Studying Grosz On The Bus

There are poetry titles that murmur discreetly from the shelf, and then there is Studying Grosz on the Bus by John Lucas, which sounds like the sort of thing that could only happen in a very particular kind of intelligent, slightly dishevelled life.

Published in 1989 by Peterloo Poets, this is exactly the kind of book Crappy Old Books likes to wave about with quiet delight: literary, specific, faintly improbable, and possessed of a title that does at least half the work before you have even opened it. Studying Grosz on the Bus is wonderful because it combines the high and the low, the cultured and the ordinary, the art-historical and the municipal. George Grosz, savage chronicler of modern ugliness and urban madness, meets public transport. Expressionism meets the 47 to town. It is magnificent.

The title alone suggests a whole world. Not simply reading poetry, but reading poetry that has already been thinking about a modern artist while rattling between stops, perhaps under strip lighting, perhaps beside a shopping trolley, perhaps while someone nearby unwraps a boiled sweet with the slow dedication of performance art. There is something deeply British about that collision. Great thought, serious art, and the bus, which waits for nobody and smells faintly of damp coats. One imagines John Lucas gazing out of the window, notebook in pocket, while the ghost of Grosz looms over the route map.

And Grosz is a particularly marvellous name to have in a title. He brings with him all that furious, angular twentieth-century energy: satire, corruption, grotesques, cities teetering at the edge of moral collapse. To study Grosz anywhere is one thing. To study Grosz on the bus is another. It suggests that modern life itself has become the classroom, which is either very profound or a sign that one has missed one’s stop while thinking about Weimar decadence. Crappy Old Books sees no reason these possibilities cannot coexist.

John Lucas, meanwhile, is precisely the kind of poet one hopes will do this sort of thing properly. The small-press poetry world has always been one of Britain’s best quiet rebellions: serious, observant, unflashy, and gloriously unconcerned with mass approval. Peterloo Poets, too, is the perfect imprint for such a title. It sounds principled, literary, and faintly heroic, which is exactly what you want from a volume of poems likely to concern itself with art, politics, place, and the strange dignity of ordinary surroundings.

As sold by Crappy Old Books, this copy is in good condition, which is pleasingly right for a 1989 poetry pamphlet or slim volume of this kind. Good condition suggests it has survived the decades without being crushed under too many worthier but duller books, and that it is ready to be rediscovered by someone who understands that poetry often turns up in the most oddly specific corners of print culture. A good second-hand poetry book has a particular charm: it feels less like merchandise and more like a recovered signal.

There is also a lovely irony in the whole enterprise. Poetry is so often imagined as something solemnly detached from the everyday, all moonlight and silence and carefully sharpened transcendence. Then along comes Studying Grosz on the Bus, cheerfully reminding everyone that the actual business of perception happens in transit, in noise, in public, in the compromised spaces where culture rubs up against weather, timetables and other people’s carrier bags. It is a title that already understands something important before the poems have even begun.

For collectors, this is a cracking find: late-1980s small-press poetry, Peterloo Poets, John Lucas, and a title with real shelf charisma. For readers, it promises that most attractive of poetic combinations: intelligence without pomposity, culture without insulation, and probably a good deal of wit lurking where it is least expected. For shelf appeal, it is first-rate. Few books say “someone here has both read poetry and waited for public transport” quite so elegantly.

It is also the kind of book that flatters its owner in the right way. Not by shouting importance, but by implying taste, curiosity, and an openness to the small surreal dignities of daily life. A copy of Studying Grosz on the Bus on the shelf suggests that somebody in the house suspects there may be art in the everyday and absurdity in the serious. This is generally a good sign.

So here we have a good-condition 1989 volume from Peterloo Poets: sharp-titled, culturally alert, pleasingly offbeat, and exactly the kind of literary survivor that makes second-hand bookselling worthwhile. It is a book likely to reward the reader who enjoys poetry with one foot in the gallery and the other on the lower deck.

Studying Grosz on the Bus is not just a poetry collection. It is a small, intelligent monument to the fact that modern life is at once ridiculous, revealing, and entirely capable of sustaining serious thought between bus stops. Crappy Old Books is delighted to offer this elegant oddity to anyone who likes poetry, art, small presses, or simply titles so perfectly pitched that they feel like miniature poems in their own right.

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