Leaving Camustianavaig by John Beaton

Word Galaxy Press (2021) £15.95

A Review by Anne MacLeod

Word Galaxy Press (2021) £15.95
Review by Anne Macleod

John Beaton is a bard in the oral tradition who happens to write his poems down.  He recites the work from memory as spoken word performer and poet member of the band Celtic Chaos, and though his home is on Vancouver Island, in non-pandemic years he spends each spring in his native Scotland.  

Beaton’s work is widely published in Canada and this, his first collection, sweeps us from Skye to Canada’s lush west coast and back again.  It is a celebration of wildlife, landscape, history, and love - Beaton’s delight in all these things is palpable.

There is sadness too, the emigrant’s wistful regret..  The title poem Leaving Camustianavaig hints at beauty, at loss of birthright, and Stillbirth, the opening poem series is a sensitive exploration of the gradual loss of parents to ageing and death.

Camustianavaig, the crofting township in Skye, is near the site of the famous Battle of the Braes, a mass land protest by crofters in 1882. Beaton is unafraid to address ensuing hardship and conflict.
‘.. nets hung dry; rust stalked the waves of the eaves..’  Brothers of the Byre

In For the Crofters, a breath-taking sweep through crofting history, he concludes:
 ‘As you drive on the roads that run where your forefathers trod, you lean to the whine of the wind.’

He celebrates  Sorley Maclean’s great Gaelic poem Hallaig in The Burn of Hallaig
‘   ..the words …/ .. your own Gaelic, and .. your own English’   and Robert Burns in Immortal Memory. ‘A nation’s heritage defined/ by peopled landscapes of the mind.’

The Canadian landscapes are peopled too.  And exciting. In River of Refuge, he visits a backwoods cabin.   ‘sign/above the door:  Come in but mind/ the bear-board welcome mat!’
The mat being a plywood sheet with upward-pointing two inch nails.

In The Way he drives his truck on defunct logging roads and hikes through chest-deep brush to  ‘A played-out quarry’ with  ‘huckleberry, salmonberry, devil’s club, and thorns’.  And cougars.  
He loves Vancouver Island. In Qualicum Sunset he declares ‘..this is my life and this fair coast, my home’.
But finally, in When I Am Old, he yearns for Scotland. ‘ ..it’s here I’ll yield/ to the stubble and seeds of the past.’

This genial, thoughtful collection will repay time spent reading and re-reading.  And these are poems to be read aloud – musical, a song cycle, as Alasdair Fraser the fiddler attests on the back cover.  Though he has been creative with stanza form and line-break, Beaton’s love for metre and joyful, often internal, rhyme demand the actual human voice.