On Max Crow Reeves ’SCARECROWS OF LONDON’ (Entropy Press, 2026)
As shrooms speak through soil, bursting as acne on earth
Scarecrows bristle, breaking like beards grown on gardens,
As homeless hairs, with no comb, to keep them in place;
These are anarchists made of straw battling light as it
Hardens into night’s armour before which their staring
And their stalled crusades cannot roam. And so Max Crow
Reeves returns to align with the wooden hearts his lens
Lives for. This photographer flies by seeing, ravening portent fed,
As he and we see as an insect might these ragged towers,
Or are charmed by a pink shirted Pride winner winking at us
By a shed. Reeves peoples wood, more than Pertwee or Crook’s
Charming Wurzels; shot from behind, one’s a drunkard,
Part toppling in a yard, while another is a bird portraitist,
Leant before his hung etchings, as a rag headed couple
Near shimmy or crucify close. Love is hard.
A natty Frank Sidebottom astounds, pointing from the page
And communing, artfully dressed he admits us into the ways
And walks of the wood. Soil Sigilists, or Below Bird Bards
Of Abandon, the Scarecrow represents us. If we could
Watch as they do. And we should. For they are the field guardians
Or the appointed allotment angels. Reeves, who has fully fallen
Now into folklore, rewrites their legend all across modern land,
As they promise with roses at us, or drunkenly sing by the railings;
As they suffocate within sex bag plastic, their arms embrace
And command some form of sympathy set in the outsiderdom
We’re all scared of; wary always that our exile is a matter
Of money and chance and quicksand beneath carpet, cell,
Cage, office and shop, each blow bruises, even if, as I write this
There is no wind at all. So heat damns. Both the pets and mascots
We prize as we burn for breath in our gardens, while Reeves’
Camera captures these English sentinels as they spy
On the lonely lives we all lead under the disguise of acceptance;
Sometimes, a hung hat and vest and a bucket on a makeshift
Cross explains why we are all like these Christs who with
The slightest tilt talk a gospel. Sometimes they’re our father,
Friend, uncle, or cardiganned gained grandad. Or very often
A threat, or an alien made from detritus; as if what we threw
Away was a rebirth, as the bland and unwanted in both
Weather and warp watched Lear mad and then looked at us,
As Reeves finds faces and eyes in these figures; his chaos click
Calls them from their fabric life into breath as part
Of the imagination and air which would make us all feudal.
A scarecrow then is a squire of unrepentant earth, ploughing
Death by revealing that time can always be mastered. Reeves
Works his lens like a brushstroke, the briefest glance so creates
A fedora tiotoe on soil sans soundtrack or tulips, or hero’s pose
Whose head basket is as appealing to girls as a rake – meant
In the old fashioned way, as many scarecrows seen here
Are dandies, amidst the dandelions these princes of garden
And park celebrate the flesh shadows we form, whereas
All we really need is their semblance; some sense of shape,
An impression of person on place to suggest that these
Simple structures are hosts to the homeland spread like butter,
Curdling across London, the inhabitants of which are the guests,
Who, if not chosen by them are perhaps tolerated. For, as
With cats, a scarecrow allows us to see what we wish.
That they are the out to our in; that they are ours to control.
Its all rubbish. For it is the Scarecrow who shows us
That what we seek to contain is fate’s dish and upto the will
Of the winds to destroy or to carry across the bylanes
Of London, or any patch of land the crow grows.
They are the multifaceted muse of mud and myth, made
Or modern; totems for a time long relinquished, which
Max Crow’s click now revives. A reverse centaur stares us
Down with his mannequin girl and a conga; so look, learn
And listen as you too can make the ancient seem modern.
Their empty heads hold our thinking. In our buzz “to be”
They’re the hive. Long lost Hamlets whose howl is eternally
Silent, but there for all. For just like the cockroach,
And come Armageddon, the conjugation of refuse, rune
And ruin sets the scarecrow’s soul singing. Birds break
Before them as they grow through green. They are preening.
Max Reeves is proud of them. And so am I. They survive.
David Erdos 23/7/26
Book available here:
https://www.entropypress.co.uk/books/p/scarecrows-of-london
.