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Poetry Scotland 91-93 Main Street Callander FK17 8BQ UK ISSN 1460-681X Ł1 email Poetry Scotland visit Poetry Scotland's Website read reviews of later issues Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page Home page Notes for publishers Want to be a reviewer? Anthologies. Books. Audio. Magazines. Software. Video. Artefacts. Web design by Gerald England This page last updated: 28th August 2004.		Poetry Scotland #13
		Subtitled New Verse for a Young Century the editorial reflects on how poets seem to write longer lines at the turn of centuries. It seems not all do as although two pages of this 8 page A4 size magazine are split only into 2 columns to accomodate longer-lined poems, one page still manages four columns and the rest have three. One of the longer-lined poems is Frank Kuppner's LEO HENNIGSDORFER (AN INDEX OF FIRST LINES) which includes such gems as God is, essentially, a personification of the universe ... If history could carry four mugs up a stairway If you are not about to read this poem ... She was slim and supple and appreciably above the age of consent ... What a fool I was to listen to that travel agent ... You weren't who I thought you were — but then, neither was I. Hamish Whyte contributes some TUSCAN HAIKU including Late cappucino in the square: sugar wrappers fly in the warm breeze while Gerald England's are set in Scotland single track road ends 30mph sign can i speed up now? Fred Beake writes affectionately about an old car; Angus Calder questions the use of pomegranates; Brian Louis Pearce writes poignantly about Zimbabwe; Michael Malone bewails a Lewis shipwreck; Colin Donati parodies Milton — and there's a lot more besides that I haven't mentioned — certainly worth a quid of anybody's money.
		reviewer: Mandy Smith.

		Poetry Scotland #25
		Poetry Scotland is a usefully mixed collection of poetry, written by poets associated with Scotland and with the British small press, and includes some of the best poets writing in Scotland today. A stapled publication of twelve pages, each page is crammed with two, three or four columns of poems, some of which are in dialect, and one in Irish Gaelic. There are only one or two poets whose names I recognised but others will, no doubt, be well known in Scotland. What stands out is the traditionalism of these writers and their concern for, and interaction with, the full range of the British poetry tradition. One of the longest pieces is a poem on the back page called THE VISIT, by Norman Lothian, winner of the Ayr Writers Club poetry competition of 2002. There is a letter of explanation from the author telling readers how the poem came to be written that readers can find on the Poetry Scotland website. The first poem on the first page, DISPLACEMENT by Sheena Blackhall, is in dialect, but is easy to understand and full of humour: Granfaither bred milk kye, Hard uddered, fu o cream. Shires fur the ploo, Reid wattled, bigsy cocks. Robert Davidson's NIGHT VISITS is a series of ten poems in rhyme of which poem number four FOSTERING stays in the mind: "The trains are always late," she said to me, for Perth, Stirling and Falkirk Grahamston. These days I make the journey just for fun. There's someone I'm extremely keen to meet, but if not him there'll be another one. Several longer poems take up the middle section, of which Steve Sneyd's poem NOT LIKE IN DEAD POETS' SOCIETY impressed with its couplets He couldn't do it, couldn't go on sitting as if nothing'd happened He had to do it, had to ask an answer why Kieran Furey produces a sequence of poems called CLIMBING BEN NEVIS. Almost surreal in tone, the menace, danger and excitement of climbing is unsettling. The writer captures the mystery of mountaineering in this line, We viewed the mist and missed the view. Hazel B. Cameron's poem, THE WING OF PRAYER, details a mother's suicide with her two babies. Cameron is involved here with the surface of language, relying on a balance of tone, repetition and questioning to invite the reader into co-producing: I was the wing on the prayers of the night, I was the glimmer that gave hope a light. When this style works it can be very moving, when it doesn't, it can become tedious. Olivia McMahon's MY MOTHER'S HOUSE TURNS INTO A FOLK MUSEUM, has a sure touch, a measured elegiac tone: You had no time for this sort of house. This is the sort of place you sprang from, ran from. In the end the effect of this publication is one of great abundance and a reinforcing of the message to look outside one's own area once in a while. The issue contains some of Scotland's best living poets, and is held together by volume and excellence of diversity. Within the limits of a review, I've touched on some of the poets represented. There are many more. Poetry Scotland illustrates the poetic quality arising from Scotland, and is bold in its commitment to dialect, language and the promotion of little-known poets. Try it. It's a good read.
		reviewer: Patricia Prime.

		Poetry Scotland ##26/27
		Issue 26 which comes as free supplement to issue 27, is a single A2 sheet folded to A4 size, four pages, 51 new poems, virtually an entire booksworth, by Robin Fulton. His work is new to me, so my remarks come from my immediate and evolving experience of the poems, not from a helpful background or context. One might expect, from such a substantial selection of what one assumes are all recent poems and can therefore be presumed to reflect current preoccupations, to have some notion of what these preoccupations are, of what makes the poetry tick: after several readings, I have little strong notion, and helpful generalisation is difficult. This is indeed difficult-to-obscure, laconic writing, and it's paradoxically easier for me to discern what it doesn't have than what it does; it is not, on the whole, overmuch concerned with relationships or with emotional states and conditions, with love or any pervasive domestic context. It is writing that holds you at arms' length, indeed that holds itself at arms' length. WALKING INTO A COLD WIND opens: I watch myself from a great distance — and that is characteristic of the almost clinical, certainly detached, attitude winch pervades the writing. The impersonal solitary figure in DUTCH, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY is as closely observed as Fulton seems prepared to be concerning people: There, far left, under a huge hat, bent on his lonely anonymous journey at this moment stomping past a low leafless badly pollarded willow. not glancing at the inn, a figure too minor to be given features... The last statement surely relates to Fulton as well as to the painter: he too finds the figure too minor to be given features, is not prepared to play imaginative conjuring tricks with what the painter has offered him. Another poem about pictures, indeed called PICTURES, ends with a sketch of two girls, and again one is conscious of an uninvolved, arms' length detachment: Standing in scrubby river bank growth two girls: the tall one uncertain what to do with her hands makes fists of them, the small one, solemn but not yet so troubled, keeps her hat tense balancing her huge circle of hat. Yes, there is some insightful reading of the situation; but at some distance. From time to time, a "we" appears in the writing; but one has no sense of an intimate or involved relationship. Fulton's poetry makes rather than says, is carefully and precisely crafted, wastes no words and makes no concessions, has often to be worked out and reflected on, is not anxious to explain itself. There is a good deal of observation — of the natural scene (several times filtered through the eyes of a painter) which is likewise not lush, not generous: WEATHER-COCK Not pastoral at all this growl of February wind through the bary wiry ash-tree. The window has forgotten summer's waterfall of leaves... There is a pervasive concern with landscape and the elements of landscape, with the large and elemental; with skies and snow and trees and clouds: SEPTEMBER LEVELS Wedged clouds remembering at last how to move move. UNSTILLED Black clouds barge softly in. Sun- light leans down at odd angles... Another poem derived from observation of a painting (TO THE RESCUE by Dorothy Stirling) depicts a scene precarious but balanced, and I think the notion of balance is important to Fulton Snowflakes are good at balancing. says NEW LIVES. In this poem/painting, two sheep are marooned on a pinnacle; this is the second of the two verses: In real life, a scene to run and run from and still stand trapped in, like the animals paralysed, with the fixed eyes of statues. In art, a scene to keep returning to, the improbability of rescue encouraging inner calm and balance. And there perhaps we have a clue: the poetry, with its relative human uninvolvement, its emotions on a tight rein, its reluctance to mix with the mess and precariousness of real life, expresses a strategy for coping and handling. From a high window, the speaker looks out: Highest up in High Petergate I look from a window out on a street so bare humanity has been uninvented... Perhaps that is another way of expressing the preference for the non-human, for buildings, for places and scenes, with which the poetry is largely concerned: that, and the pervasive notion of what yet another poem, ON AN OLD PAVEMENT, calls ...getting the hang of keeping a measure of balance... Issue 27 consists of two sheets of A2 folded and stapled to form a broadsheet of six A4 sides incorporating over 60 poems: if you can cope with poems crowding each other at tops, bottoms and sides (which I found difficult with my wandering eye), this is a value-for-money publication which is also doing the environment a paper-saving favour. As to the contents, a few inept items dismayed me. Richard Livermore's THE WAY IT IS This excuse is risible. We are indivisible, you and I: one is all. So why does murder not appal the suits and ties who order things with bombers waiting in the wings to back them up? is naive and the meaning led by the nose by the self-inflicted tyranny of rhyme (i.e. the author is saying what the rhyme leads him to say, and looks rather random). Then Pamela Constantine's THE KINGDOM OF CELT When the kingdoms [sic] goddess Is welcomed to her throne, The king who rules but half a land Shall dwell no more alone... would be acceptable if a small child had written it, whilst Alex Migliore's INHUMANITY is a scrap of sawn-up prose which needs a narrative context to make it significant, and some, for Heaven's sake, of the attributes of ars poetica (e.g. some alliterative and assonantal patterning, imagery, lively and intelligent concrete language rather than the largely monosyllabic muttering on offer, maybe even some rhyme, rhythm or sensitive lineation reinforcing the totality...) Happily, this degree of incompetence is not the staple, though many of the poems seem to me to be more or less flawed (though many are interesting, and the selection is gratifyingly varied), and there was even some humour, good humour, and some irony: Stephen Eric Smith's THE GARDEN PARTY is a gem, a blend of sharp observation and delightful, unmalicious irony. The quotation begins at the second verse, and we are at Holyrood Palace. You will not miss the appropriate Scottish reference in the third line: This is, indeed, an occasion of charm, protocol and nationhood, all confused in borrowed robes and bright imported styles. There are self-conscious kilts and fancy hats, assorted uniforms and telling ties. We are a complicated social plaid.... A patter of polite applause, as for some ideal village cricket match, dapples the stage set of this heady afternoon. This is incredibly important stuff... Elsewhere the Scottish element in the magazine is more overtly and sentimentally patriotic as in Stanley Robertson's CALEDONIA CALLING: ...Heath and heather wi Rodan trees are Nature's masterpiece Dunrobbin Cattle and Clydesdale Horse and ewie's woollen fleece. Frae a foreign shore yer heart it sechs for the land o Scottish flame. Auld Mither I'm coming, ye ken I am coming, dear mither I'm coming hame. Well, it's familiar enough, and native performers from Lauder to Mackellor sang of little else. George Gunn strikes a more gravid note in PINK MOON OVER YARROWS, verse stronger on gesture than specific meaning: She sits by the Loch of Yarrows knitting the music of water from the twigs all these stones she has summoned down from heaven into the cairns of sleep watching the sky cut the footprints from those who lived in and under her handiwork... — she being The woman who guards the burial mounds — but don't let that worry you. Gunn's poem is one of several of the long poems wliich the magazine seems to attract, and indeed invites: as is usual for long poems of the lyric persuasion they tend to ramble and become tedious, but R.J. Ritchie's pun- and fun-laden GONE TO THE DOGWOODS is relentlessh entertaining, and if it catches you in the right mood a good hoot: When my true love went from me, bosky and brusque as Basil is brush, I was sycamore as a parrot pollarded in a pear tree... I was happy as a larch ascending, proud as conquering Cedar on the ruins of Lebanon. Dylan Thomas, eat your heart out (in fact the poem reads almost like a parody of the excesses of Thomas). Charles Hobday has a version of the Anglo-Saxon poem THE SEAFARER which has the authentic clang and groan and may well be a near-enough translation (my copy was bequeathed to Oxfam decades ago and I apologise for being unable to check, and am unwilling to resort to Ezra Pound's travesty); and Christopher Rush is in love with Anna on the front page and extensively on the back one (in NERUDIAN SONNETS); I hope she was less clobbered by the very heavy writing than I was: I went through streets last night with rain in my heart and my mouth went on remembering your mouth, how, soon after our first kiss, your urgent tongue made that sudden urge, like a red tide of Egypt, and we died like throbbing bees, bruised beneath the thundering hooves of Taurus, when the sun struck winter's window and warmed our house of love. We drowned them in the honey of our imagined hope. You have to feel sorry for the bees. I don't know whether the excesses are the fault of Neruda or of Rush, and am quoting what I see. But Poetry Scotland is an interesting magazine, and its format might well set a helpful precedent for others.
		reviewer: Eddie Wainwright.