The Age of Water: Book of poems is lyrics to history of a life

Perrie grew up in the Lanarkshire mining village of Quarter, looked after by grandparents whose speech was a rich Scots and who had literally come out of the 19th century. At Low Waters Primary School, he encountered Hugh MacDiarmid’s children’s poem 
“The Bubblyjock” (or turkey), a bird that “twists its neck like a serpent / But canna get oot a richt note” for “the bubblyjock swallowed the bagpipes / And the blether stuck in its throat.” Instant delight.

Perrie attended Hamilton Academy, a school he described as “very pukkah” at that time, where the English language was privileged and Scots was not tolerated. There was nothing of MacDiarmid (not even Burns!) but an enlightened teacher invited his class to read some of Wordsworth’s sonnets and demonstrate their understanding by writing one.
“That was the beginning of an awareness that that was what I wanted to do,” Perrie noted: to write poems, to be a poet. Also, as a very young child, he attended speech therapy classes and became “obsessional about language”. 

His grandparents encouraged him and gave him the confidence to pursue his ambitions. He studied philosophy at Edinburgh University and went on to help start a literary magazine in the wake of the 1967 SNP success in Hamilton. The Chapman, launched in 1969, evolved into Chapman, one of Scotland’s most important literary journals. Perrie has also helped edit the periodicals Lines Review and Margin: International Arts Quarterly.

READ MORE: Book of portraits celebrates hard work of Frontline Heroes

Perrie has published numerous books of poetry, beginning with a small pamphlet, Deidre (under the pseudonym Patrick MacCrimmon) and his first substantial books were A Lamentation for the Children (1977) and By Moon and Sun (1980). His critical essays appeared in Out of Conflict (1982), while an account of travelling through Eastern Europe, Roads that Move, appeared in 1991, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the USSR. Various books of poems have appeared since then. For many, Perrie has been resident in Dunning, a small village in Perth and Kinross where settlement dates back at least to the Iron Age. 

He has co-edited and published more than 30 issues of the occasional poetry magazine Fras (the Gaelic word for a seed – or small shot from a gun), and related publications. The Ages of Water is his first substantial collection since Decagon: Selected Poems 
1995-2005.

Beginning with the intuitive and visceral understanding between the human and animal worlds, and with the “cunning, manipulative, wise” potential glimpsed in the eyes of a child, this new collection is a resetting of co-ordinate points, a reorientation compelled by maturity, an acknowledgement of personal and social regeneration as a hoped-for, and welcome, principle of life. Here, for example, is 

“A Gaelic Air”:

Weighted with generations the fiddle soars
from C to A with a swerve of bow;
pale congregations mass behind the tune,
intone the great sea-swelling psalms;
retreat, resurgence, hope and woe.

You can’t step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus, but Perrie knows you can’t even step into it once: it’s already moving along. Underlying all the poems here is a sense of the Gaelic word “dùthchas”: a tripartite understanding of land, people and culture, and how these three things are inter-related across terrains and centuries. 

But such an understanding is no recipe for complacent assurance: there are shadows moving in “the human dark”, families where hurt is commonplace, blighted youth, the tragic consequence of love asserting itself through human agents despite the inimical weight of oppressors.

That sense of impending tragedy is nowhere more poignant and beautifully expressed than in “Deidre’s leaving of Scotland” – a translation from an ancient Gaelic song in which Perrie catches perfectly the presence of love between people and within specific landscapes of Argyll: “Grey mossy stone in Glen Etive / made our first shelter …” Here the shapely terrain of the land is “herding the sun” and “green-gold mornings” are “chill / in lark-light”.

This is sung by Deidre, as she is about to return to Ireland with her beloved, Naoise, where they will meet their tragic destiny. 

When I first visited the great poet Iain Crichton Smith at his home in Taynuilt, near Glen Etive, he opened the door and smiled in his mustard short-sleeved shirt and pink trousers (the Gaels always loved colour) and, gesturing out with a sweep of his arm at the landscape surrounding us, he said: “This is their land, you know – all around here – Deidre and Naoise.” The story and people were present tense to him, both mythic and real. Good company to keep.

READ MORE: Alan Riach: Hugh MacDiarmid and the Brownsbank years

Mythical and real women and men from ancient Gaeldom and ancient Greece are the company behind the immediate presences evoked in Perrie’s poems. And there is a “horizon you carry always with you” that indicates a world beyond the present tense.
The Ages of Water is not the repayment of the final account, as one had the sense in Norman MacCaig’s last book of poems, Voice Over, that a life’s work was nearing completion – although MacCaig’s posthumous collected poems gathered numerous works that had not been previously published. Rather, Perrie’s book resembles the answer to the fabular Celt whose modest reply to his interlocutor’s “Have you lived here all your life?” was the gently corrective: “Not yet!”

Fragility, or vulnerability, is well caught, though: in “Reflections” he writes: “Our boundaries lie just upon the skin / meniscus keeps us from the absolute.” And sighs: “The things my poor hands cannot hold! / Love, water, light”. The time evoked in “Ages” and the perpetuity of change evoked by “Water” are evanescent in this poem: “the alchemies that humanise / mortality”.

Some poems relate to paintings, some to classical compositions, all carry lightly a sense of reference to the world out there, of landscape, of other people, of made things in art and nature, the blessings of culture, the brutal impositions of controlling and usurping politics. 

Most of the poems are short, almost epigrammatic observations and judgements, but the title poem is a more extended enquiry and affirmation. All are deceptively easy to read, fluent in tone and balanced in diction: but all suggest more depth than they release on first reading, and repay revisiting, time and again.

If there is something unfashionable about a poetry more concerned with great art and the big questions, there is also something inherently welcome in it: a fearlessness, and a commitment, or in Nietzsche’s terms, a resignation, but also a cheerfulness.

Deidre’s leaving of Scotland

Short, short are our days in Scotland;
Glen Etive, Glendaruel
loch-scattered fairyland
green and gold.
Out of our bitter Ireland fled,
each binding the other
in fate’s love-net
black, white, red.
Grey mossy stone in Glen Etive
made our first shelter, bracken
slopes a cattle-fold
herding the sun.
In steep, deep-wooded Glen Massan
half-sleeping we listen
to clarsach tunes
on the burn.
Wake up to green-gold mornings, chill
in lark-light, walk the dream
pastures of may-thorn
rowan, broom.
Ever, ever I would stay there
but you would not stay, not stay
to hear the cuckoo, cuckoo
fade away.
Glen Etive, Glen Orchy, Dun Súibhne
green Glendaruel, slow, weighty
names as honey
coat my tongue.
I would not leave you, Scotland,
but to go with my love
sweet-voiced Naoise
hand in hand;
he of the raven hair
brow of the snow-drift
mouth of blood.

Alan Riach is hosting an online event tomorrow from 5-6pm, Landmarks: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank,which National readers are welcome to attend. It’s free but ticketed.It comes in advance of an exhibition about the poet to be held at Biggar and Upper Clydesdale Museum.
Register at landmarks-hugh-macdiarmids-brownsbank.eventbrite.co.uk