Faber & Faber

Poets aren’t often boxers. They tend to use parts of the brain that don’t respond well to being rattled around like ice in a cocktail shaker.

But Vernon Scannell was the exception. Novelist, critic, teacher, and even journalist are all common enough ways for poets to make money to live - but professional boxer and fairground bruiser are unusual trades for a man who was to become one of the finest poets of his generation.

He left school at fourteen and largely educated himself, his boxing career giving new meaning to that tired old cliché about the "school of hard knocks". His work was rooted partly in his constant and intensive reading of poetry and literature, but mainly in a life packed with experience: after a battered and brutal childhood, he fought in North Africa and at D-Day, spent time in a military prison as a deserter, and then more time in hospital as a wounded hero. On the run from the police, he dodged from one job to another, washing dishes here and selling dolls’ heads there, with the occasional desultory bit of teaching thrown in. This, too, was when he did his time in a forties fairground boxing booth, although he fought successfully in a number of proper amateur and professional bouts as well, selling the prizes he won to pay for his next meal. It was writing novels that rescued him from this ‘Only Fools and Horses’ lifestyle, and - poetry not being a particularly well-rewarded occupation - he kept on turning them out to help make ends meet throughout his life. But he always saw himself as a poet, and it was as a poet that he made his mark.

When you read some writers, the biography may seem barely relevant: the stories they tell seem to stand alone, and too much prying into the experiences that made the poet what he is may almost seem impertinent. But it’s not so with Scannell: snapshots of his life keep appearing, remembered, reconsidered, and reinterpreted in his poems.

He would never have claimed to be a good soldier, but in many ways it was the War that made him. Memories like the cows in a Normandy field through which he made his way in the bloody days after the D-Day landings, or the field ambulances "stumbling and churning" past with the wounded, keep recurring in his poetry, even years afterwards - as of course they would.

They return sometimes as flashes of terror brought back by the explosions of Bonfire Night, and sometimes, guiltily, in images of the silent ranks of friends who didn’t survive.

But he went on to describe other conflicts - most particularly what he saw as the long-running battle between men and women and, as he put it, "the sense of danger which is part of the climate of our times". Many of his poems, like It’s Sure to End in Tears, The Loving Game, or Wicket Maiden, concentrate on the bitter or regretful aftermath of emotion: you get the feeling that love, for Scannell, was often the continuation of war by other means.

That might have been quite dispiriting, except that there are also occasional tender and extremely direct expressions of affection. And, of course, there was his mordant wit: again and again in the poems, the reader is tempted to a quick and lazy response, only to have the ground swept away from under him in the closing words: look at Incident in a Saloon Bar. Scannell voices fears and emotions which all of us can share, but which most of us habitually shy away from. He could be funny, often poignant - but he was never predictable.

He was, too, a craftsman - a poet who understood and valued the framework of poetry, the demands of metre and the subtleties of rhyme. Few poets, in fact, could capture the rhythms and language of everyday speech as successfully as Scannell could and, subtle and nuanced as they were, his poems were always lucid and accessible. He was writing not for literature students, not even for poetry lovers, but for ordinary people.

Scannell was working on his final collection of poems - sadly not included in this collection - only a few weeks before he died at the age of eighty-five. It’s lucky for us that, torn as he was as a child between boxing and literature, he devoted himself in the end to writing. That decision meant that instead of a shambling, mumbling old wreck, we were left with an uncompromisingly intelligent and compassionate poet who could speak about serious subjects in a direct and colloquial voice. And we need poets more than boxers.

Andrew Taylor's biography of Vernon Scannell will be published by the OUP in 2012.