Although many of the lines in ‘Andrew Seems Popular’ have the feeling of being sourced from a primer, there are many lines which seem improbable: ‘That manager envied him his good fortune’. The idiom of this sentence works but not the subject, ‘manager’; when have we ever talked in this way? Another example is ‘The gardeners walked quickly’, as if two people were trying to catch a train who just happened to be gardeners. In many lines Cobley is attempting ‘bad’ poetry and doing it very successfully.
A review by James Davies of the excellent Andrew Seems Popular is available to read at the 3AM website.
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