Truth in a world of lies - a recommendation of latest poems

Poetry is where you find it, not where it says that it’s at. Where it says it’s at, I don’t find a lot of poetry there – very often, mostly none.” Thus said the great American poet Edward Dorn, and the first sentence there is quoted as an epigraph to Angus Macmillan’s “Polmaddy – a sequence”.

The second part has application too, though, since you might read the publicity from poetry publishers telling you “here’s where it’s at!” or words to that effect, which is only what you’d expect, but then there’s serendipity, just finding things where you do.

And that’s an essential part of the process. The unplanned. Accidentalism. So here are a few recommendations sent out like flat stones or wee slates into the ocean, skimming the water, who knows how many times. Watch where they land. Someone might see them splash neatly.

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No place better to start than with Angus’s book itself. The poems in The Ways of Salt (Stonehaven: Drunk Muse Press, 2024) are tensile, tough, slender and sharp, arising from the needs and pressures of language, psychology and geography.

Each one is closely attentive to the suspenseful relations between words and phrases across clean line breaks and deliberated spaces, ultimately forming the most reliable handholds, secure as geology in a world of great distances. Every poem generates its own patterning of unparaphrasable meaning, brilliantly evocative landscapes, or rather, hauntings of places and echoes of human movements and occupations of them, the urgencies and delicacies, the wayward sensitivities of humankind.

They are essential matters of value in an increasingly vandalised earth, crystals of treasurable worth in a tangible human universe, ranging in location from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to the Borders, spanning the nation’s keenest edges.

The “Poems Bizness” has its favourites but you won’t always find poetry there, reliably. You do here. The “Biz” is mainly conventions of approach and confirmation. Take for example, “wilderness” or whatever it is that’s “wild”: well, there’s the wilderness that you feel comfortable with and then there’s the wilderness that’ll kill you.

One goes for the sublime and delivers the picturesque, the other is almost unapproachable but the best of us always acknowledge it. How we do so is the artist’s skill. And, in The Ways of Salt, it’s in a fine abundance, clear on every page.

Portraits and landscapes, adult, serious elegies and throwaway laugh-aloud joke-haiku are all placed in sequence in a decorous, carefully paced arrangement. Domesticity – a father, mother, brother, a sweetie, a whisky, a daughter and her kite – establish a set of co-ordinate points within the parameters of a fragile, vulnerable homeland.

But we also venture out with Macmillan into the world of forebears, warred-over France and of wild nature, wolf-land territories, foxes, migrant sanderlings, the guga, swallows in the churchyard, nature’s quick-flitting defiance of religious human orthodoxies, sun, moon, stars, seasons, what the world can still afford to give us.

Such gifts Macmillan takes gratefully and returns to his readers with an exact generosity. He knows – he has worked for a long time to learn – just precisely what’s good for us. His English is leavened or seamed through with Gaelic and the collection keeps both these languages and the meaning of what language is and does, as a constant, consistently engaging, concern.

Themes of seeing, touch, tactile, visual, aural and olfactory immediacy, are present both as facts and miracles. They are miraculous because their presence can never be completely understood, and magic is what cannot be explained. This is a book of magic poems.

For example, in “Drystane dyker” we meet the man, settled into “a rhythm beyond braille, / an unworded language between / eye and hand and stone, webbed / in a haptic grammar of heft and balance” deft in the knowledge of “what to pick up, what to leave aside.”

He can see the line he’s building extend “across the hillside, / slanting beyond us, shaping a future tense”. and the next poem in the book, on the same page, picks up the imagery so carefully, in the opening and closing lines. It’s called “poems”:

some strike straight up the hill

reaching for that clearest blue

some meander and stumble

looking for lines of least resistance

some head for deep waters

hauling images from the undertow

each seeks to make the stones speak

before the moss grows into their mouths.

For contrast comes a cheeky little volume gathering the results of a curious experiment. In Sleekit: Contemporary Poems in the Burns stanza, edited by Lou Selfridge (Tapsalteerie), poets as various as Katie Ailes, Harry Josephine Giles, W.N. Herbert, David Kinloch, Simon Lamb, Jeda Pearl, Calum Rodger, Stewart Sanderson, Maria Sledmere, Taylor Strickland and Kate Tough and others were invited to exercise their sinews with what’s termed the “Standard Habbie” stanza (six long lines, all rhyming, one short, one long again, rhyming with the previous long lines, and one short again, rhyming with the short line).

It’s designed to trip up pretentiousness, overinflated magniloquence, overblown rhetoric. It’s a poetic form of quick movement, not stately procedure. (Burns himself uses it most effectively to bring down the horrible hypocrisy of “Holy Willie” in his “Prayer”.)

The poets here all carry it off with a general air of pleasantly amused engagement, an athleticism and comic poise, usually kept nervous (as anyone might be, taking part in a dance where you aren’t quite certain that you’re making the right steps).

That’s part of the fun. Another part is in the subjects. Titles include “Tae a Sex-Toy”, To a Moussaka”, “Ode tae a Tunnock’s Teacake”, “Lauders”, “(To a) Nous”. Here’s a stanza from Jeda Pearl’s “Ma Scotland is”:

bladderlocks n deid man’s bootlaces

microcosmic rock pool embraces

coastal melodies – shoreline graces

ripe mussels thieft

gulls screekin, swaddlin wind displaces

salted grief

(Image: Adam Jones (Western Telegraph Camera Club))

Words, phrases, miniature images, scattered in the lines according to the rhythm and observing the rhyme but in ways that are utterly foreign from Burns himself and thereby overturning expectations that the stanza has come to endorse. More closely arising from the canonical traditional, and going on to redress it, is WN Herbert’s “An Epistle”:

While London’s steekit beh thi snaw

and ilka sleekit chitterin jaw

is ettlin tae describe

hoo drifts ur white, and ice is cauld,

and feel thi lave maun be enthralled -

Eh’ve Bowmore tae imbibe,

And as the nicht - mair dreh nor me -

draas in, Eh think Eh’ll scrieve

a wee epistle tae, let’s see,

thi deid and Doctor Grieve -

auld hermits, wee MacDiarmids,

thi ghaist o guid Lapraik:

here’s a ravie fur young Davie,

and a rant for Rabbie’s sake.

The subversive jollity of some of the poems is often bubbly and blithe and quite confidently irreverent: “The only Sound / of Freedom” is “the signature jingle / of an operating system as you log off from your devices.”

This is a slim collection of quirky, barbed, workout poems, divertissements philologique, enjoyably frivolous, mainly. Their portent lies in the dwindling authority of the bardic figuration whose centrality in the myths of Scottish iconicism (is that the word? Or, iconicality?) remains, tattered, decayed, so often irrelevant and misinterpreted, and still central.

The poems respond to that centrality, chipping bits off that old block, or adding wet poultices to it. Or a bit of both.

Few things are more thankless than writing good poems. The readership is small, good critical appreciation is infrequent, and getting such appraisal into print and alerting a wider public to its virtues is increasingly difficult in a world so devoted in most of its media to the enunciation of nothing except sensationalist loud braying, which only increases in volume, until layers upon layers stack up like badly mixed pancakes in an impenetrable pile of noise, whose summary effect is to say, “Keep out, don’t interrupt!”

I take it that is what most public discourse is, these days and politicians don’t lead the way, they just fall into line.

We started with Angus Macmillan, whose favoured territory is his native Isle of Lewis, then we looked at poets from various parts of the country focusing on one poetic structure.

Here’s a different voice again, Graham Fulton, the bard of Paisley. And yet, if such an appellation might appear inflated, it carries an intrinsic self-ironising panache. All Fulton’s poems have this quality, and have had for decades. He has been writing splendidly lyrical, satirical, bitterly funny, happily sour poems, lightly, but seriously, skewering pretentious contemporary conventions with reliable accuracy and a verbal nonchalance that belies a long and hard-learned attentiveness to tone and the balance between informal address and serious intention.

The Testes of Lenin (Pindrop Press) is a substantial collection, with as wide a range of reference as you’d find in a good magazine (if such things existed anymore). Tolkien, Alasdair Gray, Balloch Bridge, Chariots of Fire, Dumbarton in the rain, Dawn of the Dead, the late Queen. I can’t imagine much would be outwith Fulton’s target area, if he set his sights on it.

The verse is fluent, lucid, untroubled by closed forms or strict structures. As Jim Ferguson puts it, Fulton is “a master of rhythmic free verse”, which means you can read his poems as brightly as articles by a good journalist.

That they use line breaks, enjambment, poised phrasing and tonal modulation so skilfully, is deceptive of the art involved.

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What comes through the whole collection, though, strongly, cleanly, consistently, is character. Reading this book, these poems, cover to cover Fulton is a good companion, and you’re glad to have made his acquaintance.

Hearing of Alasdair Gray’s death when he’s about to send his copy of Lanark to a charity shop, he pauses, decides to hold on to it. It’s only a moment, yet in the poem, made into something unemphatic yet memorable about what seems like necessary expediency and the priority of lasting value.

Likewise, thoughts prompted by a robot voice confirming his name when he calls a taxi, not “FULTON” but “SULTAN” and off we go on a magic carpet ride from Morrisons to the recycling bin. On Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary he’s on a bus travelling “with enough thrust / to put us into orbit”.

Paisley, Glasgow, the west of Scotland and the rest of the world as it comes into view, is Fulton’s domain. Politically astute, edged with cynicism, energised with a healthily derisive laughter, made buoyant by reflective compassion, the poems are nourishing an aptitude for good sense, and won’t be, and help us not to be, taken in by the culture of braying nonentities, lunatic actions, deluded, self-deluded people in the unreal world out there. Fresh air in the big city.

Meanwhile, I was alerted to Em Strang’s new collection Firebird (Shearsman Press) by Mike Small on his Bella Caledonia website (bellacaledonia.org.uk/2024/07/06/firebird-and-phoebe-anna-traquair/), where he says this: “Artists, whichever form they adhere to, try to look beneath the surface of things. They are meaning-makers, even (or perhaps especially) in times of trauma and change.”

In this new collection, Small tells us, Strang “explores directly this time of fire, confronting its destructive reality but also its potential as creative and spiritual metaphor. The following poem, taken from her collection, is inspired by the art of Meinrad Craighead who created a series of paintings in response to a devastating fire in 2004 on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived.”

I’ve seen a YouTube clip where a scientist explains to the egregious talk show hosts what burning in an overheated climate will mean: you will die because the blood in your veins will boil.

The TV hosts laughed hilariously in incredulity. The scientist was appalled at their reaction. That’s what mass media does to reality.

But poems treat reality differently. That’s why they’re still being written in Palestine. Here’s Strang’s poem from Firebird.

BURNING COYOTES

We let out the last air of us.

Above the burning hot scarlet we’re running,

sloping between night clouds,

leaving behind our bodies as offerings.

We don’t know what we’re doing

without paws, heads, muzzles or legs.

We leave as though there’s nothing

we need to take leave of.

We become seamless

in the way blood is seamless.

Nobody hears our souls lifting up,

their robust silence,

the way they float and rest,

float and rest

like brave lilies on an open pond,

up and out

beyond anything like life,

deep into mountains that are not mountains,

to a sandhill that is not a sandhill

in the middle of which is a red bridge that is not a bridge.

We cross the red bridge or the bridge crosses us

and, like strange birds in a new cosmos,

we pass over, giving back whatever gifts we have.

It is extravagantly dark here, until it is light.