven, where’s the opposition? where’s the cricket bat, the ball, the bails, the stumps, the umpires, the pavilion, the crowd, the scoreboard and the commentators waving from an upstairs window?
It’s just a bedroom and a boy procrastinating over an essay on the French Revolution.
He’s kneeling on a mat between two single beds, one his, the other his younger brother’s. He thinks his bat is this wooden foot ruler and the ball a screwed up first page first attempt on the storming of the Bastille, one leg of the chair behind him is his all important wicket. He throws the ball at the bedroom wall and whacks it onto the candlewick bedspread. It’s a six, naturally.
The umpires call lunch and he rises from the pitch on one hundred and two not out.
What’s not to like?
Except the essay isn’t done and his stepfather will threaten him with a thick ear.
(from Valley Micropress, July 2014)
Poem © André Surridge
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André Surridge’s new cricket tanka
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