Tag: Poetry

Poem: Open House at Shady Pines

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This poem was shortlisted for the Westport Arts Festival Poetry Competition 2016.

westport arts fest

Open House at Shady Pines

They trudge in, trailing cheap perfume,
parading polyester slacks and cut-
price crap from T K Maxx.
Not one of them is here to buy.

Ours is an ‘open house’; a free-for-all
where folk can snuffle through our smalls
and nary a nook is out of bounds.
There isn’t a thing I can do.

We’ve over twenty floral rooms,
well-groomed grounds, a spacious
lounge – yet still it’s on the market
and so still they tramp through.

I sit here in my winged armchair
(a wedding gift from darling Bert)
as strangers coo ‘How’re you coping
without him, dear?’ and slope past

on their way to visit Walter with claw-
hands, Marsha with pishy pants, Harry
with gammy foot or Deirdre, bald as a coot
(why these codgers linger here’s beyond me).

Away, I say, Shady Pines is up for sale,
Bert put it on the market himself.
He’s always been fit as a butcher’s dog,
but this place grew too big for two.

We’ll find a buyer, shake off these chumps,
and nestle in our bungalow. We’ll gather
in its cosy hall, allow the blessed latch
to fall, and bar the door to every soul.

 

Book Review: Whaleback City, Ed. Andy Jackson & Bill Herbert

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Whaleback

This review first appeared in The Bottle Imp (The Association for Scottish Literary Studies) 21 Nov. 2014

‘Ask most Scots to name a Dundonian poet and it’s a pound to a peh they’ll say McGonagall.’ So say poets W. N. Herbert and Andy Jackson in their introduction to Whaleback City, and if this anthology of poetry stemming from Dundee and its hinterland does one thing it will be to convince such folk that there is far more to this city’s poetic output than McGonagall’s ‘magnificent mangling’. Though Dundee is, admittedly, ‘in the second rank of Scottish cities, leaving Edinburgh and Glasgow to fight for primacy in political, economic, and, usually, cultural terms’, it quite clearly ‘punches well above its weight in literary terms.’ In a 1994 episode of The South Bank Show exploring the new generation of UK poets, five of the twenty poets featured were ‘based within thirty miles of Dundee’. Such an impressive statistic is unsurprising when the poetry on offer here is considered.

Whaleback City is split into five pleasingly alliterative categories: The Tay, The Town, The Times, The Types and The Temper. The first section revolves around the famous river, from the ‘epic outlines’ of Douglas Dunn’s exquisitely rendered ‘Tay Bridge’ to Kathleen Jamie’s beautifully unsettling ‘The Tay Moses’, a weird and biblical take on an expectant mother’s fear that she might not bond with her unborn child. Lorraine McCann’s ‘A View of the Tay’ is a darkly atmospheric depiction of the river, made all the more troubling by the startling line: ‘This is where we dumped the body’.

The second section includes the rousing, heroic bombast of Arthur Johnston’s ‘Taodunum’, translated from the Latin by Robert Crawford: ‘The marble palaces of Genoa, / The pyramids of Memphis, count for nothing / Compared to you.’ Kate Armstrong’s ‘Blackness Road’ depicts the coal-stained faces of Dundee buildings, blending the industrial with the natural: ‘Great gaps in the buildings now / let light wash in like the stirring sea / into Fingal’s Cave.’ Colette Bryce’s ‘Self-Portrait in the Dark (With Cigarette)’ is a fresh and modern poem, full of the acid wit of a bitter ex and laced with dark humour: ‘… Morrissey / is jammed in the tape deck now and for eternity’.

Robert Crawford’s ‘Mary Shelley on Broughty Ferry Beach’ is an imaginative and playful take on the beaching of the Tay whale, alluding to a certain ‘sad girl’ who ‘walks from the beach’, stepping over the ‘monster littering the promenade’, perhaps inspiring Frankenstein itself. In Douglas Dunn’s ‘Broughty Ferry’, the poet’s humanity is inherent in his perception of a ‘winey down-and-out […] Defiant in his cap of weathered tweed’, his poet’s self-awareness (‘My comfortable, mind-aggrandised visions’) undercut by the true beauty of the scene: ‘… roselight’s neutral flawlessness, / Dismissing what I think of what I see’.

Anne Stevenson’s gorgeous and celestial ‘Night Wind, Dundee’ evokes a nocturnal vision of the city: ‘Someone’s ripped cobwebs from a great vault’s rafters, / Revealing a moonface, a starfield, / Barbarian Orion crucified in God’s heaven.’ David Fyans’ ‘Haiku for the Law’ sees style and form combine as this simplistic and lovely haiku swells across the page in the shape of a hill. W. N. Herbert’s ‘Port Selda’ is packed with images that are at once familiarly couthy and pleasurably surprising: ‘his helmet gleams like a pie-dish on the drainer […] A policeman like a column of oatmeal’. Jim Stewart’s ‘Night Gulls, Dundee’ locates the eerie in the ordinary, a ghostly poem despite the speaker’s opening statement: ‘… I know there are no ghosts’. It is full of a poetic deference to nature (‘The night is theirs not mine’) and yet the speaker imposes his own unease onto the birds, making phantoms of them. In in the end, however, it is the speaker who becomes spectral: ‘… I / haunt their streets, untimely, revenant.’ J. B. Salmond’s delightful ‘Mount Pleasant’ is sweet as a nursery rhyme, revelling in wordplay involving Dundee’s unusual street names.

The third section includes Pippa Little’s spine-tingling ‘Slant’, which resurrects Dundee’s dead, hidden amongst the streets or in black and white photographs: ‘look slant, you’ll see us, / and through all the layers between the light / we’ll see you.’ Judith Taylor’s funny but affecting ‘The Life Cycle of the Barracuda’ describes a naff Dundee nightclub, ‘like a nightmare based on a Wham song […] And God, the desperation […] By the nineties it was property / like everything else in the Nineties.’ Now there is ‘nothing but dust and buddleia’ where the nightclub once thrived. Mary Brooksbank’s ‘Strike Sang’ is rousing and, sadly, still pertinent today, whilst Hugh McMillan’s moving and haunting ‘Dundee Jute Mill, Turn of the Century’ bewails Dundee boys lost to war as well as industry lost to shifting times: ‘He will not live to see the skeleton of his mill / or hear the women, weeping still.’

Section four sees Joseph Lee’s excellently titled ‘Grizzel Jaffray’ conjure a fascinating account of a Dundee woman burned for being a witch, as well as C. B. Donald’s ‘Death of a Comic Artist’, a darkly comedic take on one of those three ‘J’s’. John Glenday’s ‘Etching of a Line of Trees’ is one of the most musical and bewitching poems Whaleback City contains: ‘Some shadow’s hands moved with my hands / and everything I touched was turned to darkness / and everything I could not touch was light.’ Dorothy Lawrenson’s ‘Peggy’ dissects the status and plight of Dundee women who worked ‘among the din and the dust’ of the mills, ‘their coarse beauty / strong as spun jute’, whilst A. D. Foote’s ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ tells the tale of a fantasist mill worker, the kind of pub-lurking blowhard everybody seems to know.

John Burnside’s ‘Children Sledding in the Dark, Magdalen Green’ is laced with challenging but beauteous imagery: ‘the sky is glass, the distance is a train, / angels are sealed in the gaps / of walls …’ Andrew Murray Scott’s ‘Reaney’ is steeped in affection, a poem about a Dylan Thomas-style pub-dwelling literature lover, the air around him thick with booze fumes and fag smoke, full of fabulous imagery: ‘And when Reaney talked / The redsea waters of our ears / Divided and were strange / In a backroom bar in the Hawkhill.’ The mingled grief and hope of Douglas Dunn’s elegiac ‘Leaving Dundee’ is set alongside the startling brevity of Joseph Lee’s ‘Bullet’: ‘Perhaps I killed a mother / When I killed a mother’s son.’ The poignancy of Brenda Shaw’s ‘Auction’, about a deceased amateur painter’s legacy, is matched by Andy Jackson’s powerful but tender ‘Sour Jewel’, a poem about Dundee-born singer Billy MacKenzie, who killed himself aged thirty-nine: ‘his steep falsetto rise let off the leash, / foreshortened by the accidental melting / of the precious piece of vinyl, out of reach, / a limited edition, perhaps the only pressing.’

The final section contains Michael Marra’s jazzy and inventive ‘Frida Kahlo’s Visit to the Tay Bridge Bar’, a song which quite perfectly does what it says on the tin. Sean O’ Brien’s ‘At the Wellgate’ includes wonderfully rich evocations of homeless men: ‘The boreal flaneurs donate their stains / And thick cirrhotic sherries to the bench / Outside the precinct where they’re not allowed …’ Don Paterson’s ‘11.00: Baldovan’ is a deceptively simple tale about two wee boys taking the bus to the Hilltown (‘I plan to buy comics, / sweeties, and magic tricks’) with a sting in its tail so potent it will stay with you for days. The anthology ends with Sean O’ Brien’s ‘Dundee Heatwave’, its last line ripe with hope: ‘At the foot of the page, the beginning’; a fitting ending given Dundee’s continuing flow of first rate poets.

A great deal of the poems in Whaleback City have a set rhythm and rhyming scheme, with simple, monosyllabic rhymes deployed in the classic a/b/a/b pattern. Whilst such poems are often technically masterful, such a repetitive and predictable framework may well render many of them old fashioned, even, at times, plodding for some readers, particularly those of a younger generation. However, as Herbert and Jackson rightly state in their introduction, the poems here are intended to represent the works that have emerged from Dundee throughout the centuries, and therefore omitting the more traditional poems would do the city’s writers and history a disservice. Quite often, traditional forms are used to great and stylish effect, such as Herbert’s ‘Ode to the New Old Tay Bridge’, a deft but affectionate pastiche of McGonagall’s clunky and embarrassing verse: ‘but it disnae tak a Storm Fiend tae plant some gelignite, / like it disnae tak a genius tae pen a load o shite.’ But it is the younger, fresher, non-rhyming poems about modern life that elevate Dundee – and Whaleback City – above the pithy, tourist-friendly, but ultimately reductive label of ‘journalism, jam and jute’.

There are therefore pits and peaks in the quality of the anthology, which is understandable given Whaleback City‘s bold ambition to represent the poetry of Dundee from the past six centuries. As Herbert and Jackson state from the start: ‘The editors have […] selected that aspect of the work of excellent writers which focusses on Dundee; and the most successful work by those writers who may, in the compendious scheme of Scottish literature, be regarded as representatives for the city.’ Because the anthology encompasses work from such a vast time period, it would perhaps be useful to have dates unobtrusively listed next to each poem, as it is sometimes difficult to contextualise individual works.

The anthology is lovingly dedicated to Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra, who died in 2012, and it is washed through with the warmth of Marra’s songs. Some are perhaps better heard than read, but others, like the elegant and emotional ‘The Lonesome Death of Francis Clarke’, are as good to read as hear: ‘They say he fell for an Indian maiden / Who was more lovely than mere words could tell / Hey lay in her arms and they bathed in the moonlight / He sang softly of the Bailieborough Belle …’ Marra’s work is described by the editors as ‘a perfect ambassador for the Dundonian character’, and if Whaleback City introduces a younger generation to his songs then so much the better. Whaleback City will tug at the heartstrings of those who were born or live in Dundee as much as it will inspire those who’ve never visited to jump on a train and cross the Silv’ry Tay into a city still blazing with poetic promise.

Book Review: Play With Me, by Michael Pedersen

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playwithmepederson

This review first appeared in The Bottle Imp (Association for Scottish Literary Studies) 18/06/14

Michael Pedersen’s aptly titled Play With Me is full of the writerly joy of playing with words, a delight in their sound and appearance as much as their meaning. Pedersen is drawn time and again to alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhymes and half‐rhymes, as if he is making patterns as much as poems; but his particular skill lies in combining this richly textured word‐play with his powers of storytelling.

‘Colmar’ begins as a straightforward narrative about a school French exchange. It is a self‐effacing poem which mocks the speaker’s past pretentiousness and the faux‐pas of his thirteen‐year‐old self. There are some lovely, whimsical similes here—’linked / together like salted pretzels’—and the long lines and enjambment give the poem a flowing, narrative feel. It’s a comical piece, but at its end the poem makes a serious point about first love and poetry alike:

[…] a poem is like a bomb,
a bomb like a poem; assembled correctly, both
explode, they don’t arrive, become
instantly important—as she did and could again.

‘RIP Porty High School’ concerns the demolition of a school, filled with sci‐fi film imagery—’Armageddon’, ‘space-age’, ‘portals’—undercut with old wifies speaking Scots lingo (‘It’s the parliament / aw over again’) which brings the poem back down to earth. Borderline‐absurd alumni of the school are listed (Gail Porter, Kenny Anderson, James Carlin), and this sense of absurdity is continued with references to ‘Mr Big Banana’, ‘Bojangles’ and ‘Thai brides’. The poem ends with a fantasy of the poet carrying stacks of Collected Poems bearing his name on their spines; he is teasing himself as much as he is teasing others.

‘Midnight Cowboys’ has a mythological feel as a father and son set off to shoot a star down from the sky with a bullet, but instead witness a real shooting star. It’s a fantastical but sad story with a moral at its end, just like a fairy‐tale. The stars become ‘brilliant bulbs’ which ‘dangle like decorations’ or else are plucked from the sky ‘like a thistle from the cairns’. They then move from being bulbs and thistles to fruit, a strangely successful mingling of metaphors: ‘for such beauties are screwed in / tight, falling only when ripe.’

‘Laddie at Heart’ relates the story of the poet’s five‐year‐old self telling a lie about a man trying to abduct him. The police become involved, which earns the boy the attention he craved: ‘tuckshop booty and lip kisses’. This is shown to be a merely silly thing to do aged five, but ‘It’s what I do / at 25 that gets my mother going’, he says, ending the poem with a sting in its tail.

‘Greenhouse Ganglands’ evokes the natural world as sensual and vaguely predatory: ‘Buttercups solicit ladybirds, pansies woo bees, / sparrows raid the strawberries.’ The speaker’s mum peacefully gardens amongst the looming Edinburgh landscape as the place crawls with life. He describes the memory of this as ‘my teenage years’ elixir’, gentle thoughts sustaining him like a magic potion in darker years when personal traumas occurred and ‘beetles / crunched underfoot like celery’.

‘Quitting Cheese’ looks back at a doomed relationship, describing a day spent with an ex‐girlfriend in Nottingham, with all the pubs, parks and picnics that entails:

we
feasted on each other, spinning
the conversational equivalent
of a roly‐poly.

The pair revisits Nottingham but things just aren’t the same; the weather is harsher—’winds / scraped against our bones’—and he has a feeling of ‘a cheese cube too many, / bellyache, that fateful feeling / of having peaked too early.’ ‘Shapes of Every Size’ explores how we can be damaged by a past relationship such as this, whilst attempting to begin a new one:

This is the way to walk
when in love with your new shoes,
still blistered
by the old pair.

‘Feathers and Cream’ likens a story from the past to ‘a secret / conglomerate of crumbs / smooshed into a carpet’. The speaker relates memories of the death of his friend’s father, the strange rumour about his corpse being taken to the dump, ‘tipped from skip to local dump, / where metallic, apocalyptic jaws / minced through his brittle bones.’ The mundane truth is bad enough without this obscene rumour, which his friend is badly damaged by. The poem trips back to a time before the tragedy, when he and his friend were ‘fourteen forever— / paused in fairytale parlours’, a fleeting, sadly sweet image.

‘Owen’, about a lost friendship, is full of startling similes. Owen’s hair is all ‘long black locks / like dirty cat tails’ and his lungs are ‘power stations’. ‘C.J. Easton’ mingles the mundane and exotic—’As pylons streak the sky / a ferocious sun sets over Glasgow, / bleeding, looking almost African’—and paints a lover’s body as ‘that puny frame, its bag of bones / in winsome skin, will coruscate / and carousel’, a gorgeously weird description.

‘Manchester John’, about a friend who becomes brain‐damaged after an overdose, describes drug‐use in a perversely positive and surreal fashion: ‘medical diction fails to touch / on the warm tingling bliss of horse / trotting up the arm’. But now his friend is ‘Zimmer-framed, / shuffling as if you walked / on constant snow’, and the speaker is no more than an ‘ambulance hitchhiker’, filled with guilt and shame at being complicit in his friend’s problem.

‘The Raven by My Writing Desk’, with its shades of Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allen Poe, is another self‐flagellating poem. The ravens’ ‘black tongues ooze like poisonous slugs— / medusa among the animals’, and the poet paints himself as equally monstrous:

next time
I wield a conversational pickaxe
with mistimed velocity
or head off on a squint orbit,
bear in mind, I probably ruined my night too.

The ravens haunt him like bad memories, stalking him as weird harbingers of death, and his role as a writer becomes inherent in this.

‘Tom Buchan (1931-1995)’ celebrates the famous Scots poet, whose eloquence is beautifully evoked by Pederson: ‘so / like the comets flew he spoke’. He describes Buchan as ‘a turtle-necked warrior’, painting a funny and affectionate picture of the man, and there is also a sense of affinity here between the old and younger poet: ‘It’s possible we were, at some point, synched / in time and place’. ‘Edinburgh Festival’ evokes the weather and geography of the city with panache, with its rain that ‘skelps make‐up from faces’. The faintly depressing aftermath of the festival is knowingly described: ‘Come September, posters / in gutters turn to pulpy gruel’. No matter how well or badly things go for performers, it will all turn to mush in the end.

The dazzling, stand‐out ‘Cowgate Syvers’ describes Edinburgh stairwells as:

erudite elders: folded skins
and muckle beards they’re twizzling
constantly, each a bard of handsome ken,
a hoarder of cadged chronicles.

It’s a romantic image, but funny too, and wonderfully original:

As for the rats,
gremlins and even more sinister
goings‐on they host … well, we can’t
all choose who comes to visit,
or at what hour they call.

This mixture of horror and humour, the light and the dark, infuses the collection, though ‘Heredity’, written in Scots dialect, is a bleaker affair exploring inherited violence: ‘Like his faither afore him, / ma faither kicked fuck oot ma maither, / ma maither battered us bairns’. The speaker is capable of violence too, except now it’s (apparently) just the pets that get it: ‘clobbering / only the cat.’

‘Jobseeker’ will strike anyone who has ever gone through the degradation of claiming benefits: ‘Like a marsupial conceals / a cub, I cradle a book / of Armitage’s poems’. It is sad that he has to hide this important side of himself, sad that he’s there in the first place. This poem is explicitly about the poet himself (‘come right this way, Mr Pedersen’), though all the poems in Play With Me share this feeling of intimacy and immediacy. ‘When I Fell in the Bog’ recounts the speaker almost drowning as a child, and the strange feeling that came over him when he did: ‘Funny thing— / when it seemed I was going under, / my body relaxed’, a ‘surprisingly Zen’ feeling at odds with the presumably normal response of dire panic.

‘In Marrakesh’ is one of a group of poems set in Cambodia and establishes the difference between tourists and locals, with ‘us piggy visitors’ set alongside the ‘ragged fingers’ of locals. ‘Newscast’ describes red roads that ‘clump, bubble and cook in the heat’ in a country where ‘Bees are bigger, beer is cheaper’. ‘Justice Locale’ recounts the tale of a boy killed by a 4×4 and the driver who is forcibly removed from his vehicle by local folk:

A seventy-strong siege
of swipes and stamps
leave him writhing
a crushed worm.

‘Arching Eyebrows and a Chalked Door’ describes, with hissing resonance, ‘cracked lips, thin as slits on wrists’, and ‘a gravy‐blooded, Xed, hexed body filled with AIDS.’ ‘Hello. I am Cambodia’ personifies the country, contrasting the picturesque ‘pina colada and sugared cherries’ with its bleak past:

I’ve forgotten
the old regime […]
My monuments await
restoration, half my population
is children.

‘Boom Town’ recounts the finding of an unexploded bomb, the differing reactions of tourists and locals: ‘At the whites full of worry, Khmers giggle’. The speaker’s reaction is one of fear: ‘something stirs inside my gut, / disturbs the sticky rice and stomach worms’. ‘From the Right Bank’ mingles humour with romantic imagery as the speaker:

limps
to the bank’s edge and spurts
triumphantly
out into the current
like a rogue pup, as the moon, giddy,
gawks from above.

‘Network: Cambodia’ likens the sun to a gang, a surprising and original image: ‘Sunrise springs from behind dustbins, / pours through alleys, pounds down streets / like a terrible gang’, the alliterative patterns of ‘my belly / bubbles full of fish’ adding to this rhythmic, playful but slightly sinister feel.

‘X Marks the Spot’ scrumptiously evokes the optimism of new love: ‘Life was a sack / of strawberries, the future, jams / and spice’; but then the speaker spies on his new love, looking through her phone and assuming infidelity where there is none, exposing how mistrust can spoil a good thing. ‘Expired Treasure / Broken Bulbs’ describes the wrecks of old vandalised buildings, with ‘mangled prams, / hijacked trolleys, / 80s electronics’ abandoned in a Burn. Pub landlord becomes ‘head honcho with first dibs / on the local munters’ whilst the ‘town beauty’ dreams of escaping abroad. The quotation marks round ‘abroad’ show the girl’s naivety and lack of concrete plans; it’s unlikely that she’ll ever escape.

‘Paris in Spring’ describes the speaker’s body as being wrecked by booze: ‘After three days of heavy saucing, / I am in tatters, bowels barking’. He reads of Paris in Spring from within a damp bus, and the contrast between his reading material and material surroundings could not be more marked. ‘Dead Skin and Stray Fingernails’ recounts the new inhabitants of the house where someone special used to live before ‘tragedy’ struck. He and this special person ‘forgot to finish / our most important conversation’ which sounds as if it will never be concluded. ‘Water Features’ describes a lover being left behind, with the speaker comparing himself and his lost love to water: ‘one of us running, / the other stilled’, ending the collection on a muted note. Playtime is over.

This is joyful, sensual, frequently heart‐wrenching poetry filled with a richness of language that is brought to life by Pedersen’s startling imagery and storytelling skills. Whether he’s in the gutters of Edinburgh or on the red roads of Marrakesh, his infectious delight in description and pattern‐making makes it a unique pleasure to play with Pedersen.

 
Jacqueline Thompson
Creative Writing PhD student
The University of Edinburgh
J.Thompson‐9@sms.ed.ac.uk

Play With Me by Michael Pedersen is published by Polygon, 2013.

Poetry Review: Yellow & Blue, by Thomas A. Clark

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yellowandblue

This review first appeared in The Literateur Thursday 24 April 2014

The experience of reading Thomas A. Clark’s Yellow & Blue is much like taking a walk. The small and unassuming stanzas, resting in the clean white space of a page without capital letters or punctuation, lead us on a journey past sea rocks and skerries, gables and gardens, sandwort and shells, bog-cotton and birch, mountains and moss. Clark delights in simple, natural things and the power and beauty inherent in them:

 

————————————after rain
————————————briar leaves
————————————have a scent
————————————of apples

 

This is quiet, contemplative, Zen-like poetry that records what Kathleen Jamie termed a ‘walking-pace life’; a life in which time is taken to pay close and careful heed to the natural world surrounding us. As Clark puts it: ‘If we have been given the gift of the world, the very least we can do in return is give it our attention.’ His poems act as ‘little spaces of quiet where things can be seen clearly’.

Though Clark’s is a peaceful sort of poetry, Yellow & Blue is filled with a sense of liveliness and humour. It is poetry with a wink:

 

————————————here is a garden
————————————of tansy run riot
————————————around anyone
————————————bright enough
————————————to neglect it

 

Though he revels in rivers, flowers and mountains, he does not turn his back on human life. The stanzas which linger awhile on domestic scenes are some of the most powerful sections of Yellow & Blue:

 

————————————in a back parlour
————————————the best furniture
————————————is seldom used
————————————linen is folded
————————————neatly in a drawer
————————————fresh for an occasion
————————————that never arrives
————————————the clock ticking

 

The apparent simplicity of such stanzas belie the close attention Clark pays to language and sound. Indeed, this is poetry for the ear as well as the eye:

 

————————————in a wilderness
————————————or bewilderment
————————————of sandwort
————————————and bladder-wrack
————————————small shell place
————————————sheltered

 

So much is going on beneath the still surface of these lines; Clark’s work may be quiet and contemplative, but it is bustling with life. The visual and half-rhyming repetition of ‘wild’ in ‘wilderness’ and ‘bewilderment’ evokes the untamed nature of the landscape Clark is describing, and the alliterative quality of ‘shell’ and ‘sheltered’ gives an onomatopoeic effect of a hushing shush, the quiet nature of this sheltered place. Visual and aural patterns are created by the assonance of the ‘i’ in ‘wilderness’ and ‘bewilderment’, the ‘a’ in ‘sandwort’, ‘bladder’ and ‘wrack’, and the ‘e’ in ‘shell’ and ‘sheltered’, as well as by the consonance of the ‘d’ and ‘r’ in ‘wilderness’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘sandwort’, ‘bladder’ and ‘sheltered’. These patterns aptly echo the rhythmic, flowing quality of a well-paced walk.

There are so many layers to this one small stanza, which reflects the multi-faceted nature of the landscape Clark is describing; the open land may appear vast and clear, but look closer and you will find it packed full of the intricate details of living things. Such richly textured evocations of a peculiarly Scottish landscape are brought to life by the cadences and lilt of Clark’s words, their rhythmic quality and the patterns of sound that emerge as each line progresses. The multisyllabic ‘wilderness’ and ‘bewilderment’ are reduced to the shorter ‘sandwort’ and ‘bladder-wrack’, followed by the monosyllabic ‘small shell place’, ending in the one-word line ‘sheltered’, the hard ‘d’ acting as an aural full-stop and mirroring the simplifying, quieting act of finding shelter, of being enclosed and protected from the noisy elements.

Clark’s literary snapshots of his journey could be classified as ‘the art of the ordinary’, a term which highlights the painterly nature of his verbal landscapes. Robert Stacey has commented on the three categories into which Clark’s work falls – still life, landscape and domestic interior – referring to his poetry as ‘a still life in action’. This can be seen most clearly in lines like:

 

————————————by a window
————————————blue cornflowers
————————————in a yellow cup
————————————continually
————————————wake up

 

These ordinary objects are brought to life by Clark’s close attention, and the titular colours of yellow and blue are a recurring theme in his work. In one of his installations, the phrase ‘one blue moment’ is printed in blue on a white wall in a room containing a blue bedspread, and in another room the phrase:

 

————————————Anyone
————————————who comes
————————————to yellow
————————————wants more

 

is printed in yellow on a white wall beside a yellow wall. Such rooms, in which Clark’s words find the space to breath, demonstrate how his work does not fit quite so comfortably in magazines; the texts require a different kind of reading process. In book form, their spare, isolated situation on the pages of collections like Yellow & Blue provide this crucial breathing space. Poetry outside the clustered pages of a conventional book or magazine, in Clark’s words, ‘takes you by surprise’. Rather than being tucked away out of sight, arrived at through deliberate searching, it can be stumbled upon accidentally.

The sense of poetry being part of our everyday world, whether it is placed in a hospital in Glasgow or an old kimono shop in Nagoya (where Clark’s poems have appeared), makes poetry accessible rather than lofty. Clark’s belief in ‘poetry as making, as a practical rather than an intellectual activity’ underlines this down-to-earth appeal. Though the poems of Yellow & Blue appear in book form, there is still a craftsman-like quality to their shape and movement; they could just as easily be carved into stone or painted on a wall. Indeed Clark’s own publishing endeavour Moschatel Press, which he runs with the artist Laurie Clark, produces hand-made artist books that bear out this sense of poetry as craft or practice.

This meticulous, crafted and objective quality grounds Clark’s poems in their linguistic materiality and in that of the natural world they gesture towards; they are pastoral but never Utopian. As John Freeman has commented of Clark’s work: ‘To value the light is to be aware of the darkness’. Though the beauty and joy to be found in natural things is felt throughout Yellow & Blue, they are not quite idealised. There is a sense, felt in the silences around the words, that these things we cherish might someday be lost. The act of valuing something stands alongside the horror of losing it, and how awful would it be to lose our connection to certain landscapes and the things they contain through apathy and negligence?

Recording and revelling in a particularly Celtic type of landscape that might someday be lost brings to life shades of myth and folklore, found in lines such as:

 

————————————sylphs and nymphs and kelpies
————————————might slip between
————————————silks and shocks and sulks
————————————of water into real bodies

 

Such images escape the pages of fairy-tales and emerge into the very real world witnessed throughout Clark’s walking poem. Yellow & Blue closes on another stanza in which the fantastical is placed in the real, a magical image that could have emerged straight out of a tale of bygone days:

 

————————————a lamp of fish oil
————————————with a wick of rushes
————————————gathered by the light
————————————of a full moon

 

Through taking this imaginary journey with Clark, we come to realise that we have not yet lost our connection to a host of precious places and things. They are there, waiting to be discovered and treasured, if we would only take the time to walk and listen and look.

Backspeirin

~ jacquelinethompson87 ~ Leave a comment

InOnTheTideFront1

This poem first appeared in Appletree Writers’ In On The Tide

http://appletreewriters.co.uk/backspeirin-by-jacqueline-thompson/

All profits go to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

It can be bought here: http://appletreewriters.co.uk/shop/books/in-on-the-tide/

 

 

In the night North Sea

we catch treats for beauties asleep

under flash Orion’s Belt

and Mars fuming red.

 

In the great mother’s paddle-pool

we net her fish, as we’re tugged and torn

between anchoring homes

and breath-pinching horizons.

 

Some of our tales are even true.

Here at the end of the world

there are mergirls drunk on rocks

and ship-hungry beasts.

 

Then there are the dry-land lovelies

snoozing in upper rooms, their tousled hair

tumbling over eiderdowns,

warm limbs and parted lips.

 

But we mustn’t look homewards

all the time, it’s pure backspeirin.

All we’ll catch is spray in our eyes.

Whether we’re wrapped

 

in soft-shawled arms or rocked

in this vast bobbing cradle,

the great mother soothing us

with the hushabye of her waves,

 

we mustn’t look homewards.

All we’ll catch is salt-crusted lashes

and glances black with omens.