Haslam’s blurb calls it a “pun”, among other assorted attributes. An Icker is a small piece of grain, so it’s probably about ‘middlebrow’.
The fist poem begins:
Snow fell from heaven while Aneurin Bevin
thought to spawn the NHS. Mother had drunk
her Guinness bottles on prescription nonetheless.
It’s certainly not doggerel, and the language – I’m unsure if it’s truly epic in scope, or just a joke about the romantics – pushes hard against serious content. Yes, poetry is “life or death”. Or is the NHS?
These poems don’t think for you, they just pretend to show off. My concern is that it’s not well suited to ‘moments’, for which I have a preference to over ‘place’.
But perhaps a deceptively visual poetry.