Alan Riach: Oppressors might not give up – but neither do Scots poets

Harry Lauder’s prancing mockery, Andy Stewart’s kilt-swinging glee, Stanley Baxter at his worst. Each of these “entertainers” was also capable of being at their best – in fact, they knew their Scots –but they used it in the service of commercial priorities. Verbal exploitation is a product and perpetuation of colonial subjugation.

Am I going too far already? Well, two recent books of poems take the provenance and authority of Scots into a different dimension.

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Rab Wilson’s Collier Laddie (Luath Press) is a commemoration of the 1984-85 UK miners’ strike, as the back cover paragraphs explain. This was “the largest union-led industrial action in the 20th century”.

Rab was deeply involved as a working miner and the poems in this book are interwoven with his contemporary diary of events as they happened, from March 12, 1984 to March 5, 1985.

The poems have a thoughtful, carefully considered and meditated, reflective character and are often in the voices of individual characters, miners themselves. But they are placed in the context of an unfolding narrative so that the reader re-enacts the moment-by-moment, day-by-day, week-by-week period of tension through the strike itself.

It’s a mesmerising and profoundly moving book for anyone who really cares about what changed so radically in the overwhelming forces set against working people at that time, and what that struggle encapsulated.

Rab is a chronicler of the miners’ experience but the book is more than that. It is an embodiment of a turning point in modern UK and Scottish history, when the authority of Conservative commercialisation and exploitation decisively gained the upper hand, leaving the rest of us with only one way forward – resistance.

To quote once more: “Collier Laddie is an ode to resilience, solidarity and the enduring legacy of those who fought for justice during a pivotal moment in industrial history.”

Here’s a sample poem: Pat Rattray, Kelty:

Ah leeve in a place in Fife caa’d Kelty

It wis built oan coal, but there’s nae Pits noo

An men that’s goat work traivel, baur a few

We saw it comin ah could hae telt ye.

Ah picketed Longannet, Castlehill,

Solsgirth, Kincardine, ah wis at Orgreave

They jiled me twice, ye’d haurdly believe

Ah’d nevvir yince been in ony trouble.

In ninety-twa we aa walked tae London

Whit a fantastic adventure that wis

Ye’d ne’er believe, fowk wanted tae touch us

An the kindness we goat fae everyone.

Naw, ah’ve nae regrets, ah focht the guid fight

An did it because ah thocht it wis right.

And here’s a diary entry, to give you a sample of that: “Tuesday, November 20, 1984 – A chap was killed at Auchinlek today while digging coal from an embankment. His name was Gorman and he worked at Barony, though I can’t recall him, and he did work on the surface.”

Two instances of the book’s dynamics. Following an introduction and prologue, Part 1 is entitled “The Enemy Within …?” and introduces 20 characters, mainly the miners themselves, from various parts of Scotland, interspersed with the diary entries.

Part 2, “Come All ye Bold Miners” reflects on aspects of the history, memorials and wonderfully unforgiving panegyrics on the death of Margaret Thatcher.

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Parts 3, 4 and 5, “Collier Crambo-Clink”, “‘Fair Fa’ My Collier Laddie!’”, and “Pit Oot the Lamp” take a poet’s various points of view through time and place, reflecting upon and delivering judgement upon the events of history as only poets can do.

Rab Wilson was born and educated in the Ayrshire village of New Cumnock. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he worked at the Barony Colliery in Auchinleck for eight years. After the strike and the closure of the pits, he trained as a staff nurse with the NHS, latterly in a psychiatric intensive care unit.

He took “early retirement” in 2012, after he’d become a “whistleblower” in a case that became headline national news and resulted in sweeping changes in health care and patient safety due to his persistent campaigning.

Rab was one of the recipients in 2003 and 2004 of the McCash Scots Language Poetry Prize, Scotland’s premier poetry competition, run annually by Glasgow University and The Herald newspaper.

The first work that brought him public recognition was his “owersettin” into Scots of the famous medieval Persian work The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. Wigtown Book Town Company, as part of their promotions for their festival in 2004, had a version of Rab’s Omar Khayyam made which I understand is currently the biggest poetry book in the world, measuring 10ft X 4ft!

He also compiled, edited and published an anthology of contemporary Dumfries and Galloway poets’ work, entitled Chuckies fir the Cairn. Entirely in Scots and Gaelic, it launched in January of 2009. These are mere indications of the range of Rab’s work and his attentiveness – his friendliness, one might say – to the enhancement of others.

Just as all the major Scottish poets of the last century have been, he is an educator. He’s committed to widening engagement. His own collections begin pre-eminently with Accent o the Mind, which was launched in Spring 2006, and continued with Life Sentence, in 2009. By 2011, Rab had published his sixth book, A Map for the Blind.

Rab’s commitment here and his enduring loyalty to seeing justice done in the social world is also an aspect of his work as a poet, a practice that extends beyond artistic composition into direct political engagement.

He is not afraid to do what many, perhaps most, of our politicians fail to do. He speaks truth to power. All the arts do this and as a poet and as a moral human being, Rab’s work is committed to this. After all, there is only one Supreme Court and it is not in London, nor in any building anywhere: It is The Court of Poetry.

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Throughout the first decade of the present century, Rab worked tirelessly in partnerships with various individuals and institutions, the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) Ayr, NHS Ayrshire and Arran and the ministerial advisory group on the Scots language at the Scottish Parliament, alongside luminaries and activists such as Derrick McClure, Billy Kay, Janet Paisley, James Robertson, Matthew Fitt and others in the effort to strengthen and preserve the Scots language in the 21st century.

In March 2011, Rab officially released his poetry-driven mining documentary film Finding the Seam. This project traces the history of the local mining industry and mixes stunning images with verse.

I remember visiting the miners at a colliery in Ayrshire with Rab and my wife Rae, who was also involved in the project, representing the UWS. The foreman gathered the working miners in their communal shed and told them, “Now, lads, we’re going to hear some poetry read to us by Rab Wilson”. The looks on their faces were sceptical.

These were hard men, hard- working men and intelligent, insightful and clever people with their own formidable expertise and strengths. Within minutes, Rab had introduced himself, read some poems by that other fine Scottish miner poet Joe Corrie, and then some of his own poems, and the men were completely won over, paying attention, enjoying the poems, simply for what they were. There was no pretentiousness on either side.

That local loyalty and quality of friendliness has an international context too. In solidarity with working people, Rab read in New York in 2011 at the Bowery Poetry Club, invited by the Walt Whitman Fellow George Wallace. During this visit to the States, Rab also spoke at the Working-Class Studies Association’s annual conference in Chicago, where he read from his mining-related poetry and showed Finding the Seam to an enthusiastic audience of American academics.

Rab’s multifarious achievements are sustained by a sense of loyalty, to his locality, his language, and then to family, but then extending into all that is manifest in human potential enacted at its best. He was justly given the Saltire Society Fletcher of Saltoun Award in November 2023.

Here’s one more sample, a short poem that illustrates simply the quality of Rab’s work: The Greater Sea.

Oor boat is rigged tae face the greater sea,

The day daws blithely whan we must set sail.

Hou aften hae we twa wrocht in the gale,

An waithert aa its wrath tae bear the gree?

We stievely grupt the tiller, haund oan haund,

Held firmly tae the course that we hud chosen;

Be’t sauf bield o the loch, else sea, or ocean,

Nae maitter! We wid siccarly mak laund!

An mony’s the lauch we hud alang the wey,

We caredna dael-a-hate the haund fate gien us,

But made the best o’t, kennin fine atween us

The bonds o luve we hud wid aye haud sway .

Ayont the faur horizon Venus lowes,

The Cosmos beckons tae us; pynt the prow!

ALONGSIDE Rab’s recent book, I’d like to praise Len Pennie’s first collection, poyums (Canongate). Here is perhaps her most famous poem, a wonderful refutation of the dominance of the English language in our culture, and a rejection of its usurping authority: “I’m no havin children”:

I’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans;

an ye’ll can ask whit A cry them, no what are their names;

an they’ll be gettin a piece, no a wee packed lunch;

an they’ll be haein a scran, no having a munch;

they’ll fanny aboot, they willnae waste time,

an when they scrieve their wee poyums, A’ll mak sure they rhyme.

A’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans,

who’ll be gowpin an bealin when they’ve goat aches an pains;

an instead of don’t worry, A’ll say dinnae fash;

instead of stand your ground, dinnae take any snash;

ma weans’ll be crabbit, no in a bad mood;

and they’ll greet, no cry, when their day isnae good.

A’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans,

wae a prood ancient language crammed in their wee brains;

an whenever life tells them their English is bad,

A’ll tell them the hassles that their mammy had,

an A’ll say ma maw’s words till the day that A’m deid:

Ye’ll be awright, hen, ye’ve a guid Scots tongue in yer heid.

The very title poyums challenges the strictures of Scots language purists, or more broadly, puritans anywhere, which as a fellow Airdrieonian I consider a particularly wonderful attitude to take by anyone from that darkly post-industrial, neo-sectarian world.

The sheer amount of anti-Scots, and horrifically misogynistic online abuse Len’s writing has drawn is astonishing. I say “drawn” and I won’t say “provoked” because it’s the medium itself that provokes the abuse, not her message. Some fools are more susceptible to it than others. Pity them.

What stays impressive about the collection as a whole is its deep and unapologetic seriousness. There’s not a trace of embarrassment or diffidence in her attacks upon masculine superiorism and that goes along with her courageous and sustained attack upon linguistic imperialism.

Nor does this result in seriousness beyond humour. There are wonderfully bitter turns of wit and venomous barbs which any reader can savour and enjoy. One poem, Yours, begins: “He said, ‘Write me a poyum,’ this boy that I knew; / I said, ‘Break my heart and I’ll write about you.’ It ends: “He said, ‘Write me a poyum,’ this boy that I knew, / I hope this one makes up for what I did to you.” But you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out what comes in between those two couplets!

Tender love poems (Coorie) and angry praise poems (Address tae the Leid) rub shoulders with ferociously self-determined feminist poems, mysteriously engaging speculations, as in The Library: “What if stories told us? What if books read us back? [….] Could you sail on a shipwreck of paper and glue? / Imagine the tale if your story read you.” This poem ends with a kind of manifesto of commitment: “And though far from idyllic, I do not intend / To abandon my book till I’ve written the end.” You’re left hoping that that won’t be for a long time yet: you know there’s so much more to come!

Not all the poems in Rab Wilson’s Collier Laddie and Len Pennie’s poyums are in Scots – both switch with facility and fluency to English when they want to – again , there’s nothing purist or puritanical about their practice of language, and there’s always more to it than phonetics. But both these collections are among the best of recent months.

And together, Len Pennie and Rab Wilson are both essential parts of the antidote to the exploitative caricatures of Scots and Scottishness our immediate galaxy, the world here and now, still so unfortunately suffers with.