Anne Macleod rounds-up and reviews some recent poetry titles

A Review by Anne MacLeod

Mariscat Sampler One:  poets Helen Evans, Peter Kenny, Marilyn Ricci.
Mariscat Press (2024) £

Mariscat Sampler Two:  poets Candida Elton, Phil Kirby and Jacqueline Thompson.
Mariscat Press (2025) £7.50

Sonnets for my mother as Lear
Martin Malone
Mariscat Press (2025) £7.50
[Mariscat titles can be ordered post free by emailing hamish.whyte@btinternet.com  Ed.]

Dwams
Shane Strachan
Tapsalteerie (2024) £10.00

In 2023, Mariscat Press won the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Competition and two of their poets were shortlisted for  the Poetry Prize. The generous prize money prompted them to open a submissions window and this beautifully produced series of Mariscat Samplers, three poets per issue, emerged.

In SAMPLER ONE we meet Helen Evans, Peter Kenny and Marilyn Ricci from Devon, Sussex and Leicestershire respectively. All three are widely published, and all three share a clarity of line and a love of simple, effective language.  

Helen Evans spins confident vulnerability.  ‘Flying isn’t dangerous/ Crashing is.’  she tells us in Life Lessons for Girls,  the opening poem and also the title of her contribution.   ‘There are only two types of pilot./Those who have./and those who could.’  She exhorts us to  ‘Always reach for the skies.’

In the poem this her love of flight becomes ecstatic. ‘If you’ve ever soared the sunshine edge/of a snow shower in April - wingtip in cloud/ cockpit bright with warmth –/ this’

She celebrates flight. And light. In Collateral she concludes ‘you’ll see bent heads transformed/by a shift in light….. which … illuminates you as well.’

Peter Kenny opens his time-travelling Chrononaut with The House with Blue Curtains, where he  sees himself at four, playing with his grandfather, dashing about a room ‘in wild figure eights buoyed by his laughter… /Though mum told me he was already dead/ by then …  never/lived a day in the house with blue curtains.’

Still, in The Door in the Wall he tries to open. ‘ .. every door, hoping to steal into a story;’

And the past can always be regained. As Chrononaut concludes. ‘…I can open my laptop and, by typing,/crawl into the dolmen of my beginning’.

In Marilyn Ricci’s pared-down Revenant, the story is the thing. This emerges gradually, a dark tale where poems flesh the shadows of a sad, uncertain past.  Also a playwright, Ricci skilfully unfolds the plot. Rooms are witnesses.   Doors are locked. Owls, tigers, an elephant and the raven of the protagonist’s relationship are uncannily remembered, outlived. As The Owl Advises, (the first poem of the set)  ‘a raven, even in dreams, must be faced down’. 

The past and an apparent present clash here, jostling till the final whisper, The Last Word. ‘… let’s face it, you’re merely a ghost/from my past and I am here, right now.  Alive.’

There is much life too, to be found in SAMPLER TWO, where poets from Arbroath, Devon and the West of Scotland ply their words.

Jacqueline Thompson’s Backspeirin trawls a dark North Sea, ‘catching treats for beauties asleep/under flash Orion’s belt’.  But ‘we mustn’t gaze homewards,’  she warns.  ‘It’s pure backspeirin.’

Backspeirin. The only Doric word in this series, it sets the tone for this lively questioning of love and loss, of how women are seen, persuaded to portray themselves.  In Selfie  ‘my look is polished marble,/ skin purged of  human blots,/jawline held divinely taut,’ while ‘voluminous on the heater,’  the poet wryly notes ‘Nana’s pants.’ 

Thompson objects to objectification.  ‘Step into your garden and watch’ she demands in Glow Worms. ‘Cradle us in your palm./Look us straight in the eye.’

How could we do otherwise?

The Breaking Faith of Phil Kirby’s  title is taken from the poem Her Spanish Watch where sorting through his mother’s belongings after her death feels like betrayal.  The poet finds and keeps her Spanish watch, one she always wore, which ‘measures nothing now except/the compass of her absent wrist.’

These elegant, elegiac poems cast a wistful gaze on family life, on separation.  ‘..how is it I’ve come to be / the only one of this side of the glass?’ (In the Garden.) 

And in Unsung he muses ‘ But I lose the point of numbering such ageless things, when… you could count how often I have said/ ‘I love you’ on the fingers of one hand.’

Candida Elton’s Soft Gifts of Moss has Snakelock Anemones concealing their ‘.. wild and / boundless dreams of conquering/ the world’  and settling for ‘the small space conferred on us.’

Ravens too are constrained. In the poem of that name they bear ‘soft gifts of moss for fair exchange’ and ‘nest and scavenge and connive’ but ‘Rarely straying far from home, round and round/ the rugged rock the ragged ravens roam.’ 

This collection breathes hill and sea and mermaids, ending in October.  ‘It’s rainbow season’.  Winter  will follow, bring ‘whooper swans’ sunlit’ or ‘.. heron’s flight on a misty morning.’ 

Not so constrained, then.

 In short, Mariscat Samplers One and Two introduce six fine poets.  I can’t wait for number Three.

DWAMS by Shane Strachan.

Shane Strachan, Scots Scriever from 2022 to 2023, lectures in creative writing at the University of Aberdeen. Dwams, his first poetry collection was long listed for the Saltire First Book of the Year. A performer,  he has written for the stage, and been involved in a plethora of creative projects.  In this lively and varied collection he merges poems from all these different areas, poems from lockdown and found poems from the Aberdeen streets.  And they’re nearly all in Doric.

Strachan has a good ear,  is particularly skilled at conveying differences in voice and tone.  Dreepin, the long poem that opens the collection, draws us through  Aberdeen’s oil years from 1969 till the present day, a series of messages that start on landlines and end up, perhaps, on WhatsApp, the message read but not responded to.  ‘Hello, Sexy, it’s me,/ yer North Sea sugar daddy  –/ weet, sweet and fiery!/ God’s gift tae  modernity!’ Love at first sight. The poem reels us through the decades, oil crises and Gulf Wars, and  inevitable downturns brought about by climate change, but in the end  ‘O wad some power the gift give us/ tae see oorsels….  Weel, dare ye look…. It’ll be yer ainsel reflected back’  ‘But fa wis Orpheus?’ The  message echoes,  ‘fa wis Eurydyce?’

Greek gods make another appearance in Colonnade, a poem written in response to a 2016 project responding to the architecture of Union Street. ‘Watch Helen of Troy attempt to sail/ her buggy through showers of battling hail;/.. Poseidon’s fingers turn cold and numb/as he waits for a bus that never comes…. And poor Dionysus, bleezing since ten,/ has got his head stuck in a bin again.’ 

Ordinary Aberdonians manage the buses better.  In Shelter, a found poem from a Union Street bus shelter, Strachan weaves the richnesses of Doric, English and Polish into a tapestry of the city at Halloween. And in Just Another Job, Bill Gibb’s  working life and life as a child on a farm near New Pitsligo are celebrated. His sister offers the final conclusion.  ‘.. Oh, Billy was just an ordinary man/ and a man fa wis extraordinary.’

This collection is energetic;  Doric dancing on the page. You will enjoy it.

SONNETS FOR MY MOTHER AS LEAR  by Martin Malone

Martin Malone, an editor for Poetry Salzburg and ambassador for the Scottish Poetry Library, has previously published four poetry collections and four pamphlets. He is also guitarist, songwriter and sound engineer for the band Innocents abroad.  He divides his time between Donegal, Aberdeenshire and France, which must have greatly complicated the experience of dealing with his mother’s dementia and the complex systems  involved in caring for those with the condition. In the twenty ‘raggedy' sonnets – his description –  of Sonnets for my Mother as Lear he offers us a spare and moving retelling of their journey.

And what a story he shares.  His proud and independent mother is eighty-six and struggling to live at home. As her confusion deepens, she is more and more at risk. One carer appears dishonest, others genuinely nurturing but not always able to manage their spirited charge who time and again refuses help. In The art of our necessities is strange the baffling, Orwellian nature of official language looms.  ‘The checklist below is representative/of the individual. Please do not worry/ if you can’t give the data it asks for,// it may not apply to everyone; may not/tell us anything of importance at all.’ 

The eventual crisis happens. In Sonnet XVI  What should follow these eclipses?  ‘In Donegal when it comes, I take the call /in some car park as we count our blessings:/a fall but not a bad one..  a hospital bed’ .  They are at last able to organise residential care for his indomitable mother whom he visits in the home in Sonnet XX We two alone will sing like birds I’ the cage. He finds her in the lounge, singing and dancing, and she draws him into her dance. ‘ .. of course, you’ve no idea who I am,’ he  says ‘ though now, at last, I think I know you.’

The poet is wrong in one thing, though.  His sonnets are not ‘raggedy.’ Loss and despair are all the more poignant for this pared-down style. Malone’s language and sense of line perfectly convey the human tragedy.