You could try joining the forum and PMing the poster. He hasn't been active in years, but that doesn't mean he won't see it.

Likewise the person who posted the poem with the sweetshop line here in 2009:

https://forum.fellrunner.org.uk/show...y-s-poet/page2

Though he may have got it from 2006 post, I guess.

One of his weaker poems, and a self-parody.
A parody of Aubade would be worth reading.

His name is Colin Lazzerini; he's a jazz singer. He has a Facebook page. There's an email address for him on the bottom of this page.

And if you find out where he got it from, let me know. I'm getting sucked into the mystery.

The verse, with the sweetshop line and the attribution to Adrian, also appears on MumsNet. I shall pursue - but very carefully.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_be...m-and-dad-quot
.

Oh, I see it less as self-parody than comic distillation of things like "I Remember I Remember" and "Dockery and Son". Though they're both pretty funny already.

Yes, I came across that one too. My guess is that it was posted by someone who'd found John Whitworth's post, as it mentions there being no middle verse, and John didn't post a middle verse.

I think I'm getting closer. I now have references to the sweetshop line in 1993 and 1996, both in the New Statesman. Both attribute the poem to Adrian Mitchell. This is interesting because as far as I'm aware the first proper published Mitchell version of the poem appears in his 2000 collection All Shook Up , Bloodaxe books. Presumably he had an early version in a pamphlet or perhaps in a magazine like New Statesman

I tracked the references down using the Google Books search engine. Frustratingly, it only gives you a small snippet of the text. But it does supply Volume, Issue and page numbers. Looks like I may have to trek off to a university library.

Unless someone here has a collection of New Statesmans going back 30 years. Or has easier access than me to a big library.

The references according to Google Books are

New Statesman - Volume 9 - Page 17 (1996)

New Statesman Society - Volume 6, Issues 234-245 - Page 23 (1993)

Still not quite got there. My nearest big library (University of York) has the volumes of old New Statesmans that I need, but has not yet re-opened to the general public.

From the Google Books search snippets, it looks like the whole poem (inc the sweetshop line) has been printed, so it may be Mitchell's first publication of the poem that was later altered. I know that Adrian Mitchell was poetry editor at NS for a few years, so he had a relationship with the magazine and it does not seem unreasonable that this was where it was first published.

For anyone still interested in my quest, I have now found a published version of Adrian Mitchell's parody of Larkin's "This be the verse" that is definitely by Adrian Mitchell, pre-dates his 2000 collection "All Shook Up" and contains my favourite "sweetshop" line. Here it is

Attachment 1035

So my question now is why did the sweetshop line get dropped in later published versions? For me, it is the best line in the poem. Which is why I remembered it all these years later. Larkin's original line "It deepens like a coastal shelf" captures the misery that man hands on to man. The coastal shelf gets deeper, darker, gloomier. But how does a coastal shelf describe happiness? Mitchell was surely right in his 1993 version that happiness shines out.


A possible explanation might be that "It shines out like a sweetshop shelf" is a little tongue-twisting like "She sells seashells on the seashore". But I suspect playful Mitchell wouldn't mind that at all. More likely, I would guess, is that he misremembered his own poem when it came to preparing "All shook up". That's a shame.


I wonder if his literary executors have any other information?