We Are Migrant by Jim Mackintosh

Seahorse Publications (2024) £10.00

A Review by George Gunn

REVIEW BY GEORGE GUNN

There are two areas of poetry that are vital to its success. One is language and the other is story. Jim Mackintosh’s book, “We Are Migrant”, engages the reader with both. The Oxford dictionary describes migrant as “a person who moves from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions”. So either as a noun or an adjective there is a sense of movement, of urgency and necessity in the term. Often it is used disparagingly but in Jim Mackintosh’s work the word encompasses both the personal-political and the economic-historical realm, where family experience melds into the broader experience of emigration-immigration. No subject is more pertinent to so many in the modern world and used in such a toxic fashion by governments around the world.

Yet Jim Mackintosh sees the world as a poet and his radical and random empathy is apparent from the beginning in the poem “By Grace” where the protagonist states quite plainly.

“I am migrant. A century narrowed in eyes
widened by Dunfanaghy’s peace
and behind me on the hill a kirk-yard of my discovered ancestors resting
safe from our turmoil yet still
willing to guide me to a better understanding.”

Thus the narrative of the collection is laid out and what we undertake as a reader is to inhabit the hegira the poet takes us on, through many states and time, whether it is, as in “The Fever Crossing”, with the Irish navvies on the building of the Carlisle to Glasgow railway, dying of Typhus in 1840,

“Stand on the hard shoulder,” the poet urges the workers, “sense polluting thunder
pass relentless, unforgiving
of your silence buried between the ridge and the river.”

Or in the poem “Grains”, about the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 where the children are compared to scattered grains,

“I hold hope in my hands and wait.
I must. It is too easy to let go.”

When we let go of our empathy we betray our humanity. In light of the ongoing  collective tragedy of Gaza Jim Mackintosh, in the poem “What Now?”, notices a solitary workman in a ravaged Aleppo and captures a moment of continuity, of everyday human activity amid the violence, and asks,
“What is there now for the cabinet-maker
at the soot-trimmed velvet noon?”

where “Aleppo’s innocent children
played on open ground…”

The English language in this book is spare, even tentative, allowing the image to inhabit its own space, as if too much detail would choke it, yet on the few occasions Jim Macintosh writes in his native Scots the language is freer, more relaxed and musical. As for example in “Revelled Thrums”, where

“yon skoddy notion o daein summit, ill-best,
gaun tae War until you Pointless Celebrity Jungle Factor
distracts wir confeesed-like state o breathin”

Here the Scots language is taken out of its often ghettoised rural comfort zone to witness a modern war with no rules. The language makes the subject memorable as well as highlighting the horror of barrel bombs and the “laser-precise deid”, the “daith-ruckle… an corpies/ blank gawpin..” A living language is the life blood of poetry. Most poetry produced these days drips only embalming fluid. 

Seamus Heaney once wrote, “The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” 

This is what Jim Mackintosh attempts in “We Are Migrant”. The book, the hegira, ends up where we began – in Dunfanaghy, on the north coast of Donegal – this time in a pub where the poet enjoys a pint of Guinness - weary one feels from the horrors he has witnessed – yet stoic, for it is no easy thing to aspire to clarity in an age of catastrophe. He finishes his pint and leaves. 

“Crossing the street I stopped mid-stride. The Hotel with its familiar name and rooms
now housed, like we all are from something in life, refugees. I looked nine floors up
to a face and a hand on the window. I raised my hand in solidarity.

We are migrant.” (Nine Floors Up)

These poems help us all lift our hand and to recognise – the hand and the face at the window, yes, but something more, something greater and something summed up by the late great Hamish Henderson,

“No one can interest me in ‘fine’ writing as such… Any fool poet can write well if he happens to have talent – but the poets who LOVE have a much larger problem, not only to write well, but to express once again – after a lapse of several centuries, the WHOLE world, and this impinges not on one individual but on the collective.”

This is the ambition of this book. Buy it, go on the journey and see for yourself.