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Aye, a radical and pleasurable diversity W N Herbert finds Scottish poetry is as vibrant as ever |
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KATHLEEN JAMIE LIZ LOCHHEAD EDWIN MORGAN DON PATERSON
Back in the 1930s Scottish poetry was polarized. On the one hand you had what MacDiarmid called ‘the white mouse faction’, or poetry that he assumed was primarily trying to appeal to the English. On the other was what Muir saw as a highly artificial attempt to maintain a Scottish language and sensibility that, in his opinion, ‘is now falling to pieces, for there is no visible and effective power to hold it together.’ You can take it as read that each was referring to the other in these less-than-constructive analyses. From this dialectic emerged the magisterial generation of MacCaig, Crichton Smith, MacKay Brown and W.S.Graham, of which Morgan is now almost the only surviving member. And what a survivor. After the difficult 1950s, when the dominance of the Movement meant there was little space for Celtic voices either to develop or to be heard, Morgan’s work exploded in the 1960s into a whole series of new poetries — concrete, sound, colour — in which the debate between Scots and English was only one issue among many. The sheer diversity of his voice meant that large parts of his achievement appeared to remain outside the auditory range of critics. It was as though Mozart had written his best work for some virtuosic version of the dog whistle: those of us with enough border collie in the genes were dazzled. Since his retirement he has entered into an efflorescence of new work, and in his dramatic writing in particular we can see the development of a lively Scots influenced as much by such successors as Liz Lochhead, as by those auld debaters, Muir and MacD. In Cathures, he returns to his great theme, ‘my green Cathures / By the frisky firth of salmon...’: the city of Glasgow, and finds in it a broad range of voices, themes and forms. It’s fitting that there’s a tribute here to Roy Fisher, another apprehender of the non-Metropolitan metropolis. If there can still be a notion of British poetry, it will perhaps come from these careful observers of city states, rather than the anthology-pedlars. It’s always been Morgan’s delight to leap from history to news story, to overturn the received in search of the revelatory: as the refrain of his poem on Burns states, ‘the exciseman’s awa wi the Deil.’ He keeps the camera as closely focussed on his language as on his subject, as here, where we can overhear the enlightenment surgeon John Hunter breathlessly asking Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination: What the devil becomes of eels in winter, Many of these figures are conscious embodiments of that curiosity which has always driven Morgan’s poetic, like the gull which peers in on him, apparently an avatar of death, but just as much a version of that unblinking attention he continues to pay the world: A seagull stood on my window ledge today, Liz Lochhead’s poetry, like that of her near-contemporary, Tom Leonard, has always fought against easy definitions, whether of Scottishness, Glaswegian speech, or of poetry itself. Her work in Scots is a singing rebuke to the notion that dialect diminishes poets, rendering them difficult to comprehend outside the ‘tribe’ and, well, not really significant. Her exploration of gender stereotypes through rewritten ballads, fairy tales and fictional characters prefigures Carol Ann Duffy’s work along similar themes. She has influenced a generation of women writers especially, and Scottish writers in general, to politicize their speech and professionalize their performance. It’s always bewildering, therefore, to find her work is out of print, and a pleasure to welcome it back into the bookshops. The Colour of Black & White is an impressive and by no means complete gathering of twenty years of work — plus new pieces. Lochhead can range from the darting imagery of ‘Neckties’: ‘Paisleys squirm with spermatozoa./ All yang,no yin...’ to the graceful recapturing of childhood language in ‘Kidspoem/Bairnsang’: it wis January Her work is marked by an elasticity of line and an ease of voice, a sense that she is inhabiting her language as a zone where vitality and accessibility can coexist. But if the word ‘gallus’ resonates through Morgan’s Cathures, the word that seems to characterize Lochhead’s work would be ‘raw’. The child, off to school in that January chill, is about to be stripped of her language. The rawness of nudity can be beautifully evoked, as in the ‘lowsan time’ of ‘The New-married Miner.’ But emotional stripping is never far from poems like ‘The Bride’ where we glimpse a favourite theme – the collision of high and low culture in the image of Frankenstein, and in the body of the bride: I lie beside you Lochhead encapsulates a moment of personal loss in ‘Sorting Through’ when, in handing over her mother’s dresses to Oxfam, she senses ‘the invisible danders of skin fizzing off from them / like all that life that will not neatly end.’ This last line gives us the central theme of Kathleen Jamie’s mature work, as summed up by the title poem of this selection from her four Bloodaxe books, Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead. Jamie’s ambivalent yet compassionate eye in that poem picks over the remains of a stifled life, the repressed Scottish society that Morgan had to liberate himself from, and that she herself spends so much of this book travelling to escape: old ladies’ bags, open mouthed, spew The traveller returns, and must make a life for herself, determining what of this seemingly moribund culture will serve to carry on into the roles of creator and indeed mother. As in Morgan’s ‘A Gull’, the man who cleared the old couple’s house has an emblematic significance: Forget them, till that person enters One of the choices Jamie makes refers back to the old debate of the 1930s — despite being a poet who certainly appeals to the English, she elects to write poems in Scots. And it is a Scots which acknowledges its debt equally to MacDiarmid and to Lochhead. Paradoxically, it is a voice she appears to have discovered on her travels, as she says in ‘Xiahe’: ‘A’m waukent, on a suddenty mindit...’ — and the Wordsworthian revelation, ‘I hae crossed China’, feels completely at home in Scots. In ‘Arraheids’ the repressive voice of the past finds its fittest comic form in the realization that the flints in the museums are ‘a show o grannies’ tongues’. There is a rueful admiration of the sheer flinty endurance of this voice which ‘cannae keep fae muttering’. One of the striking elements of Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is the sense you have of a writer progressing, evolving from collection to collection. As with Morgan’s sixties collection, From Glasgow to Saturn, there’s a moment, here marked by almost any poem in The Queen of Sheba, where you realise a successful leap has been taken into a fuller version of the poet’s voice. Too often you get the impression that poets’ first books are either their best, or the one in which they satisfied the taste of their time, and that the subsequent work is a gradually diminishing set of variations on the same themes or poses. Don Paterson is a poet whose first volume, Nil-Nil, achieved so much that you might look cautiously at his later works. Here was a Scottish poet who won over the English mainstream by judicious reshaping of a Northern and principally a Northern Irish poetic. Muldoon and Mahon could be read into the exquisitely controlled ironies of ‘The Alexandrian Library’, surely the finest long poem of the 1990s, and weren’t Harrison and Dunn being refracted through the grudge match of ‘An Elliptical Stylus’? Where could he go from there? Well, Landing Light is a volume of clear progression, and, as with Douglas Dunn’s Northlight, it is a progression north towards a clearer sense of the Scottishness at the root of Paterson’s deadpan lyricism. Alright, the third instalment of the Library, with its depiction of Prima Donald in the sticks of Kirrie, isn’t a patch on the first, but only in the way To Circumjack Cencrastus isn’t a patch on A Drunk Man. And ‘The Hunt’ is more than a patch on Muir’s ‘Labyrinth’, which it resembles in its fusion of myth with Kafka, as in this stanza, where the unnamed protagonist stumbles on what appears to be the minotaur’s study: The walls were lined with skinbound books Like Jamie, part of the reason for Paterson’s resettlement is family, the sense that a poet’s development isn’t just willed, it’s also lived, a matter for circumstance as well as ambition. In the two sonnets for his twin sons, there is an unambiguous tenderness which rings a tender and welcome change on the shifty laddishness he sometimes favours: Whatever the difference is, it all began Landing Light, winner of the 2004 TS Eliot prize, also contains a couple of poems in Scots, further proof that the either/or positions of the past have given way to a plurality of approaches. Paterson’s position in the heart of the mainstream means that such gestures won’t be overlooked or disparaged, as has tended to happen when English critics look at a ‘difficult’ language like Scots. Caught between the problem of decipherment and the assumed nationalist posturing (which can replace inspiration in some works) it has been hard for such critics to read a poem in Scots on its own merits. Caught between the assumption that Muir was practically English and the apparent indigestibility of MacDiarmid, it used to be hard to imagine a space that Scottish poetry could occupy. These four books indicate that a distinct territory has been independently occupied for decades, and that a radical and pleasurable diversity is its defining characteristic: For the lyart sang’s no’ staneyraw,
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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