Review: Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance by Paul Hawkins and Steve Ryan
It’s rare to come across a poetry collection composed as much of language and ideas as it is of people and places, but this is exactly what we get in Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance (Hesterglock Press 2020). Recounting the occupation in the early 90s of Claremont Road in London’s East End before it was lost to the M11 link road, this expanded edition of Hawkins’s Place Waste Dissent (Influx Press 2015) does more than reflect the fights and frustrations of a disaffected counterculture. With brutal honesty, it exposes the dark underbelly of a shameful history that is still very much in the making, asking us to consider how far we would be willing to go to protect the people and the places that we hold dear.
Adopting a host of voices and mediums through which to tell the stories of Claremont Road, Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance is as much a celebration of friendship and community as it is an homage to those neglected by Thatcher’s government and the political ideology that outlived it. Containing not only the same iconic images, introspective diary entries, and powerful poems of the original collection, but a stunning selection of artworks created in response to them, it represents the important role that art continues to play in the ongoing struggle for recognition and respect.
Rather than presenting an idealised memoir of their shared experiences of Claremont Road, Hawkins and Ryan develop through their collaboration a visual language through which we’re able to grasp the full spectrum of feelings the campaign ignited. Absorbing and expressive with sudden bursts of clarity amid suffocating darkness, their artworks reflect and build upon the emotional complexity and intensity of Place Waste Dissent. Striking balance between stillness and chaos, Hawkins and Ryan seem to capture in these pages the very essence of what Claremont Road was: a brutal battleground and a dysfunctional yet loving family home.
Printed entirely in black and white, this striking collection brings into sharp focus the polemics of the socio-political context that inspired it, communicating through its visual poetics the shades of grey that tend to be overlooked while we’re competing for space and attention. Through a thoughtfully curated archive of poetry, collage, photography, visual art, and other ephemera salvaged from the time, Hawkins’s poetry offers fascinating insights into the good intentions and solidarity that brought the Claremont Road squatters together. It also sheds light on the poverty, violence, and self-harm that threatened to drive them apart. Showing us the frightening consequences of losing not only valuable physical places but psychological ones: ‘I stink; maybe one more drink? ... The pain-birds are all around me, in my head,’ Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance invites us to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and reminds us of how precious our homes and identities are.
While some of the poems lack the level of linguistic and formal complexity that I usually look for and enjoy in poetry, these moments of telling rather than showing are balanced out by many other pieces that engage and excite the analytical mind. Lines such as ‘losing her best friends in strawberry pill-boxes’ and ‘A tool. A thin-train. Zygotic sheep’ create images that are both intellectually challenging and hard to forget. More than a collection of artworks and poems, this book, like Place Waste Dissent before it, is a valuable account of a notoriously incendiary time in British history, as well as an important critique of the political ideology that shaped it and continues to haunt us in the twenty-first century.
It was difficult whilst reading Place Waste Dissent & Diisonance not to be reminded of the HS2 trainline that will inevitably destroy or significantly damage vast swathes of woodland along its planned route from London to Leeds. At a time when it too often feels as though those in power care more about the economy and keeping up appearances than they do about the environment and our communities, the stories captured in this book are hugely important to share and to remember. The resounding phrase when Claremont Road was finally torn down in 1994 was ‘Shame on you!’. We’re still shouting it today. Will we ever stop?
Originally published by The Babel Tower Notice Board in March 2021.
