Poem of the week: George Szirtes – ‘Mony Mony’

By GEORGE SZIRTES
Published on 26/01/2013 00:00

Tommy James and the Shondells was a Sixties rock group best known for Crimson and Clover, I Think We’re Alone Now and the UK number one Mony Mony.

In his new collection, Bad Machine (Bloodaxe, £9.95), George Szirtes has penned a tribute to the Shondells’s finest moment. The poem begins as an evocation of the electrifying effect a piece of music can have on a room, before reflecting on the way in which, like Proust’s madeleine, it can transport the listener back to an earlier time. By the end, however, the poem takes a deeper turn, detecting in the seemingly simple pop song primal urges.

When Mony Mony starts up the room stops

whatever it’s doing and begins to frame

something it needs to say. The music is a game

it learns then forgets. Temperature drops

inside it as if time were running backwards

to where Tommy James falls through a trapdoor

of memory and disappears through floor after floor

till he ends up here with these notes and these words.

The Shondells tremble with electricity. Drums

generate invisible bodies in the dark

holding a grey diffuse space and charging all

of it. Here she comes now. Here is the spark

that passes between them. Here are the magical

ingredients: death, fury, yearning. Here she comes.

You can borrow Bad Machine from the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. Tel: [phone], [e-mail] or see www.spl.org.uk