Alasdair Gray has been a major figure in Scottish literature and art for many decades. His work spans seven novels which he has written, designed and illustrated, plays, short stories, poetry, drawings, paintings and murals – including the huge ceiling mural at Oran Mor in Glasgow.
“I’ve always been interested in the beginnings and endings of things,” he has said. So his recent collection of ten late poems holds special interest, as a distillation of a life in verse. It opens with gratitude to the poet’s parents and ends with an invitation to: “obey that call into fertile nothingness.”
The poems are framed with a confessional prologue, ruefully entitled Critic Fuel. The reader begins her voyage through this life, made wonderful by contact “with art, science, magic and history” in conversation with the poet. Gray’s tone is candid and self-deprecating, as he promises his readers a “nourishing oatmeal of greater writers’ ideas.” This joyous delight in and debt to the work of others is one of the pleasures of the collection. End Notes continues the dialogue started in Critic Fuel. Friendly accounts of the genesis of each poem, they enrich one’s reading and feel like poems in their own right.
Humanitad, a poem of almost two hundred lines described by Gray as a ‘wee epic’, surveys the history of humankind in septets at an even iambic pace. Without breaking step, Gray offers his analysis - moral, political and economic - of the development of the human condition. As hunter-gatherers, we “made bone needles, coracles of skin.” The “forging of iron blades” led to an “impoverished majority,” to “gaining wealth by lending wealth,” to “world wars that have not ended yet.” Gray’s civilised and unorthodox polemic exposes flaws in all political systems, asserts belief in liberty, fraternity and equality. The last stanza blossoms into fruitful uncertainties through the words of Morgan, Lowell, Eliot , Crane, Poe and Lear. “Wishing to end more resoundingly,” the note confides, Gray enables us to reflect on the process of composition, the playfulness of the poet and the raw uncertainty of the human heart.
The final poem in the collection, Last Request, is a moving accommodation with death but at the same time with life. It engages with the thinking of Johnson, Hume and Dante and finds a home in the words of Robinson Jeffers. The language is direct, the subject huge and the patient, balanced stanzas bring us close to a courageous voice. This poet of solidarity invites us into his confidence. We are changed and moved by this contact.
The outcome of a residency at the Harvard School of Hellenic Studies awarded in the summer of 2017, Hugh McMillan’s Heliopolis is rooted both in classical Greece and contemporary Scotland. The poems are urgent and full of movement. Macmillan ranges from tender lyrics in Birthday to political satire in 364 BC, from meditations on haunted ruins in Cottage to the elegiac tone of The Shades of One Shade.
The conceptual framework of the book gives each poem a classical context, invites us to look through an ancient Greek lens. Foteinos, the final section, is filled with moments of illumination. “Hope is keeping opening your mouth” he writes in the poem Hope, vibrantly alive to current problems.
These deeply serious poems are also capable of giving great delight. McMillan handles language deftly and lightly, paints vivid images, subverts our expectations. He challenges and engages us. Watcher, in the section Hyperborea, wonderfully evokes the world of the light keeper. The moths and the sailors exposed to the possibility of extinction, drawn to the light ‘thrown like a rope across the back of the ocean’ and the keeper himself watching the moths beating on the glass, then the muted sorrow of the final line: reel in hope after hope after hope. The poem taps into human tumult with delicacy, as does Psalm 121, whose tone moves from light to comic to tender so smoothly it feels effortless. The collection ends appropriately in a burst of sunlight - In Lit - where Dumfries becomes Heliopolis. Nymphs at the fountains take selfies and the sun drops words in our palms.
“Poetry” he writes, “will come today from sand and scrim.” Reading this book gave me a day of sun, with poems created from sand and scrim which turn out to be the flesh, blood and bones of our own experience.
The latest in a line of more than ten collections stretching back to the 1970s, Walter Perrie’s new work includes the poem What can the makar? where he writes that the makar illuminates this where, this when, this cast. His Sorceries is full of wheres, whens, folk and creatures, each offering a moment of insight. But Perrie qualifies the possibilities of language and poetry, admitting (with candour, given his status as a poet, editor, publisher and critic) that language is limited. What can the makar? ends:
all we thought we were collapses in earthquake and metaphor.
These poems of humility are not afraid of “time holding eternity’s rage in his long strong arms.” The makar’s eyes are on eternity and time. The pamphlet is rooted in this paradox. Its author does not shrink from big abstractions and from distilling from them - in roads, hills, lizards and bindings. In the beautiful love poem, Though you are sitting beside me, the poet asks: “how can a twain be wholly one?” The language of love is qualified, “a two letter shift from is to was.” The poem asserts that we are “fast in our osmotic chain”, the condition we all share but the experience unique to each lover. Perrie’s poems are robust expressions of fragility. They offer a lucid and honest account of this separateness.
Water bubbles through the collection. In Spaces and As Glaciers Retreat it shapes language and metaphor. The five short lines of Glen Etive carry much of the emotional weight of Sorceries. Here human memory and landscape are one and the poem’s soft rhymes enable the reader to reflect on the act of reading. Perrie’s poems draw us further into “the enigmatic, the sovereign.” After this task, the final poem is a song to prompt us to hymn, praise and make elegy and to let poetry carry the whole palette of experience. Which is what this pamphlet of quiet but potent sorceries does, each poem a Hirundo rustica, “a bold bundle of purposes.”
My mother did not flinch. Coolly,
Glisk illuminates the bodily-ness of life with tenderness. It is also a robust analysis of the ways society has diminished women. In You Ask Why I Seldom Write About Men Stewart deftly reverses gender roles, and describes marginalised men, inviting us to notice the way language has been appropriated.
There is fascinating range in these poems. Each offers pleasure where language and sense fit perfectly together.
Like Alasdair Gray, Ken Cockburn invites us to enter a dialogue with and about his poems. The Afterword in Floating the Woods lets us into the process of creating; often playful and always intriguing. His methods are as beautiful as the poems. So The Solitary Reaper is conceived as: “translations of (Wordworth’s) reaper’s song made by a poet familiar with Basho’s work.”
This poet of fragments and random comings together, whose currency is what the eye sees and the ear hears and nothing second-hand, through his collaborations and projects, makes writing an adventure. An adventure for the reader too. He shares with Gray a delight in the texts of other writers. He also explores the use of other languages. Interesting too is his use of given measures, the alphabet, the months of the year. “These constraints” he writes, “evoke (memories) in a way that more direct approaches often fail to do.”
Cockburn collaborates regularly with visual artists, which led to some of the work in this collection. This includes the six poems of Ness, which form a linked chain of responses to the eponymous river. They were composed to a brief drawn up by sculptor Mary Bourne as part of the River Ness Art Project - a series of inter-related works commissioned to highlight the ways the River Ness connects Inverness to other times and other places. The sequence is mesmeric. Collaged reflections assemble the river’s parts, from its tongue to its creatures, from the names of its tributaries to its power-balance with the tide.
These ‘woods’ are entirely welcoming and entirely unfamiliar. The poems are spare and exuberant at the same time, with such variety of response to the endlessly fascinating world of the poet’s imagination. The reader cannot help but be exhilarated by this collection.