While Judith Chernaik deserves credit for establishing Poems on the Underground (Editorial, 19 January), very few of the poems chosen have caught what it is like down there. My own book, Poems NOT on the Underground, published in 1996, sought to address this anomaly.
Thus, with apologies to Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, the Northern Line trains / They may not mean to, but they do / They say they’re coming though Camden / Whereas you know they’re stuck at Waterloo.” It ends: “Governments hand on misery to man / It deepens like the Northern Line itself / Get off the trains as early as you can / And don’t commute at all if you want your health.”
Roger Tagholm
London
