Hitchhiker
Thumb out to the flow of traffic, and hoping not
to get robbed, mugged, or murdered.
But also a lift. I step into cars, vans, and trucks. I once rode a rocket
fired down the M1 — a Ford Cosworth, stolen — like a sonic boom jet
in the outside lane.
I met Samaritans and chancers.
One man will explain Islam, another will talk about
fucking lorry drivers. A fashion designer, who picks me up
from a garage forecourt, will give me a mint
while her dog growls from the back seat.
On a roundabout near Bedford,
another hitcher waits. He wears a trench coat, and boots
once worn by a paratrooper. He also has a crucifix
tattooed on his forehead, just below his mohican. We say hello.
He’s going to a party in Leeds. I’m going to Leicester, to see my sister.
No one picks him up. No one picks me up.
Occasionally, I think about him. Punk Jesus on a pilgrimage.
More often I think about the teacher who cried
recalling a holiday to Scotland
with his dying son,
and how they took a row boat onto a loch
so thick with mist
that the known world shrank to a bubble of white.
Borne along the highway in a Vauxhall Cavalier, I saw,
through his eyes,
how the mist would clear and a castle
reveal, the unexpected ramparts sealed with moss.
And then the boy in the boat
leaping ashore. Up and over the broken stone,
joyous. A prince in a fable with a palace of his own.
The appeal Leicester-born novelist and screenwriter Nicholas Hogg’s enthralling collection Missing Person is hard to summarise: Hogg’s poems seem to possess a hard-edged romanticism, or, to put it slightly differently, a realism that has an uncompromising shine and excitement. Precarious beginnings on a tough housing estate are presented clean of self-pity in the first section: then the rebellious spirit goes “missing” in places exotic, cosmic, hallucinogenic or just sharply realigned “ordinary”.
It was hard to choose a poem, since I couldn’t find one I didn’t enjoy living in. I settled on Hitchhiker because it combines two effects that poetry often keeps apart from each other: muscle-tensing narrative anticipation, and epiphany. The latter may be better expressed by Paul Celan’s word, “atemwende” – the “breath-turn” in which “your sense of self is suspended and you are open to everything”.
Hitchhiker tells a story. It has aroused our suspense by the end of that first of a number of casual half-sentences, “… and hoping not / to get robbed, mugged or murdered.” The narrator’s looking back over a hitchhiking life, so we know he probably didn’t end up murdered. But expectations of “a good story” are roused.
Hogg weaves easily between past-tense recollection and the immediacy of the present (the latter being the favoured angle) and between specific anecdote and generalisation. He gives us a short spin in a high-performance Ford Cosworth then switches in verse two to various kinds of lift-givers (“Samaritans and chancers”) without loss of power. That stanza has fun with ambiguity (“another will talk about / fucking lorry drivers”) and drifts into the well-timed inconclusive bathos of the fashion designer, who gives the hitchhiker a mint, and the jealous dog that growls in the back-seat.
Nicely paced over its six five-line stanzas, the story casually, slowly, raises the tension. The “Punk Jesus” who, like the narrator, fails to get picked up “on a roundabout near Bedford”, steps forward into potential significance. We don’t hear his backstory – but the rich visual detail of his appearance suggests past conflicts at least superficially reconciled.
Now, however, a new character and car, (the family-sized Vauxhall Cavalier) are introduced as the hitchhiker’s more significant memory, effecting a shift of social class and mood. So where’s the narrator going with this, the reader thinks: will he get there safely through these sudden shadows of emotion and death?
Hogg’s narrative judgment steers us away from “character” to situation. We don’t “see” the teacher-driver, or hear his directly voiced reminiscences, but are fully focused on what he has told the hitchhiker about the holiday “with his dying son”. It’s almost as if the scene on the Scottish loch were being filmed, as if the mist-wrapped “row boat” itself claimed the camera’s view as “a bubble of white”; the bubble might also symbolise the child’s unnamed disease.
You might take “borne” (verse five) as a pun on “born” since the angle of vision is increasingly through a new consciousness, that of the boy. I like the shock of the intransitive verb in “how the mist would clear and a castle / reveal” – Hogg’s shorthand effects are always worth the jolt. The picture of the castle is interesting. How can we tell if it’s fantasy? The view we’re shown, its “unexpected ramparts sealed with moss”, sounds convincing and exact, even if the moss is partly a symbol of non-belligerent reassurance, like the Jesus tattoo on the other hitchhiker’s forehead.
We might, in the closing image, see the son through the father’s wishful eyes, or simply through the narrator’s story-making, story-resolving imagination. But the power of the ending is that the boy’s excited reaction stays within psychological possibility. And there is an additional effect, because, reading this far into Missing Person (by now, we’re well into the second of the collection’s five parts) we can imagine the poet, too, as “a prince in a fable with a palace of his own”. Firmly structured and lit with dreams, games and adventures, Nicholas Hogg’s poems invariably lead “up and over the broken stone” into an exhilarating, credibly renewed imaginative space.
